The Andronovo cradle of Indo-Iranian?

(India Facts, 31 May 2016)

In 2006, the late Russian archaeologist Elena Kuzmina wrote a hefty book on the Origin of the Indo-Iranians (Brill, Leiden). It gives a very detailed history of the Andronovo culture and its surroundings in time and space. The Andronovo culture spanned most of Central Asia in the 2nd millennium BCE, from the Urals to Bactria. At  the same time, the book contains a lot of speculation about links with the information given in the Veda and the Avesta, generally convincing. While it has become a very authoritative work on Andronovo, there remains a big question-mark over its presumptuous title: was this culture indeed the cradle of the Indo-Iranians?

No one who is serious about deciding the Indo-European Homeland question can afford to leave this book unread. It promises to give the prehistory of the Aryan invasion, the preceding movements of the tribes concerned, perhaps even the events that triggered their migration into India. No one serious about arguing the case for an Indian Homeland can afford to leave it unanswered. I have had it on my shelves for a few years, hoping to find time to thoroughly review it. Realistically I still haven’t found that time, and I have not yet co-operated with an archaeologist on this. But a review simply cannot wait anymore.

The book ends with a discussion of the procedure for establishing the chronology of Andronovo, and starts with a detailed explanation about the archaeological method and the rules for ethnographic reconstruction. Then follows an analysis of the typical Andronovo features that allow her to define the spatial and temporal boundaries of the culture she studies. Culturally important and archaeologically easily accessible are funeral practices: “Cremation dominates in the Urals; in central and northern Kazakhstan the cemeteries are bi-ritual; in eastern Kazakhstan and south Siberia, inhumation prevails.”

And at once we notice something that will characterize many passages: though convinced of the Aryan invasion, she furnishes data that are compatible with, or even point to, an opposite Bactria-to-Urals migration. In this case, the Indo-Europeans, historically known to practise both types of disposal of the dead, but mainly cremation (though inhumation will be magnified in the eyes of the archaeologists as it leaves so many more traces), brought cremation with them along the Amu Darya to the Aral Lake area and on to the Urals. The native practice was predominantly inhumation, and it was preserved far from this trajectory, in areas where the Indo-Europeans didn’t come.

An Indo-Iranian culture

While the observation has no evidential value in itself, it deserves noting that the cultural identity of the Andronovo culture has now virtually become a matter of consensus: the Andronovo culture was Indo-Iranian. This book itself has greatly contributed to that consensus, for before its publication, there was still some hesitation.

Thus, many sacrificial and burial practices (and sati, the self-immolation of widows) “characterize the burial practice of the majority of Indo-European peoples: Hittites, Greeks, Germans, Balts, Slavs etc. It leads to the undisputable statement that the Andronovans were Indo-Europeans. However, the common Indo-European character of the whole burial complex does not, strictly speaking, permit one to declare the Andronovans as Indo-Aryans.” (p.195) However, she finds that «the variety of Andronovo funeral rites finds a complete and thorough correlation in early indic texts ». (p.195)

What decides the question for her, is the wealth of correspondences beween her material findings and references in Indian or Iranian texts. Thus, she describes the typical fireplace and then the corresponding reference in Vedic literature. These “hearths comprise a shallow round or oval pit… often covered with flat stone slabs on the bottom…. This hearth is described in ancient Indian texts as the domestic fire gārhapatya-, ‘fire of the master of the house’… Such hearths were used for ritual purposes: a bride would go around it, a widow would perform a ritual dance, people jumped over it during a feast.” (p.45)

Another type of hearth “has a rectangular form… and was made of closely adjusted rectangular stone slabs inserted into the ground on their narrow ends. Such hearths were found in the centre of a house, kept clean, and it is likely that they had a ritual function… This type of hearth corresponded to the early Indian special cult hearth āhavanīya…” (p.45) As she notes, round and rectangular hearths had different functions among the Indo-Europeans. Thus, in Rome, round hearths were sacred to the goddess Vesta, rectangular (including square) ones to male deities.

This could be coincidence, for there are only that many ways of making a fireplace, and it may have been by coincidence that Indo-Iranians and Andronovans hit upon the same design. But let us assume a genealogical relationship: either the Andronovan hearth became the Vedic one, as Kuzmina assumes, or vice-versa. Then everything depends on the chronology. South-Asians may have left their homes and taken the fireplace design with them to Central Asia, where from 2000 BCE they participated in the Andronovo culture. This, of course, presupposes that an “Aryan emigration from India” took place at the very least 500 years before the AIT posits its own Aryan invasion of India.  Indeed, this would fit what Shrikant Talageri says in his The Rigveda and the Avesta, a Final Analysis: the proto-Mitanni/Kassite Indo-Aryans left India ca. 2000 BCE (for West Asia, but some of them may have branched off to Central Asia), the Iranians even earlier.

Indians and Iranians

Though Indo-Aryan and Iranian, together with Dardic, are usually reckoned as branches of a single linguistic group, there is evidence for a conflicht between an Indo-Aryan and an Iranian population connected with the Vedic c.q. Avestan tradition: “H. Oldenberg showed that in spite of the genetic closeness of religious beliefs, the Vedas and Avesta differ considerably, and that in the Avesta many of the heroes play opposite roles to their counterparts in the Veda.” (p.183)

This starts at the level of the gods, where Indra is glorified in the Vedas and demonized in the Avesta. Rjashva, the Vedic king in the Varshagira battle, is glorified in the Rg-Veda but demonized in the Avesta. And yet, except for Shrikant Talageri, no one has drawn the logical conclusion: that Indians and Iranians waged a war against one another, in which one side’s heroes were the other side’s villains.

