Arguments For Aryan Invasion Theory

As it has already been mentioned before the article offers no new arguements in the favour of the Aryan Invasion Theory. My advice to Rohan is to read the books that I mention here:
1. The invasion that never was by Michael Danino
2. The Real Eve: Modern Man`s Journey out of Africa by Stephen Oppenheimer.
To the best of my knowledge none of these belong to the Sangh Parivar (if indeed belonging to Sangh Parivar automatically discounts one`s opinion as merely being Hindu nationalist). I am no supporter of VHP, Bajrang Dal etc but do not base my opinoins about them solely on the basis of information provided by the English media in India.
A few observations before I try to refute the author`s opinions.

``These people -- like Kak, Frawley and Rajaram -- have no background and no interest in linguistics, in history, in genuine, professional scholarship. They are cheap frauds. Their books argue at a level that would be laughed out of a first-year undergraduate history class. They proudly trot out arguments that are ridiculous nonsense.``

He leaves no stones unturned to malign Kak, Frawley, Fuerstein, Gautier and such people. I would recommed the author visit the website of Subhash Kak who happens to be a professor of Electrical Engineering at the Louisiana State University. There he would find a number of scholarly papers and articles on Indology
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/hist.html
which could not have been written without significant research into the matter. If castigating them is premise for proving his point, it is laughable.

Anyway, coming back to the point : the second book mentioned above, The Real Eve; the author after pathbreaking study of DNA from all over the world proposes the migration patterns of humanity out of Africa. And much to the chagrin of the AIT supporters, I`m sure, there is no migration pattern out of Europe to India or to anywhere; exactly the opposite. So this discounts the Aryan Invasion or Migration theory absolutely on the basis of hard genetics.

As far as this article is concerned the author keeps harping on lingusitcs. Lingusitcs is not the only discipline utilized to estimate ancient history. There is absolutely no lingustic evidence whatsoever for the existence of any Proto Indo European Language. Nor is there any lingustic evidence to support the theory that Indo-Aryan languages were brought from outside. The author mentions near-unanimity about this amongst modern scholars without any names.

From amongst the human remains found at the Harappan sites, none of them have been distinctly different. Which discounts the claim for presence of two separate races. One being the ``Aryan`` invaders and other being the ``Dravidians``. In fact none of the terms Aryan or Dravidian has any racial connotation. Former being an ennobling quality and latter being a geographical entity. Panchdravid as mentioned in ancient books refers to the south of India including Maharashtra and Gujarat.

The author talks about pre-literate societies and their short memories and goes on with examples from other cultures. But the fact that he conveniently forgets is that Indian tradition has always been oral rather than literate. Thousands of hymns and verses have been passed down to generations for millienia. To claim that they could not have remembered their originial homeland through litereature is absolute rubbish. More so in the case where there were more than one wave of migration as claimed by some of the ``esteemed`` historians at JNU.

The author picks out from literature that is convenient to him e.g. the horse. What about river Saraswati?
Rg Veda abound with verses that praises the river Saraswati. And satellite images and studies have proved the existence of the river Saraswati and drying of the same circa 1900 BC. And all the Harappan sites have been found on the dry bed of the same. So there is no reason to believe that the authors of Rg Veda were not from the subcontinent. It also points to the continuity between Harappan and so called Aryan civilization discouting any migrations from outside of an alien culturel

Anyway the author has used some unconvincing lingustic concepts to prove the AIT with brute force discouting the literary and archeological evidences conveniently. And if Stephen Oppenheimer is to be believed, migration out of Europe is out of question, genetically.


People tend to forget that in modern ages writing history is influenced as much by archeology, literature, etc as geo-politics. Aryan invasion theory and its by product the PIE are both products of the same euro centric policy. Max Mueller, the father of the Aryan Invasion theory in his later years refuted it! But some so called scholars clung to it as if their life depended on it. The fact that invasionists changed their theory from invasion to migration and then to waves of migration signals a loss of face for them. If they are to be believed why haven`t they come up with the Uhreimat the Orginial Homeland for the Aryans and the PIE?? All European nations from England to Germany to Russia have claimed to the Uhreimat which is ridiculous. Although my school history text book told me it was the Caucasus montains in central Europe there are a large number of opinions by the invasionists as far as the origin is concerned.

