Unmasking AIT

[ramana]

Dhu, There is website on the Three Kingdoms which gives a Japanese prespective. They think that India, China and Japan are the threkingdoms which anchor East Asia.

[dhu]

<b>Ideology and Race in India's Early History</b>
Padma Manian
San Jose City College

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Probably without realizing it, World History textbooks often take sides in an ideologically charged controversy over the role of race in India's early history. Their account of the so-called Aryan invasions may reflect nineteenth-century Eurocentric scholarship that privileged lighter skinned peoples over darker skinned ones. Alternatively, it may show a naäve endorsement of recent books by Indians and Westerners that owe as much to ideology as to evidence. Certainly the facts don't speak as clearly as most textbooks confidently represent them.

I have taught World History at colleges in the United States for many years. When it came to the early history of India, I once taught that "Aryans" invaded India in 1500 B.C.E., conquered the "Dravidians" and then became predominant. This is what I had learned in elementary school, high school and college courses in India. This is still what is taught in most textbooks. About ten years ago, I became aware of challenges to the idea of the Aryan invasion and decided to look more critically at what World History textbooks were saying about this topic. My study was published in the History Teacher.2 More than half of the textbooks I examined stated that the ancient Harappan civilization was "burned, destroyed and left in rubble by invading Aryan-speaking tribes." These Aryans were "virile people, fond of war, drinking, chariot racing and gambling" and were also "tall, blue-eyed and fair-skinned." The defeated natives were "short, black, nose-less." The victorious Aryans had a "strong sense of racial superiority" and "strove to prevent mixture with their despised subjects". Accordingly they evolved the caste system with the lighter skinned Aryans at the top. 2

In fact, archaeologists have been aware for several decades that Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the demise of the Harappan civilization.3 In contrast, most of the textbooks relied on out-dated sources and presented erroneous material.

Although there is consensus among well-informed students of Indian history that Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the demise of the Harappan civilization, there is a contentious debate underway both in India as well as in the rest of the world regarding whether there was an invasion of Aryans into India around 1500 B.C.E (that is, after the end of the Harappan civilization). The Indians who favor the invasion theory are largely of a progressive or leftist political persuasion. They believe that the iniquities of the caste system are a result of the Aryan invasion. For such Indians, questioning the invasion theory would undermine the work of redressing the injustices of the caste system. It would be akin to Holocaust denial. On the other hand, many Indians who doubt the invasion theory view it as a matter of national pride that their civilization is rooted in the ancient past on Indian soil and is not a result of barbarian invaders a mere 3500 years ago. Each side believes that ideological commitment blinds the other side from seeing the true facts. Western supporters of the invasion theory are accused of intellectual inertia. They are also diagnosed as suffering from "the Liberal White Man's Burden" — the guilt that some Western scholars and journalists feel for the sins of their fathers in perpetrating racism and imperialism in modern times. This predisposes them to believe in the idea that their Aryan ancestors committed similar crimes 3500 years ago. It is argued that the desire of Western liberals to atone for these sins inclines them to support uncritically Indian leftist views on the Aryan invasion. As for Western scholars who question the Aryan invasion theory, they are accused of being sympathetic to the Indian right wing and, if they have no affiliation with academic institutions, of lacking the credentials to justify commenting on history. This debate can be followed on the Internet and is interesting in its own right.

Recent advances in molecular genetics have opened a promising approach to settle these questions, although the evidence at this stage remains inconclusive. Bamshad et al. studied the DNA of people from the Andhra region of Southern India and compared them to Africans, Europeans and East Asians.4 The mitochondrial DNA (transmitted matrilineally) of all castes was more similar to that of East Asians than of Africans or Europeans. The DNA of the Y-chromosome (transmitted patrilineally) of all castes was however more similar to that of Europeans than of East Asians or Africans. Moreover the higher castes were more similar to Europeans than were the lower castes. The authors conclude that "Indians are of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture" due to the Aryan invasion. The majority of the Aryan invaders were men who transmitted their European Y-chromosome to their sons born from the native women and placed themselves at the top of the caste hierarchy. But the maternal lineage remains largely "proto-Asian." The analogy, not explicitly stated in the paper, corresponds to Latin American countries where the conquistadors mated with native women to produce a largely mestizo population, with those at the high end of the social scale having the highest proportion of European ancestry. However, there are inconsistencies in the data. In Table 3,5 the lower castes are closer to Asians than to Europeans and the higher castes are closer to the Europeans than to Asians but not very much so. But in Table 46 all castes are much closer to Europeans than to Asians. Then in Table 5,7 the lower castes are again closer to Asians. In Table 4, the upper castes have a "genetic distance" of 0.265 from West Europeans and 0.073 from East Europeans. This would imply that East Europeans are closer to upper caste Indians than they are to West Europeans! The one set of data that does not use a calculation of "genetic distance" and which is therefore more reliable is Table 2.8 This table shows that the upper castes have 61% Asian maternal lineages, 23.7% West Eurasian lineages and 15.3% other. However, the 23.7% West Eurasian number includes 16.9% from the U2i lineage that the paper itself says is India-specific, and moreover is 50,000 years old.9 Therefore in calculating the fraction of West Eurasian lineages that Aryan women brought into India with the 1500 B.C.E. invasion, the U2i component should be subtracted. Only 6.8% of maternal lineages of the upper castes could have come with the invasion. The invasion looks very conquistador-like indeed!