They fought eventhough they were linguistically and religiously very close. That is one thing most Western or Western-trained scholars miss out on in their study of Vedic conflicts: the battles are not between the very different cultures of an invader group and the natives, they are between different groups of “Aryans”. Even in the Aryan Invasion paradigm, where Indo-Aryans and Iranians are like colonizers of adjoining territories after penetrating south of Bactria, this should have been thought of. Just compare with the colonial wars: the English against the Spanish on the high seas (pirates), the French against the English in Canada, the Dutch against the Portuguese in Sri Lanka, the English against the Dutch Boers in South Africa: after the initial conquest, subsequent conflicts were between different groups of conquerors. So it didn’t even take the Out-of-India Theory to see that the Vedic Aryans were not fighting the “black aboriginals” in the Battle of the Ten Kings, but their own proto-Avestan cousins.

In mapping the connections between Indo-Aryans and Iranians, her grasp of social and family relations and how these are different between the two groups, is a bit hazy and ultimately incorrect: “Kinsmen marry each other among modern Iranian peoples (…) This could be attributed to the caste system in India when marriage was within a caste without taking into account kinship affiliation.” (p.195) Good try, but this analysis from a distance obscures the thorough difference between the Iranian and Indian family structures.

She is definitely mistaken in linking cousin marriage with the caste system. Iranian cousin marriage probably predated the caste system. Even in the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), the invasion predated and occasioned the genesis of the caste system, which took place in India, where the Iranians never set foot. Indian sources too indicate that caste endogamy (not even cousin marriage) was only gradually formed, and that initially caste was passed on only in the paternal line, regardless of the mother’s provenance. The Brahmin law books prohibited cousin marriage and enacted what the Catholic Church was to call “forbidden degrees of consanguinity”. This prohibition happens to make biological sense too, for a population with frequent cousin marriages produces more handicapped or malformed children (as can be seen by a comparison between native Britons and the worse-afflicted British-Pakistani community, where cousin marriages often form the majority). So, Iranian cousin-marriage can safely be disconnected from Indian caste engogamy.

That was just to illustrate how her knowledge of the Indo-Iranian cultures she is dealing with, is not as good as her undoubtedly first-class knowledge of Andronovo archaeology. That is not an argument in itself, but it is good to keep in mind before accepting her correlation between scripturally attested cultures and archaeology.

One difference is the Iranian predilection for sheep, partly replacing the central place of cattle among the Vedic people: “An ancient term for ‘cattle’ was recorded in the Avesta and was later attributed to ‘sheep’ in the Iranian languages; Yima’s sacrifice of cattle (Yasna 32:8) was replaced by a sheep sacrifice. These facts indicate that the rise of sheep-raising in Iranian society occurred after the collapse of Indo-Iranian unity.” (p.158)

These facts, including their chronological order, are not explained by any Central-Asian development, but fit Shrikant Talageri’s Out-of-India scenario precisely. First Indo-Aryans and Iranians were neighbours in Northwest India; they developed a conflict in which the Vedic people were victorious while the Iranian regrouped in a territory where some of them had already migrated: Afghanistan. In this mountainous territory, sheep flourished much better than cattle, and therefore became the centre of the Iranian economy.

Indo-Aryan Fedorovo culture

Within the Andronovo horizon, one culture stands out as especially related to the Vedic culture of the Indo-Aryans: the Fedorovo culture. While she finds plenty of Iranian toponyms, many probably stemming from the later Scythian period (1st mill. BCE, as far west as Ukraine), yet “part of the Andronovo toponyms can only be interpreted as Indo-Aryan”. Moreover, ”the Indo-Iranian toponyms of the pre-Scythian period have been found on the territory populated by the Fedorovo tribes”.

Let us assume, with the author, that the Fedorovo culture is Indo-Aryan; though mixed in its classical habitat on the eastern slopes of the Urals with Ugrian, the Uralic branch that was to spawn Hungarian. It flourished around 1700 BC, just in time to reach India for an invasion ca. 1500. That looks neat and surely AIT believers will seize upon it as supporting their invasion scenario.

But then, Kuzmina herself provides material reasons for inverting this northwest-to-southeast scenario: “The hypothesis of an origin of the Fedorovo type in the Urals has been disputed. The sources for Fedorovo ceramic technology and triangular ornametation are found in the Eneolithic of central and eastern Kazakhstan.” (p.201) Worse, even eastern Kazakhstand and beyond: “Federovo  monuments are discovered not only in the Urals but also in the south of Central Asia and Afghanistan, where Ugrians have never lived.” (p.201) Moreover, elsewhere she designates central Kazakhstan as the Fedorovo heartland: “The further one moves from central Kazakhstan, the frequency of the complex diminishes and substratum elements increase”. (p.24)

It won’t take any special pleading to have the Fedorovans migrate from Bactria to the Urals instead. At best we could agree that at present, the distribution of Fedorovo findings across Central Asia can be interpreted in more ways than just the Urals-to-Bactria scenario. Moreover, any movement understood as going to Bactria, is never traced as going beyond it, entering India. Here too, we notice a disappointment for those who expected an underpinning for AIT-compliant migrations from the Andronovo data.