In conclusion, to discount the anti invasion/migration theory as being purely Hindu nationalist would be a grave mistake. Neither archeologically, lingustically, literarily or genetically is the migration theory viable. I would strongly suggest the readers to read the book by Stephen Oppenheimer : it is a no nonsense scientific/ genetic proof for the unviability of the invasion/migration out of Europe theory.

This article does not offer any new arguments for the AIT other than rehashing 150 old linguistic ``evidence``. The author says that he does not take any books/articles with the word ``Aryan Invasion,`` in them and yet his own article includes those very words.

I would like to respond to this article from two angles:

1. The much lauded overwhelming ``linguistic evidence`` for the AIT is not conclusive at all.

2. There has been at least one major revision of linguistic based migration theories in favor of a theory verified by more exact sciences like genetics and archeology.

Issue # 1: The linguistic evidence can be explained in other ways also. Mr. Koenrad Elst who is an IE linguistic scholar has addressed this issue in ``An Update on The Aryan Invasion Debate,`` an Aditya Prakashan. He uses the same Kentum/Satum argument used by the linguistics to support their theory. The linguistics argue that the word for ``hundred`` in an Greek (?) or some other European language, is kentum and the Sanskrit equivalent is Satem. The process of transforming the velars to palatals is a one way process and hence the original home land of the PIE (Proto Indo European) speakers must be in the Kantum territory meaning outside India probably Central Asia, even though no such archeological sites have been found. Mr. Elst argues that in fact the Uhreimat (homeland) of the PIE speakers is more likely to be in Satem territory i.e. India, because people who transported the IE languages to Europe must have left BEFORE the k-s shift took place. In fact India still has the a language of the kentum type surviving: Bangani. He has also analysed the evidence from Linguistic Paleantolgy to make his case for an IUT (Indian Uherimat Theory). Mr. Oberoi cannot just dismiss these arguments because of some bias he has against Koenraad Elst.

Issue # 2: When the linguists are finally proved wrong as I am sure they will be it will not be for the first time. This has happend in a major way with the controversy about migration of Natives to the New World (the Americas).

Conventional wisdom had lended support for the ``Clovis First`` which puts the arrival of Native Americans just before the ice age (around 12,000 BCE) through Siberia into norhtern Alaska and down to the southern tip of South America. Linguistic scholars as usual hurridely jumped in with their arm chair theories about the spread of nearly 1000 native languages. These languages were first classified into 50+ groups which were later combined into 26 and finally to just 3 by Greenberg, a Stanford linguist. This evidence was taken as overwhelmingly conclusive in support of the Clovis first theory.

However some scholars were proposing a much earlier migration around (30,000 BCE) through a ``Coastal migration Theory) a scenerio in which Natives could have travelled along the North and South American coastiline at least 18,000 years before the ice age set in. These scholars were laughed out by the linguist until:

An archeologist from University of Kentucky discovered an astonishingly well preserved native settlement on the coast of Chile. The carbon C-14 datings of 12,000 BCE and earlier were so accurate all the way down to more than an dozen layers of this settlement. Even the strongest linguistic proponents of the Clovis first theory were completely silenced. The whole course of ancient history of the Americas was turned UPSIDE DOWN. The Coastal Migration Theory was also supported by the extremly exact gentic evidence.

The same thing is going to happen, nay its already happening in case of the PIE Uhreimat. The ancient datings of sites like Mehargar do not support the invasion/migration theory at all, and the current time table give to them. Its only a matter of time when more settlements like Mohanjodora will be discovered as far east as New Delhi. Linguistics will be sent packing to obsecurity.

To conclude, the ``overwhelming linguistic evidence`` in suppport of an invasion/migration is not so conclusive at all. In fact most of that evidence can be turned around to support IUT/OIT.

In the mean time amateur scholars like Mr. Oberoi should try to refrain from exhibiting their obvious colonial bias that everything in India must have come from the West.

Read Koenrad Elst and Shrikant Talegiri who have given convincing linguistic arguments that India is the Urheimat of the Indo European languages.

The Rig Veda not only does not mention a foreign homeland but it also clearly mentions the land of seven rivers (Sapta Sindhu) as the homeland.