Another recent paper has looked at the genetics of the Indian population: Kivisild et al.10 The authors state that "Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene."11 They looked at some markers on the Y-chromosome that are widespread among Greeks and other Europeans and found that of the 325 Indian chromosomes of diverse caste and geographical background, none had these markers. From statistical considerations, this implied that the European contribution to male lineages in India is less than 3%. Kivisild et al. also suggest "early southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers from Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western Eurasian gene pools." Other researchers, such as Macaulay et al., take this suggestion further.12 They claim to have found evidence that there was only a single dispersal of modern humans from Africa and that this dispersal was through India. According to this account, several generations of the ancestors of all non-African people would have lived in India. The ancestors of Western Eurasians (including Europeans) would have spent several thousand years in India until the climate improved to allow them to migrate North and West out of India about 45000 years ago. 

Let us go back now to how the commonly accepted date of 1500 B.C.E. for the Aryan Invasion of India was proposed. It is not based on any archaeological evidence, but instead was based on Friedrich Max Mueller's linguistic work in the nineteenth century explaining the similarity of the Indo-European languages. In his view, the speakers of the Indo-European languages are descended from Japheth, one of the sons of Noah, the speakers of Hebrew from Shem and Africans and Indian Dravidians from Ham, the least favored of Noah's sons (Ham and his line were accursed because of Ham's disrespect of Noah). Since the Flood can be dated from the genealogies of the Bible to be around 2500 B.C.E. and the Vedas were ancient scripture at the time of the Buddha (around 500 B.C.E.), the Aryans (said Max Mueller) likely invaded India and defeated the Dravidian descendants of Ham around 1500 B.C.E. Around the same time, the Israeli descendants of Shem were defeating another of Ham's descendants, the Canaanites. Max Mueller dated the composition of the earliest of the Vedas to around 1200 B.C.E., allowing the Aryans a few centuries to get settled in India.

Those who challenge the Aryan invasion theory, however, believe the Vedas to be much older than 1200 B.C.E. A key piece of evidence is that the Sarasvati is the most important river in the Rig Veda but is at present a small stream that gets lost in the desert. Proponents for an ancient date for the composition of the Vedas argue that since the river dried up in about 1900 B.C.E., the Vedas must have been composed before then.

I expect that the question of whether there was an Aryan invasion and whether it occurred around 1500 B.C. E. will be resolved soon by a combination of genetic studies and by geologists dating the ancient courses of dried-up rivers in the Indian desert. In the meantime, teachers of history and textbooks would do well to present both sides of the debate instead of ignoring the existence of the debate. 
Biographical Note: Padma Manian received ..

Notes ....
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[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Jul 25 2008, 10:49 PM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Jul 25 2008, 10:49 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Dhu, There is website on the Three Kingdoms which gives a Japanese prespective. They think that India, China and Japan are the threkingdoms which anchor East Asia.
[right][snapback]85058[/snapback][/right]
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Do you have the website on hand, by chance. I have always been looking for an East Asian version of the Bharatvani site. Apparently, <i>Sangoku</i> was important enough for certain orientalists to spend considerable energies minimizing and trivializing this aspect...

[ramana]

Here it is:

Sangoku

They call it Japanese conceit!