Aryan invasion

When it comes to the AIT, we note that Elena Kuzmina totally relies on an outdated and certainly wrong racial account: “In the Rigveda light skin alongside language is the main feature of the Aryans, differentiating them from the aboriginal Dāsa-Dasyu population who were a dark-skinned, small people speaking another language and who did not believe in the Vedic gods.” (p.172) This is strictly separate from her archaeological findings, but it strongly colours her interpretation of those findings in favour of a northwest-to-southeast migration. It is mostly based on the usual reading of the Vedic references to the Battle of the Ten Kings, which is in fact not against any dark aboriginals but against the Iranians.

In her view, three stages are discernible in the movement from Andronovo into India.

Stage 1 takes place in the 20th-17th century BCE. Material culture including “a cult of the horse” moves from the eastern slopes of the Urals to Central Asia, but: “There is no evidence that they reached India.” (p.452) She naturally rejects whatever might still remain of a belief in the invaders’ violent destruction of the Harappan cities.

More to the northwest, on the Amu Darya near the Aral Lake, “the newcomers were not numerous but they employed horses and chariots and established elite dominance and adopted the culture of the BMAC.” (p.452, Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex) So what she has actually found, is BMAC cultural elements near the Aral Lake. This means the BMAC was expanding northward, precisely what you would expect if you assume the Iranians first settled in Bactria and then expanded into Kazakhstan and onwards to the Urals. We will meet a later movement from Bactria to the west, but this movement took place several times, including in ca. 2000 BCE.

Then she jumps to India without positing any causal link with any Andronovo development, and quotes G. Possehl to the effect that “the way of life essentially changed in India in this period” (453): urban culture became village culture, luxuries and international trade disappeared, but means of transport, types of pottery and procedures of house-building continued. “So the opinion of the Indian scholars who emphasize the conservation of the Harappan traditions in the culture of the subsequent periods is quite correct.” (p.453)

Stage 2 is situated in the 16th-14th century BCE. All kinds of movements take place north of (or at most, in the north of) present-day Afghanistan, such as the Timber Grave culture mixing with the Andronovo culture around Samarkand, far way from India. No sign, apparently, of an invasion of Andronovans into India, confirming the non-discovery of Andronovan elements by Indian archaeologists. Yet this is precisely the age of the supposed Aryan invasion, that AIT believers go around declaring to have been confirmed by Kuzmina’s research.

This is when the “Fedorovan tribes reached the Amu Darya… And actively interacted with the bearers of the farming Bactria-Margiana culture.” (453) We note “the penetration of the Andronovo population in the BMAC and the probable subjugation of the indigenous population” (454), the “synthesis of the Andronovo Fedorovo culture and BMAC” (454). Fine, but none of that amounts to an invasion of India.

Stage 3 really comes too late for the Aryan invasion of India: 13th-9th century BC. It was “caused by the cultural transformation of the Eurasian steppes as a result of internal development and ecological crises”. (p.454) That is richly vague, but it has no effect anymore on a putative invasion of India around 1500 BCE.

A migration that is identified, however, is east-to-west: “a part of of the Timber-grave tribes moved [from Uzbekistan or even the Amu Darya basin] to the North Caucasus because of the crisis; they had already begun appearing and settling in the Caucasus at an earlier time”. (p.454) This must be the Scythian migration, which only added to the already existing Iranian presence near and beyond the Urals. Intermittently, groups of Iranians must have moved from Bactria to the Urals and even to Ukraine for more than a thousand years. (One of the later migrating tribes were apparently the Hrvat, now known as the Croats. Before migrating west and adopting the Slavic language of the Serbs, they belonged to the Harahvaita tribe in Afghanistan mentioned as tribute-payers to the Persian empire in an Achaemenid document.)

It is important that here we can recognize a historically known migration, viz. from Bactria westwards. This means that archaeology, though uncertain and vague, is nonetheless relevant for history. That makes the archaeological silence on another supposed historical development, viz. the Aryan invasion of India, all the more significant.

Conclusion

We have nothing to add to the wealth of archaeological data on the Andronovo culture that Elena Kuzmina provides. Her interpretative framework, however, is flawed and limited by the rather dated presuppositions about the Homeland and the invasion of India. Moreover, a culture beginning in 2000 BCE comes a bit late to stage an Aryan invasion, especially given the many indications that the concomitant chronology of ancient Indian literature is late.

Things would be more challenging if we had been shown a rootedness of the Andronovo culture in preceding cultures, thousands of years older. In that case, it would be difficult to deduce those earlier cultures from an emigration from India, and the case for an intrusion from a non-Indian Homeland would be that much stronger. Perhaps this was not the object of her book, and another archaeologist might be able to trace Andronovo to earlier cultures, to the exclusion of Indian influences. There are many might-have-beens in the Homeland debate, but this deeper non-Indian genealogy of cultures has at any rate not been offered in this book. Nor, to our knowledge, anywhere else. If it had been, it would be mustered by interested parties all the time.

While this is undoubtedly an important book, and as far as I can judge a classic of Andronovo archaeology, it fails in its primary mission: to show that this culture was the staging-ground for an Aryan invasion of Iran and India. It only assumes that much but doesn’t demonstrate it.

 

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The Leipzig workshop

 

For some mysterious reason, I find myself penetrating a little bit deeper into the far part of Germany, the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, every time I go there. This time I took the train to Dresden, past Eisenach, Erfurt and Weimar which I already visited the latest times around, but got off before the end station,  at the city of Leipzig. It is here that Napoleon was defeated in the Nations Battle exactly 200 years ago.