You are citing ``unanimous agreements between modern scholars,`` who belong to the old school of thought and their opinions need to be examined. In the field of Physics the old die hard Newtonian scholars never accepted Einsteins relativity concepts. These old school people eventually vanished. Same thing is going to happend to the present day ``Indologist.``

Your assertion that they have not found horse bones in the Indus valley is just plain WRONG.

It is nice to run into you again Mr. Oberoi.

You call Kak, Frawly and others cheap frauds without actually refuting any of their arguments. Incidently you are completely unfamiliar with the work of two prominant archeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (Univ of Wisconsin), and Craig Schaffer (Case Western University). Both of them after decades of field work have asserted that there is absolutely no evidance of an invasion which destroyed the Indus valley cities.

Incidently you might want to read two other books

Aryan Invasion Theory: An update, Koenrad Elst and

Arayan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (Shrikant Talegiri)

Rohan :

The impression I got reading folks on the Indology list about Rajaram and Jha is that the scholars think Jha is legitimate, though carried away by his ideas about decipherment, and perhaps naive; while Rajaram is quite different kettle of fish.

I also know that Kak does not agree with Rajaram. Also, regarding decipherment of the Indus script, Kak`s book with Frawley, Feuerstein, mentions that using cryptological theory, one can show that you would need a string of at least 20 characters to demonstrate a decipherment of the Indus script.

I just got a book by Cyrus Gordon on the history of decipherment of forgotten scripts, and it is instructive to read this to understand how the field works. E.g., the first person to suggest that Hittite is Indo-European, Knudtzon, met with a lot of criticism, and backed off his discovery. Having ``crazy`` ideas is common, and not indicative of lack of scholarship. Doctoring the evidence is quite a different thing.

I would be quite careful about impugning a Kak (or a Renfrew ) for lack of knowledge or lack of scholarship, in general or in a particular area, without a lot of cause.

I think for example, it was a legitimate hypothesis in 1995 to postulate that the Saraswati dried up around 1900 BC, thereby explaining the decline of the Harappan culture; and that this dried Saraswati was the Rig Vedic Saraswati -- thus significantly altering the conventional timeline of Indian history. There has been five years to gather hard physical evidence of when the Saraswati dried up, and it should be possible to say now, e.g., Saraswati dried up 1200 BC, and therefore does not explain the decline of Harappan culture, and keeps the conventional timetable intact.

-arun gupta

Question -- A footnote in J.P. Mallory (In search of the Indo-Europeans) says that Anna Davies carried out a cursory examination of the Greek vocabulary, which revealed that less than 40 per cent of it could be ascribed a transparent Indo-European etymology, 8 per cent had established non-Greek origins and about 52 per cent had no clear etymology.

This is a footnote to the statement that ``Yet the linguistic evidence taken as a whole does indicate that the Greeks did borrow a considerable number of elements from a non-Greek language.``

The question is -- what is the equivalent statistic for Vedic Sanskrit ?

Thank you,

-arun

1. Arun, thanks for posting the reference to Witzel`s article on the horse seal, which I hadn`t seen before. Do note that Rajaram has co-authored a book with Frawley, and Frawley has co-authored one with Kak.

2. ``Ilovemoney``: I believe, though I don`t have any references at hand, that the Vedas are supposed to show a roughly eastward chronological progression, with the Rig Veda familiar mostly with Punjab and the ``Gandhara`` area, while later texts show increasing familiarity with eastern India.

3. There were no ``proto-horses`` in India before the horse. Those (like Przewalski`s horse) come from farther north. India did have donkeys and asses. Linguistic transference (from one species to another) is certainly possible, but the horses referred to in the Rig Veda could not have been donkeys (donkeys pulling chariots?) On the subject of transference, I read that the ``alu`` (potato) of some North Indian languages is one of the relatively few Indian plant-names of Indo-European descent, being related to the French ``ail`` (garlic). In India it apparently was used for various indigenous tubers until Europeans brought the potato from North America.

3. About Francois Gautier: I would not take him seriously. He is one of the Europeans whose interest in India/Hinduism dovetails neatly with their hatred/dislike of Islam (another who comes to mind is Koenraad Elst). He has written a book (``Rewriting Indian History``) that uses a selective and tendentious reading of history to present medieval India as one long rape and pillage session by evil Muslims upon innocent and gentle Hindus.