[Shambhu]

<b>Our Voice in Our History</b>
(An edited version of this article was published in the Aug 2008 issue of Pragati)
http://varnam.org/blog/archives/2008/08/ou...our_history.php

"The Indus Valley civilization dwarfed Egypt and Mesopotamia in area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and was aggressive in globalization 5000 years back." These are words from Andrew Lawler's lead article in the June 2008 issue of Science magazine which had Indus Civilization as the cover story

Previously archaeologists believed that Indus people got their ideas from Mesopotamia and was a civilization without deep roots, but as per new evidence, Indus evolved from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan. Archaeology has also found evidence of occupation in Harappa dating to 3700 B.C.E and in Farmana in India to 3500 B.C.E.

Writing about the religious beliefs of the Indus people, Lawler mentions that the proto-Shiva seal has fuelled speculation that the religious tradition of Indus helped lay the basis for Hinduism. While there are questions to be answered on their language, religion and form of government, decades of archaeology has changed the image of Indus from a xenophobic and egalitarian society to one which was vibrant and complex.

Though the article was fairly balanced covering excavations in Harappa, Baluchistan, and Kot Diji in Pakistan and Farmana, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan in India, it had the usual western hatchet job, blaming Indian archaeologists for using Hindu texts as a guide. This is a no-no, we are told, because (a) it is inflammatory to the Pakistanis and (b) India has a large Muslim population.

The article has other issues too. Drought, as a reason for the demise of Indus, is scoffed at while many other reasons, including "change in a society that they say emphasized water-related rituals" is offered as an alternative. The western scholars quoted in the article themselves admit their theories are pure speculation, but the drying up of Ghaggar-Hakra around 1900 B.C.E is ignored, since it would involve a reference to the Rig Veda.

As Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games --- a very different one from that practised in their own research centers --- we need to evaluate what can be done. Whining about unfairness can be cathartic, but it does not solve the problem.


Different Standards and Inept Government

Few years back, Stanford University offered a course on the Historical Jesus which was an enquiry based on the scriptures. Biblical Archaeology is quite popular in Israel which has the same percentage of Muslim population as India. These techniques are considered communal in India.

After two centuries of searching and not finding anything spectacular, Biblical Archaeology in the past half century has morphed into the archaeology of the Biblical period. Archaeologists now say the Exodus did not happen, not by speculation, but after conducting extensive archaeology in Egypt. We too should not indulge in speculative archaeology, but first Indian archaeologists and scholars need to be unapologetic about knowing the scriptures and using them for clues.

Sadly this attitude cannot be taken by people who work for government funded institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Universities. The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. (If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia)

Recently the Government of India cut funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools because - it is getting tad repetitive - India has a large Muslim population and there was a fear that it would instil religious and cultural pride among students. In such an atmosphere, it would be naive to expect the government to lead the battle in understanding our history. Instead of wasting time writing letters to ministers, we might be better off digging in our own backyard for Painted Grey Ware.

The second problem is mentioned in the Lawler's article itself. Indian archaeologists have done excellent work, like R. S. Bisht in Dholavira and Vasant Shinde in Farmana, but they are slow to publish and collaborate. Bisht's work has revealed "monumental and aesthetic architecture, a large stadium and an efficient water-management system", but has largely been unpublished. The lack of data from people who had first access to the location helps in sustaining myths about the civilization.

Solutions

There is an urgent need to create institutions where scholarship is free of bureaucracy and political interference. One such institution --- the Indus Heritage Center --- funded by the Global Heritage Fund is coming up in Vadodara. Besides starting a Smithsonian class center in India, the center also plans to popularize the findings of Deccan College, the Department of Archaeology of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Archaeological Survey of India.

There have been xenophobic comments regarding this institution due to the involvement of western professors, even though the professors don't believe in the Aryan Invasion theory. The fear is that they will be applying western frameworks on our history resulting in misinterpretation.

But instead of complaining about west, it is time we adopted some of their techniques for popularizing history. Building a Smithsonian style museum is an insuperable problem for the cash strapped ASI which can barely manage the monuments under its care. The Indus Heritage Center model where private donors in association with various colleges build research centers in which native interpretation of history can happen should be considered. Right now there are few sincere individuals who are involved in correcting Western biases; their efforts are exemplary but not sufficient to make an impact.

Past many decades of research have found no archaeological evidence for the Aryan Invasion theory. It has been discredited through genetic research as well. The demise of Indus valley is understood to be due to hydrological changes. Still, pick up a book like Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, which is used as text book in graduate courses, and you will find that colonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.