On 2-3 December 2013, I participated in the interdisciplinary workshop on Indo-European, “Talking Neolithic”, which brought together geneticists, archaeologists and linguists. It was surprisingly well-organized and the papers were original (sometimes revolutionary) and at a high level. Socializing was also fun, both meeting new people and finally getting to see some famous people I only knew from their publications, like James Mallory, whose dictionary of Indo-European I often use though he turns out to be an archaeologist. I had hoped to meet Joanna Nichols, who had at first been announced, if only to hear out her erstwhile Bactrian homeland thesis, but it seems health problems kept her back. Nonetheless, I had a very good time.

I haven’t taken notes and will not do a full report, but a few papers have made such an impression that I have to mention them here. It goes without saying that the responsibility for any misrepresentation of the speakers’ ideas, no matter how involuntary, will be mine. My apologies to the speakers who are left undiscussed here.

 

State of the art

Co-organizer Guus Kroonen, a Dutch linguist teaching in Copenhagen, introduced the workshop by summarizing the state of the art. Ever new data or deeper knowledge about existing data confirm that the Indo-Europeans in Europe borrowed a lot of their agricultural and botanical terminology from lost indigenous languages. This contrasts with the terminology from pastoralism and wheeled locomotion, which is fully Proto-Indo-European. Therefore, many scholars have suspected that the Indo-Europeans in their steppe homeland knew no agriculture at all. As pastoralists, they established a hierarchical relation with the native European agriculturalists, so that for reasons of prestige, the common folk abandoned their mother tongue and adopted the Indo-European language of the elite, transforming it along the way into the daughter languages known from history.  However, Kroonen’s own work finds that the Indo-Europeans did know at least some agriculture, though they adopted new cultivars and techniques from the Old Europeans.

Nonetheless, he also mentioned the consequential fact that east of the Dniepr in Ukraine, and in the vast stretch of land where the home of the Proto-Indo-Europeans is usually situated, no trace of agriculture has been found prior to 2000 BCE. I deduce that this area may fit the putative homeland of PIE pastoralists, who did not know any agriculture, but cannot possibly fit a PIE population of whom it has been established that it knew at least some agriculture. Whether this is really the case, this workshop was meant to verify.

The next speaker, James Mallory from Belfast, gave a historical overview of how the agricultural question had been treated in two centuries of IE studies. Very entertaining, and what I have taken away from it, is that around 1900, the homeland was often situated in Bactria as the northern rim of the original wheat cultivation zone, stretching from the Euphrates to the Indus valleys. This makes sense: Bactria, like Northwestern India and Mesopotamia, was an area propitious to agriculture and demographic growth. If in such an area a famine or a conflict forces a part of the population to leave, it may be a small percentage in its homeland, but a mighty big group in the endless steppelands, capable of imposing its language. The unparalleled success of the Indo-Europeans in spreading or imposing their language is far better explained by postulating a thickly-populated homeland rather than the bare and backward steppes.

He confirmed the surprising lack of names for cultivars common to Indo-Iranian and the European branches. While the currently most favoured explanation is that different groups of pastoralists from Russia separately entered Europe and India, it was thought then that the absence of agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian could be explained by a division of labour: the European-to-be tribes lived in the Oxus valley proper tilling the fields and took their agricultural terms with them from there, while the eastern-oriented Indo-Iranians trekked through the Hindu Kush and Pamir hill slopes with their herds.

 

My own paper

The choice to introduce my own paper at this point, though in reality it was scheduled only on the second day, is not inspired by a lack of modesty. I simply need to clarify where I stand on this matter, so that the reader can see how I had to interpret the other papers.

Incidentally, organizational and technical gave me only 25 minutes to read my paper, so I hurried through it and had no time left for questions, which I had kind of counted on. While I had a fairly original message on the homeland question, I found that during the subsequent lunch and over drinks, only a few people had any questions about it, let alone objections. This was mostly not a matter of politely hiding their scepticism (as Germans are wont to do, but the many Dutch and Anglophone participants are more forthright), but of a profound disinterest in the matter. Either they have interiorized the SW-Russian homeland theory during their schooling and simply cannot imagine Indo-European history otherwise (to the extent that quite a few have not even heard of an Indian challenge), and consequently are deaf to or immune against any alternative; or they have vaguely heard that this is a wild conspiracy theory promoted only by Hindu nationalists, which can safely be ignored.

In my paper, I argued that agricultural terminology in Germanic are usually taken to confirm the established picture. Words corresponding with Indo-Iranian terms, hence fully Indo-European, have an agricultural meaning in Germanic, but not in Indo-Iranian (Dutch tarwe/”wheat” but Sanskrit durva, “grass”, apparently the original meaning; or harvest but kṛpāṇi, “sword”, both from a root meaning “cut” but only in Europe specialized to an agricultural setting). The usual reading of this is that in their Russian homeland, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were pastoralists without agriculture, that the Indo-Iranians took this level of culture along with them to Afghanistan and India, while the European branches showed a quick immersion in an agricultural society, attested either by the specialization of Indo-European terms to agricultural meanings, or by borrowing agricultural terms from the Old European natives.