4. ``Layman``: if you find the ``mater/mata`` similarities interesting, you would probably be interested in reading further into the connections between the Indo-European languages. There are many ways by which linguists establish that these are related (cognate) words and not just chance resemblances (of which there are almost always a few to be found between any two languages). For example, the conjugations of the verb ``to bear``:

Sanskrit: bharami, bharasi, bharati, bharamas, bharata, bharanti

Greek: phero, phereis, pherei, pheromes, pherete, pheronti

Latin: fero, fert, fert, ferimus, fertis, ferunt

Old High German: biru, biris, birit, berames, beret, berant

Old High Slavonic: bera, berasi, beretu, beremu, berete, beratu

I don`t know if that will come out readably on the page, but I thought I`d paste it in anyway.

5. I certainly would not presume to have ``my`` theory of Dravidian origins, considering that I have no particular expertise in the subject. However, McAlpin`s Elamite-Dravidian connection has received some acceptance among linguists, though it can`t by any means be regarded as proved. We don`t (I believe) have any direct positive evidence for a movement of Dravidian speakers southwards, other than the circumstantial evidence of the existence of the Dravidian language Brahui in Pakistan (however note that Brahui could possibly have got there in the other direction, as Hungarian got to Hungary).

Interestingly, there is a language spoken in Pakistan, Burushaski, that like Basque is totally unrelated to any other known language. Munda, possibly the oldest Indian language, has only two definite relatives among major world languages: guess which? Vietnamese and Cambodian! I think it is presumptuous to hope to reconstruct the linguistic history of India before Harappa, but I`m sure it was interesting.

6. Thanks for your exposition, Sameer. I would say that any account that presents as proven fact the actual destruction of Harappa by Indo-Aryans is thirty years behind the scholarly consensus and should not be included in present arguments. Nor is ``forcing Dravidians to move south`` argued for anywhere that I have seen (again, it may have happened, but we don`t have much evidence one way or another). I would caution you against making what are called ``straw-man`` arguments, ie. setting up patently weak arguments that no one of consequence is seriously making, and then knocking them down.

7. However the extra-subcontinental origin of the language and culture of the Rig Vedic authors (though not of the authors themselves -- since they obviously display only knowledge of northwestern India) is firmly supported by the scholarly consensus -- that`s the part of what you can call ``Aryan Invasion`` that stands.

8. Again, absolutely, language does not correlate with genetics. The Turks of modern Turkey are composed of many accretions of other tribes who were ``Turkicised`` during the centuries of westward movement, just as the Turkic-speaking Bulgars were ``Slavicised`` and now speak a Slavic language.

9. About Urdu: there is absolutely no question that it is Indo-European and Indic. By analogy, English is unquestionably a language of the Germanic subfamily, even though it has absorbed a huge higher vocabulary from the Italic subfamily (French and Latin).

10: About time-frames: this is a very important issue that you should read about further. It is one of the main reasons Renfrew`s arguments are dismissed as nonsense by many linguists. All languages change over time, and so it would be silly to project proto-Indo-European back to, say, 7000BC, just as it would be ridiculous to look for Proto-French in 1000BC. The upper and lower limits for unified proto-Indo-European are generally fixed in the following way: 2000 BC (or a little earlier) is a reasonable lower limit, given the documented existence of differentiated Indo-European dialects shortly thereafter; 3500 BC (give or take your favourite estimate of the uncertainty which for these time depths is considerable) is a common upper limit, given the earliest evidence for the existence of wheeled vehicles, which form part of the inherited vocabulary of Indo-European. Other higher upper limits are based on other inherited vocabulary, and they all fall well short of 6000 BC.

11. If Sanskrit were more distantly related to other Indo-European languages, we would be justified in looking more closely at the possibility that it developed on the subcontinent and just borrowed features from invaders as they came in. But it is not -- it is a very close relative. This means that wholesale linguistic replacement took place in Northern India, with some substrate (probably largely Dravidian) being overlaid with Indo-Aryan. That does *not * mean that the existing speakers of Dravidian would have been kicked out, any more than the Irish were kicked out at the time English started to replace Irish Gaelic as the main language of Ireland.