One Indus Heritage Center cannot change such entrenched ideas. To give the megaphone to differing voices, more Indus Heritage Centers which are financially secure are required. This dovetails into the larger debate about the need to free higher education and research from government control and facilitate an atmosphere where private capital can provide funding. With such freedom, scholars would be able to delve into research as they see fit, instead of surrendering to artificial political fears.

Five thousand years back our ancestor living in the Indus Valley sailed across the vast Arabian sea in reed boats with cotton sails and made the best of the Bronze age globalized world. It would be a shame, if we did not show even a fraction of their ingenuity in making our voice heard in a debate about our history.

_____
<!--emo&:angry:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif' /><!--endemo--> (This article was published as an op-ed in Aug 10 Mail Today; the title the publishers have given it: "We don't quite get it, the first globalized civilization was in India". They would definitely have 'got it' if the first civilization was discovered in Germany or France..)

[ramana]

GD posted in BRF
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->3 page article.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/ ... Civiliza-0

Indian origin of Egyptian civilization
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[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Aug 14 2008, 12:41 AM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Aug 14 2008, 12:41 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Indian origin of Egyptian civilization
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This article was also posted in a pan-asian forum. The author has positively referenced the Hinduwisdom site, but taken the AIT and associated theories for granted. Seems like a convoluted inculturation/confusionist attempt. His cache of articles is typical creationist/xtian fundamentalist.

From the author's personal site:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The author, Babu G. Ranganathan (...), was born in 1957 in Madras, India. Mr. Ranganathan is a conservative Christian and a Reformed Baptist. He converted from Hinduism to Christianity when he received the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart as his personal Savior at the young age of fourteen. The Spirit of God used the preaching of evangelist Dr. Billy Graham on television in bringing Christian repentance and faith to the author's life. As a religion and science writer, Mr. Ranganathan has been recognized in the 24th edition of Marquis Who's Who In The East. He holds a B.A. with a major in Bible and a minor in Biology from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina (class of '82). He also completed two years of full-time graduate study in law at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts.
...
Gospel for Asia - Planting churches among the most unreached<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->One of the running threads in Western ethical thought is Glaucon’s challenge to Socrates in Plato’s Republic: “Why ought I be moral?” Like all threads running through a rich tapestry, at times it has been prominent and at others nearly invisible: here the picture and there the ground. Whatever the case, in this or that ethical theory at some place and time, it could be reasonably said of the Western ethical systems that they presuppose the necessity for giving reasons (whatever they might be) why human beings ought to behave morally. That is, the idea is that the self requires a reason (or reasons) for behaving morally. ‘Reason’, as I use it here, need not be restricted to mean ‘rational argument’. It merely refers to some kind of plausibility consideration which, as we know only too well today, is contextually dependent.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>My suggestion is that Glaucon’s challenge is not intelligible within our intuitive world models. </b>The reason why this is so is because moral actions and moral relations are constitutive of that very entity which is supposed to make moral choices, viz., the ‘self’ or the moral agent.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[ramana]

X-posted from historicity thread. This gives an idea of why the AIT was invented to deHebrewize their European religion....
Sharansky's mistaken identity
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Natan Sharansky defied Soviet tyranny during the Cold War and thereby earned the gratitude of free people everywhere, including the United States, which in 2006 awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After enduring years of persecution in Russia, Sharansky emigrated to Israel and became a political leader. In his new book, Defending Identity [1], he sets out to defend Jewish national identity by asserting that national identity as such is a good thing. We must belong to cultures and nations, Sharansky asserts, rather than to the insipid soup of global citizenship. <b>The trouble is that some identities are hostile to other identities by their nature. Democracy should solve this problem, Sharansky argues, except that some identities are by their nature anti-democratic, and so on. </b>

A worthwhile thought was gestating in Sharansky's mind, but was stillborn in the present volume. Sharansky wants to say that the particularism of Jewish national identity offers universal benefits for humankind. But he does not want to say so in religious terms, and cannot find a clear way to say so in secular terms.

<b>Jews often are loath to make theological claims for their own importance, which sound megalomaniac to secular ears.</b> But the Jews might as well resign themselves to being hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb. <b>Except for its religious implications, the world has little use for Jewish nationhood, and considers the presence of a few million Jews in the Middle East an inconvenience at best, and a danger at worst.</b> That is why the only true friends of the Jewish state are American and some other evangelicals, and a few leaders of the Catholic Church.