I then revisited a paper from 1979 by Colin Masica, as well as his 1991 standard handbook of Indo-Aryan linguistics, to evaluate his list of Indo-Aryan agricultural, botanical and pastoralist terms. Of these, over 9 % are deduced from Dravidian, mostly because corresponding Dravidian words are attested, sometimes just because they look Dravidian; likewise, over 5% of Munda. Some 24% are from Persian or otherwise foreign, and need not detain us here. Various Indo-Aryan or even Indo-Iranian groups amounts to some 44%, and the rest is unexplained. In fact, quite a few of the other categories are not securely explained either. Now, many of these words look perfectly Indo-Aryan, either because Hindi-speaking mouths have successfully integrated them, or because they simply are. The criterion that a word can only be Indo-European if it occurs in at least two branches, is conventionally assumed but in fact arbitrary. An Indian homeland would almost necessitate that numerous terms for Indian plants were forgotten along with the plants themselves by all non-Indian branches as people left India and never encountered, say, a banyan tree again.

According to Michael Witzel, some 4% of Rg-Vedic terminology is non-Indo-European. That would make the Rg-Veda the purest Indo-European text by far. And even that 4 % is a generous estimate, for the words he lists as borrowed have a disputed origin and some may just be Indo-European. Witzel lists bīja, “seed”, which exists also in Iranian, as borrowed from the purely hypothetical “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” language, but Masica opines that it is from Dravidian. As for parṣa, “sheaf”, I learned from another speaker that it is one of the few agricultural terms attested both in India and in Europe (Greek), viz. as part of the name of grain goddess Demeter’s daughter Persephone < perso-g^when- = Skt. parṣa-han-, “sheaf-beater”, i.e. thresher. In Germanic, the number of words deemed loans has been halved in recent decades by identifying cognates in other branches, e.g. swim turns out to have cognates in Baltic and Celtic, though meaning “move” or “hunt”; it is not impossible that such cognates will yet be found for Sankrit too.

But not that there is anything against loans into Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan. Munda was the language of a rice-cultivating society around the mouth of the Ganga, Dravidian that of the Gujarat part of the Harappan area, dimly bordering on the Sankrit speech area (separated by the Rajasthan desert), which moreover was to assimilate many Munda- and Dravidian areas into the expanding Indo-Aryan community. Moreover, South-Indian kings invited Brahmin communities to settle and give Vedic prestige to their dynasties, upon which they integrated Dravidian words into later Sanskrit, e.g. mīṇa, “fish”, or kāṇa, one-eyed. This expansion is attested by well-known historical developments and doesn’t require, let alone prove, an Indo-Aryan invasion from abroad. As for the European branches, they borrowed words but often also gave a new agricultural meaning to general IE words, e.g. Skt. ajra, “empty land” but Latin ager, “field”. But this doesn’t mean that Sanskrit had no agricultural terms, e.g. sītā, “furrow” (from PIE seh, “sow”), kṣetra, “field”.    

Masica considers his findings as incompatible with the Indian tradition of an Indian homeland. We think we have shown otherwise. Of the other arguments, he knew a few but more have been added since: (1) linguistic paleontology: agreed here not to prove a cold homeland or any homeland at all; (2) common developments with Greek, and generally the geographical distribution of the isoglosses, is better explained by an Indian “extreme” homeland than by radiation from the Russian centre; (3) Finno-Ugric has hundreds of Iranian loanwords but imparted no words to Iranian or Indo-Aryan (the seeming exception of Guṅgu, “moon”, can either be a coincidental homonymy, date from an earlier Nostratic period, or was somehow a loan from Indo-Iranian), which is typical for a colonial situation, with Scythian Iranian imparting words and also borrowing some but not communicating them back to the homeland; (4) Mitannic can be shown to belong to the youngest layer of the Ṛg-Veda, so allowing for the language to emigrate and to become a dead substrate of Hurrian (and the similar case of Kassite), the Ṛg-Veda must have been complete by 1800 BC or so; 5) geographical distribution has the homeland typically in a far corner (Amerind superfamily, Bantu/Austronesian family, Turkic group, Arabic/Russian language), not in the centre (IE: Volga), which also is not the zone of greatest diversity, on the contrary; (6) Vedic literature contains a few astronomical passages datable because of the precession (ca. 1° in 71 years), e.g. Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa 2300 BC instead of ca. 1000 BC, Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa 1300 BC instead of ca. 400 BC, incompatible with an invasion scenario ca. 1500 BC; (7) kentum substrate in Bangani, India, e.g. dokru instead of expected daśru, “tear”; (8) Vedic and Puranic literature refers several times to emigrations, never to early immigrations, and the Northwest was not venerated as an area of origin; (9) the agricultural terminology proves, contra Masica, to be compatible with an Indian homeland.

 

Skepticism

Hans-Jürgen Bartelt, teaching in Hamburg, analyzed the way the label “interdisciplinary” is misused by scholars, so that linguists hide behind findings supposedly done by archaeologists or vice-versa. Genetics is another mute science with a tremendous promise but hitherto of limited or largely false use in linguistic reconstruction.

Ranko Matasović from Zagreb, Croatia, asked if there are loans in Indo-European from North-Causasian, and after surveying some candidates, he concluded that there weren’t any. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been their northern neighbours in their Russian homeland, they should reasonably have taken some loans with them to their respective historical habitats. I conclude that, like with Uralic, the homeland had no point of contact with North Causasian, and therefore was not in the peri-Caspian steppe zone.  