12. The Rig Veda and Zend Avesta are generally believed to greatly predate the historically known Persian rule in northwestern India. You should rely on more scholarly sources to avoid making anachronistic arguments.

13. Finally, Sameer: I would be very interested to hear your reaction upon reading the three books I cited in my article, if you can get a hold of them. Those are representative of the latest research (though not all the articles in the two collections necessarily represent the scholarly consensus) in a way that the other books you mention definitely are not.

Regards,

Rohan.

Sameer :

I liked your summing up; though I disagree with a couple of points.

Read ``The Bell Curve`` and investigate a little for yourself, and you will not have any respect for left for the psychometricians (IQ theorists) who are housed in ample numbers in departments in very otherwise respectable US universities such as Harvard and U.C. Berkeley and so on.

Moreover, it is entirely possible for large corporations and think-tanks to purchase research which will have results favorable to themselves from respectable US universities, though this doesn`t usually happen in the hard sciences. There denial of permission to publish results can happen (but raises a stink).

-arun gupta

Sameer :

The 12 months in an year could have been developed independently several times in human history, simply because of the period of the moon.

Likewise, division of the new moon to full moon period into two could have possibly led to independent development of 7-day weeks.

-arun

About Rajaram, see :

http://www.safarmer.com/horseseal/update.html

Jha, Kak, Frawley, etc. are not in this class of person, as far as I know.

-arun gupta

1. Could Sanskritic language have been transferred to India without significant migration of people? Has anyone actually studied this? Seems to me that it is more likely that Sanskrit became so widespread if there was high social mobility and then there would be an incentive to learn the language... gaining money and status.

2. Why don`t the Vedas mention a journey to India?

Could be delibrate, the Ganges plain having been established as the holy land why advertise that they came from elsewhere?

3. Is it possible that Hinduism was the Harrapan religon and the Vedas were translated into Sanskrit as that language became more dominant?

4. Caste system. Just because Europeans do not have that now does not mean that they did not have similar ideas in the past. The social structure is usually described as being static because of children carrying on the profession of their fathers due to economic reasons, but there may have been a `this is the order of things` justification to it as well. Just imagine, if Buddism had been more succesful in India, historians might now be saying that the caste structure had no real meaning and was never considered sacrocant here too.

4. Is there some reason that the Sarawasti river refrences in the Vedas cannot be another name for the Ganges?

5. The word horse may originally have applied to the proto-horse found in India before the supposed Aryan Invasion, it doesn`t neccessarily prove that the speakers were familiar with the true horse.

5. The most attractive thing about AIT is that it is a coherent theory, the others are just random ideas....is there an alternate chronology of exactly what happened?

RE: ASK

Dear Ashish!
Thanks for your kind response. I really appreciate the effort. I think we are still standing where we were bofore these two articles.

SameerJB #52:

Can you tell me how the Indian Express article means that Indians are Indo-centric? Most of the quotes in the article are by foreigners - American mathematician, French astronomer, French historian etc. In fact, I would say that Indians are the least Indo-centric and are very outward looking, probably due to the inferiority complex inbred in them, from centuries of foreign rule.

In fact, it is only because European/Amerian scholars point out the virtues and contributions of ancient India, that the article even made it to the Indian Express. If the same comments had been made by an Indian, he/she would have been laughed at or accused of revisionism, wishful thinking etc.

Layman: I think the article from Indian-Express, you reproduced suffers from the same bias of Indo-centrism to which Rohan has described in his article. This debate is open-ended and must be carried out with open-mind. It is unnecessary to add Indo-centrism to Indian identity, just because there exists Eurocentrism and Sino-centrism. Most of us like to be defined by more than one data points on the three dimensional plot of identity, although many Muslims are content with one data point of religion. Indians can be proud of many things with several data points plotting their identity; Indo-centrism is not necessary.