Paul Heggarty from Cambridge analysed linguistic paleontology to extinction. The basic supposition of linguistic paleontology is that from the vocabulary, you can deduce all about a society and its environment. But words can undergo semantic shifts, so that a general word at an unidentifiable moment gets specialized towards a specific technological meaning. As for glottochronology, the calculation of the time at which a certain rate of linguistic change has taken place, it is an outrageous failure. This is shown by the rate of change calculated for languages known from their beginnings onwards, e.g. Portuguese and Italian are calculated to have separated less than 1000 years ago. This was a plea against the old and hazy methods and in favour of modern precision. Applying Bayesian phylogenetics, on the basis of linguistic facts furnished by the linguists themselves, gets better results. Between the Russian and the Anatolian homelands (an Indian homeland is not taken seriously by the researchers, or not even known), it judges strongly in favour of the Anatolian one. Nevertheless, most people present thought, on other linguistic grounds, that Anatolia was definitely not the homeland, among other reasons because the Hittite language spoken there has all the marks of a result of foreign conquest, with a very large substratal element both in the language and in the mythology. Note also that with the new fancy methods, the split between Indian and Iranian is estimated at 2800 BC, a more realistic date than the 1600 BC or so required by the Aryan Invasion Theory.

Robert Mailhammer from Sydney discussed six words for wheeled locomotion, which are as consistently present in all Indo-European branches as the words for relatives or the numbers. We give a Germanic example plus the Sanskrit: wagon/vahati (cart, conduct); rad/ratha (wheel, cart); wheel/cakra; ahs/akṣa (axle); ar/īṣā (pole, rudder); yoke/yuga. It seems that Indo-European had a full vocabulary for wheeled locomotion because this technology had just been developed in the Proto-Indo-European community. Indeed, I deduce that wheeled technology was part of the reason for the successful expansion of Indo-European. This technology gave them as edge over others, and by the time their neighbours had acquired it, the Indo-European language family was already spread from India to Ireland. Colin Renfrew may have been wrong with his Anatolian homeland theory, but he has the merit of explaining the Indo-European expansion: the shift to agriculture gave the population concerned a great demographic edge, and as the people spread, their language spread with them. If we deem Renfrew wrong, we have at least to think of another reason for this success.

Question time after Mailhammer’s lecture became a debate with Heggarty, who, for my taste, went a bit too far in his doubt that a vocabulary can teach us anything at all. Thus, the existence of words for “wheel”, “yoke” and “axle” in Proto-Indo-European does not strictly prove that the Indo-Europeans  had wheeled technology, e.g. the words for “wheel” may simply have meant “turn, revolve”, a type of motion that also exists in the natural world. But in that case, it is unlikely that all branches of later Indo-European would all have adapted the same terms for natural phenomena to name the freshly invented wheel technology. Like most linguists, I believe that in this case, the evidence of the vocabulary is so strong and so consistent as to allow the inference that the cart technology was alive already in the Proto-Indo-European stage.

Joseph Salmons from Wisconsin applied the suppositions of the Indo-Europeanists to the present-day language situation in America. While American English does have words of Amerindian origin (moose, squirrel, skunk), the southern dialects do not have any words specifically from the local Cherokee language, nor the Wisconsin dialects from the local Algonquian (only the Algonquians themselves intersperse their English with some of these). Dialectal American English does have many local formations unknown to any outsiders, even in this audience consisting mostly of linguists. Some of these are variations on English expressions, other are onomatopoeic or of unknown origin. If we already don’t understand the finesses of these local variations on the language in which the workshop was conducted, what are our chances in a language situation thousands of years before its first writing? At any rate, the test of linguistic mechanisms posited for PIE (Grimm’s law, Venner’s law, etc.) is whether they could explain linguistic processes today.

I do not remember who it was that cited a couple of leading linguists as affirming that the homeland must have been a mountainous area with thunderstorms and heat, since Proto-Indo-European had words for “mountain”, “thunder” and “hot”. Well, what could be the homeland where people would never experience thunderstorms or feel hot? Yes, Antarctica might fit the bill (though it inconveniently has a few mountains), and we might all be found willing to scrap Antarctica from the list of possible homelands of Indo-European. For me, the point of this example, or of some names in Mallory’s historical survey, is that this academic discipline has thrown up quite a few people in positions of authority who in seriousness held theories that could not stand the test of common sense.

 

Isoglosses

Hrach Martirosyan, an Armenian working in Leiden, showed that Armenian shared many isoglosses (common linguistic innovations, starting with common new vocabulary) with Greek. These had had to have shared most of the way from the homeland, wherever it lay, to their historical habitats in Armenia and the southeast corner of the Black sea coast, c.q. in the southern Balkans and the Aegean Sea. This pleads against a Pontic (steppe) homeland, as Greek would probably have to go west through the Balkans while Armenian would have to go south through the Caucasus. By contrast, in an Indian homeland scenario, Greek and Armenian (as well as the extinct and little-attested Phrygian) would follow the same route, thus fitting these languages’ isoglosses.

From Adam Hyllested, who spoke about the roots for “carrot”, I retained that unlike all other branches, Slavic had not been searched for substrate words because, as the language of the homeland, it had had no non-Indo-European substrate language. In fact, another explanation is possible: Slavic was preceded by other Indo-European languages who cleared the way and assimilated the substrate populations. Unlike even its Baltic twin, it was not in touch with non-Indo-European. It may have adopted substrate words, but through other Indo-European language, so by definition in common with other branches and hence classed as Indo-European so far. Note also that even in the Russian homeland theory, it was not the language of the homeland: united Slavic had Slovakia or so as its habitat, Central Europe and not the steppes, which for more than a thousand years were the realm of the Iranian-speaking Scythians.  

Lucien van Beek from Leiden showed that while names of grains are either pan-Indo-European or at least common to the European branches, the names for five species of pulses are undeniably borrowed from a substrate layer. Moreover, it turns out that they are cognate in the Greek and Albanian branches, and often also in the other European branches. The borrowing from this Old Balkanic language group sometimes produced doubles, e.g. orobos and erebinthos, “pea” c.q. “chick pea”, borrowed at different times or places from different variants of the native language. The strengthening (as opposed to the denying) prefix a- and the suffix inth- are instances of features regularly appearing in Greek that must stem from this Balkanic language.

Two etymologies he stated drew my attention. Odysseus and his men are at one point locked up by a one-eyed giant, the Cyclops. Folk-etymologically, this means “(he with the) circular eye”, but the speaker quoted Paul Thieme as saying that this Ky-klops came from pku-klop-, “cattle (Latin pecus, German Vieh) thief (cfr. kleptomania, ‘compulsive stealing’)”, the image of violent and lawless raiders that the Old European farmers must have had of the pastoralist intruders. The other is Persephone, Perso-g^when-, “she who beats the sheafs”, which makes a hole in Witzel’s theory that Skt. parṣa, “sheaf”, is a BMAC loan into Indo-Iranian.

Rosemarie Lühr from Berlin was an old-school professor who did not bring a power-point but read her whole lecture quite literally from her paper. Nonetheless, her message put the final nail in the coffin of the “Northwest block” theory. This language, also known as “Belgian”, was a hypothetical Indo-European language spoken in the low countries. Like Phrygian, Anatolian and Tocharian, it died out, i.c. around the time of the Roman conquest. However, it left traces in Germanic, mostly the hard-to-explain words starting with initial p-, such as pool and plough. She argued that within Germanic itself, mechanisms are available to explain these words without having to bring in the uneconomical hypothesis of an extra language. Other linguists agreed but thought that, as far as they were concerned, the theory had already been abandoned.

 

When the Neolithic people talked

Peter Schrijver, who teaches Celtic languages in Utrecht, ended the workshop with a revolutionary paper, exploring the possibility that Sumerian and Hattic, and perhaps even Minoan (linear-A), were dialects of the same language. When you compare classical Sumerian, which was studied for many centuries after its disappearance as a living language ca. 2000 BC, you will find little that resembles Hattic. But when you go to the oldest Sumerian available, many resemblances start to appear. The differences that remain, on the other hand, prove a great time-depth: the original language must have broken up already several thousands of years earlier. This chronology makes it entirely possible that theirs was the language of the Neolithic Revolution, expanding from Syria to southern Mesopotamia (Sumerian), Anatolia (Hattic) and Crete (Minoan), before Semitic and Indo-European took over.

Most participants at the workshop agreed that Colin Renfrew had been wrong with his proposal that Indo-European was spread along with agriculture from an Anatolian homeland. The two developments, agriculturization and Indo-Europeanization, had been separated by at the very least a thousand years, and the Indo-Europeans found an agriculture-based economy ready-made when they entered Europe. But the earlier spread of Hattic-related languages along with agriculture may be a defensible proposal.

 

Conclusion

We concluded with an informal drink. Everyone applauded when Paul Heggarty proposed a toast to William Jones, the founder of Indo-European linguistics. Note that Jones worked as a judge in Kolkata at the time, in the far corner of the Indo-European expansion zone, east even of a putative Indian homeland in the western Ganga basin. In India, many know of his depiction on a frieze displayed in Oxford Chapel, where he is seen taking notes while being fed information by native informers. Without the tradition of Sanskrit learning, his scholarship might not have been that rich, and he might have missed his breakthrough to the recognition of a kinship between the languages now known as Indo-European.

Unlike at most conferences I have attended, all the papers read here were interesting to most participants, and certainly to me. They came not only to rattle off their own findings, but to listen and learn. In spite of what I hear in India, where comparative-historical linguistics is lambasted as a “pseudo-science” dealing in “ghost languages”, this discipline is really making progress.

Except for myself, everyone present seemed to believe the Russian (or at any rate a non-Indian) homeland theory. Yet some of their findings strengthened the case for an Indian homeland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Aryan Non-Invasion Theory

On the Indo-Eurasian Research List, a certain Touraj Daryaee announced that he was going to write something about the Iranian Homeland Theory, an idea that has reportedly been launched in the 1990s. So, he informed about what must be, according to his information, a similar development in India. I sent him, through the list, the following reply on 21 October 2013. Two days later, moderator Steve Farmer let me know that this message could, alas, not be posted.


Dear Touraj,

 

The Indian homeland theory dates back to the 18th century European Enlightenment (Kant, Voltaire) and was espoused by the first generation of Indo-Europeanists in the very early 19th century (Schlegel). But by 1830 or so, Eastern or Central Europe (and thus, as far as India was concerned, the "Aryan Invasion Theory") was near-universally accepted as homeland.

 

Immediately it was put to political use in Britain's colonial policies. It was a God-sent in justifying Britain's occupation of India, as the British were deemed only to be repeating what their Indo-Aryan cousins had done thousands of years ago. As the die-hard colonialist Winston Churchill said more than a century later: "We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except maybe the Depressed Classes who are the native stock." In India, the theory was immediately seized upon by anti-Brahmin activist Jotirao Phule, incidentally an alumnus of the missionary education system.