I forgot to mention few other important points in my previous post on this thread. I talked about migration vs. invasion and migration in general. I should have added another issue of migrants vs. refugees [BTW I liked movie Refugee. It is about a Bihari family’s plight when they try to migrate to Pakistan through Rann of Kutch]. Refugees generally come with inherent weaknesses because they are leaving their homelands out of famine, disease, economy or over-population. It is generally believed that Aryans were migrating in waves during 1200-1800 BC for adverse reasons. Refugees usually adopt to their newer climates rather otherway around, be they Bangladeshis in Karachi or Assam, Afghans in Pakistan or Mexicans and Central Americans in the USA, unless they possess certain valuable skills or commodities, as Shah Shujah possessing Koh-i-Noor diamond or Hong Kong Chineese possessing large sums of money during the late eighties and early nineties. The best likelihood of refugees domination, in my opinion, is religion. The odds of a refugees community coming to dominate in language and culture, based on either or some of religion, skills, horses, chariots and good looks, are best for religion. If it can be proven with sufficient evidence that Rig-Veda was in fact composed by refugees, then theory has merits.

Actually a case against this theory can be made with eyes closed--without considering any evidence for or against it--based strictly on scientific reasoning and logic. The theory of Aryans exodus from their original homelands to India, Iran and Europe as well as the theory of Jewish exodus out of Egypt and into Palestine suffer from the same fundamental flaws. They are based on a series of unlikely, low probability events. The odds for other easy routes are more in each step than these theories suggest. When a case is build on unlikely pathways, the odds against it increase exponentially going to the second, third and the next “exception than the norm” steps. In biological evolution, mutations or unlikely events only survive if they have any advantage over its normal kins. Moreover, the number of biological or biochemical events are very large and very fast on time scale compared to slow and few events of social or linguistic evolution, a mutation is quickly lost or built up depending on natural selection.

Let us dissect these theories. It is less likely for a small powerless trible to leave Egypt together, putting all their eggs in one basket, knowing too well, the Pharoah’s army will chase them down. In the second step likelihood of army destroying the fleeing trible are more than army being destroyed under mysterious circumstances. The chances of crossing Sinai desert are more than being lost for 60 years because people always traveled using sun and stars as guide, in those times. In the next step entering Palestine and dominating the powerful existing tribe of cannanites is less likely than otherway arould. In the case of Aryan theory, the chances of taking chariots through harsh mountaneous terrain are lower than without them. If they moved without them, just carried the knowledge about them, then they must reach India within couple of generations otherwise the knowledge will be lost. Once in India, as refugees, odds are more for them adopting then otherway around, both because of numbers and weak refugee status. Hinduism has never been a religion like catholicism with one central authority who could influence far and near without might to back it up. Similarly, odds for peaceful transfer of language are more than coercive transfer, if it has certain benefits over existing languages.

It is the first step in the Aryan theory which has undeniable odds in favor. It is the existence of certain people probably around northern Caspean Sea, sometimes on the distant past, who spoke a language termed as proto-Indo-European and any other language which utilised their vocabularly to some extent is classified as belonging to proto-Indo-European family of languages. The odds for language transfer through induction, conduction, loan words, wave model or associated with trade can not be guessed and most likely all contributed to varying degree of extent to language transfer.

I believe the division of year into 12 month and month into 4 weeks is Egyptian in origin though it is widely believed that Chineese came up with similar division of year into 12 months independent of Egyptians. That is why, God made earth in seven days, sabbath, Sunday and Friday services and prayers respectively, and a large number of twelves; twelve brothers, twelve desciples and so on. We thank you, Pharoahs!!!! It is remarkable that French president De Gaulle himself welcomed Ramses II mummy officially at Paris airport. I am not sure if he was given guard of honor too.

Urstruly and ASK: Don`t we all wish to have the answers to every possible question about everything. I am as interested as you are in knowing more about it.

re:Urstruly #35

Rohan has responded to your query in reply#38 but thanks for asking the question. Though I must confess I am not an expert on AIT. I am just a curious onlooker as to the political aspects of the debate. I am more interested in the present direction that India and the region is taking.

I fully agree with your question though as I too have had the same doubts. Probably volcanoes can be ruled out after a study of the geology of the Indus valley but other possibilities that you have raised will certainly need extensive research. Moreover, who can say definitely that there wasn`t peaceful migration and assimilation with minor skirmishes, like what happens in refugee situations today? I remember having read somewhere that only one skeleton has been recovered from the Indus valley sites with any marks of a violent death.

Ashish