 

In 1916, the British authorities, in a move against the Brahmin-led Freedom Movement, patronized the founding of an anti-Brahmin and Dravidian-chauvinist party, the Justice Party. After independence and till 1962, it espoused a Dravidian (in effect, only Tamil) separatism, and more recently, it supported and aided the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The AIT is the alpha and omega of its worldview. Idem for the Dalit movement: while its founder BR Ambedkar articulately opposed the AIT, his followers reduce every issue to Aryan upper castes vs. native Dalits. Idem for the "Other Backwards Castes" (Bahujan) or at least their Western-sponsored spokesmen. British colonial administrators also coined the pseudo-Sanskrit term Adivasi ("Aboriginal") for the tribals, projecting the American racial situation, with European invaders subjecting the natives, onto India. Till today, even scholars who ought to know better, innocently use the very word Adivasi as proof of the tribals' native and the non-tribals' invader origins. It was used on many fronts to pit variously defined "natives" against variously defined "invaders".

 

All this while, Hindu nationalists were also active, e.g. Hindu Mahasabha's founding 1922 and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's founding 1925, without ever questioning the AIT which was so massively used against them. The AIT was so unassailable, with all the prestige of the "scientific" West, that nobody dared to question it. It was e.g. roundly accepted in the 1923 book Hindutva by VD Savarkar, the very manifesto of Hindu nationalism. Cultural spokesmen often quoted by Hindu nationalists, such as AK Coomaraswamy and VS Agarwal, also presupposed it in their work. As late as the 1960, RSS leader MS Golwalkar only dared to posit an Indian homeland by crankily postulating that the poles and all other places' coordinates had shifted and that this Indian homeland was the same as the Wolga/steppe homeland that the scholars assumed.

 

So, Hindu nationalism can perfectly coexist with a foreign homeland, and it did not invent the Indian homeland theory (though the terminology you use implies otherwise). Many national myths are not based on nativeness but on their state's establishment by foreigners, e.g. the USA, of course, or Mexico, but also Romania, Russia and others. What irked Hindu nationalists about the AIT, however, was its political use to divide the Indian population, both before and after independence. (See about this Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan: *Breaking India*.) Those academics who choose to oppose the Indian homeland theory *because* of its alleged political use by the Hindu nationalists (there are of course other reasons, too), should realize that in that case, they should oppose the East-European homeland theory annex AIT a hundred times more, for it has been politically misused for a far longer time in far more countries (including Nazi Germany, which espoused and used the AIT as a perfect illustration of its racialist worldview), and from positions of power. The Indian homeland theory is the pastime of a handful of writers, while the AIT is on the Indian government website and is taught to hundreds of millions of pupils and students. We hardly have a level playing field here.

 

This much for the (necessary) background. Now to answer your question. In the 1980s (1982, from memory), a remarkable book was published by KD Sethna, the erstwhile secretary of Sri Aurobindo, and then already nearly 80 years old: Karpasa in Vedic India. It argues that the AIT cannot be true, for the Rg-Vedic culture, indubitably located in India, predates the Harappan civilization. Indeed, he argues, cotton/Karpasa does not figure in the Rg-Veda but is quite present in the Harappan cities. Other material items follow the same pattern, according to Sethna. This drew a few other writers' attention to the subject, and they then published their own (good or not-so-good) arguments for Vedic indigenousness, as well as their account of the massive political use, both in the West and in India, of the AIT. Around 1990, historiography was very much in focus, though mostly of the medieval period (due to the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy), and in that climate, the Hindu nationalist movement seized upon the Aryan non-invasion theory. But being intellectually very lazy, the movement invested nothing whatsoever in further research into Aryan origins but at once shouted victory: the AIT was declared dead.

 

Mind you: I have not used the now-common term Out-of-India Theory. To describe the Hindu position, this term is too flattering. It was coined ca. 1996 probably by Edwin Bryant, and assumes Indo-European linguistic unity from Iceland to Lanka, with India as the source of expansion. But in fact, Hindus don't look beyond the Khyber Pass: they are satisfied that e.g. no archaeological proof has ever been found for Aryans moving into India, so they conclude that no Aryan invasion has taken place, but they don't assume the burden of responsability to explain how, in that case, the Europeans have come to speak cognate languages. They don't go looking for traces of India-based tribes moving out of India and making their way to Central Asia and then to Europe. Quite a few of them put in doubt this linguistic unity, disparaging comparative-historical linguistics to be a "pseudo-science", and most don't even think of the non-Indian dimension of the homeland question. The Aryan non-Invasion Theory has millions of followers, the articulate Out-of-India Theory only a handful.

 

Always welcome if you have any further questions.

 

Kind regards,

 

Koenraad Elst



Postscript (23 October 2013): Now I remember another factor for the fairly sudden rise in Aryan Non-Invasion thinking ca. 1990: a few anti-Invasion publications by Western archaeologists such as Jim Shaffer. These emboldened a mass of Indian archaeologists to vent loudly what they had been noticing for some time: that in spite of being the official and well-funded doctrine for a century and a half, the AIT had still not yielded a single trace of the Aryans moving into India. BB Lal, routinely slandered on this list and elsewhere as a mere "Hindu nationalist", made his name as a promising top archaeologist by identifying the "Painted Grey Ware" culture with the Aryans moving deeper into India in the 50s and 60s; but he changed his mind and saw that he had merely *assumed*, not proven, the AIT. He is but one of many scholars who "converted" away from the AIT. Among Indian archaeologists, the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory is by no means a fringe opinion. 

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