<b>Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish theologian, asserted that the history of Israel was the history of the world. </b>Expansive as this claim may appear, it is well grounded in Rosenzweig's sociology of religion.<b> What Rosenzweig meant is that Israel's existence forever transformed human identity. From Israel, Western Asia and Europe first heard the promise of eternal life, and afterwards looked at themselves differently. The pagans of the ancient world knew their days on Earth were numbered, and that their time would come to die out and be forgotten. But the promise of eternal life that the nations heard from the Jews undermined their ancient fatalism. </b>

Reasonably, or not, we want to live forever. The first people to believe that God promised that it would endure forever became the standard against which all nations must measure their condition.<b> From Ireland to Afghanistan, the identities of all tribes and nations became a response to Israel: Christianity offers a New Israel, Islam a competitor to Israel, neo-paganism a Satanic parody of Israel. The trouble is that Jewish national identity is not one national identity among many national identities. There is only Jewish identity, and a set of responses to Jewish identity. Jewish national identity has a radically different character than all other national identities, for the Jews uniquely believe that their nation was summoned into being to serve the sole creator God of the Universe. </b>

It is somewhat uncomfortable for the Jewish to insist on the point, and it is understandable why Sharansky would wish to take refuge behind the notion of "identity" in general, but that simply doesn't work, and the Jews really have nothing to lose.

<b>It is tricky to discuss human identity in other than religious terms, for our identity often implies continuity.</b> <b>With what do we identify that makes our existence more than a random occurrence? Our ties of culture, language, faith and kinship make us heirs to the past and participants in the future, and it is the future, the vanishing-point at the horizon, that defines the composition of the other images. Societies that reject religion also appear to reject the future, for example, by declining to have children. </b>

Sharansky takes to task utopian secular thinking, which claims that peace requires the extinction of all passionate attachments, national, religious or whatever. His antagonist is "post-identity" theory, for example, the head of the Modern Language Association who said, "Cosmopolites not only or even principally owe an allegiance to their place of birth but also to a broader, more worldly, supra and transnational world view," as opposed to the "negative consequences of resurgent nationalism, ethnic separatism, and religious fundamentalism".

Eliminating all passionate attachments, Sharansky might have said, is a fool's errand. A rabbinic tale of antiquity reports what happened when God decided to eliminate the ''evil impulse", by which the rabbis meant the competitive and sexual instinct among men. The next day not a single egg was laid in the land of Israel, and God was obliged to restore the impulse. <b>Europe may have succeeded in eliminating nationalism, or rather, nationalism burnt itself out in two hideously destructive World Wars. As a result children no longer are born to the Europeans. The problem is self-liquidating. </b>

<b>On the other hand, the two countries considered most suspect for their nationalism by the supposedly enlightened Europeans, the United States and Israel, are the only ones in the entire industrial world to reproduce at above replacement level.</b> Sharansky is beating if not a dead horse, then a sterile one. All that secular enlightenment can say to humanity is what that exemplar of the enlightenment, Frederick the Great of Prussia, barked at his fleeing soldiers during the 1757 Battle of Kolin: Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, do you want to live forever?).

Countries subject to communist rule, the most atheistic and internationalist, also show by far the lowest birth rates.

<b>Projected population in formerly communist countries
Population
(Thousands) 2005 2050 % Change
Ukraine      46918 25514 -46%
Georgia      4473  2575    -42%
Belarus      9795 5746        -41%
Moldova      3877 2330  -40%
Source: United Nations

Russia itself is not far behind Belarus and Moldova in the race to national extinction. </b>

A great deal of violence has been perpetrated in the name of religion; the most violent of all supposedly religious wars, the Thirty Years War, had very little to do with religion. It is wrong to blame religion for war. <b>Exterminating one's neighbors was the norm for human behavior from the dawn of man until early in the first millennium BCE</b>, when the prophets of ancient Israel first spoke of universal peace under the reign of a single God.

The modern critique of religion emerged out of the 16th and 17th century wars of religion. Secular critics blame religion for the tempted as we may be tempted to dismiss as happenstance the way in which the idea of universal love came to humankind, but the peoples of the Earth did not dismiss it at all. The peoples of the Earth heard the message of God's love in the particular way in which it was told to them.

The Election of Israel as Franz Rosenzweig put it:
It was more or less through Christianity that thoughts of Election have spread among the individual peoples, and with them, necessarily, a pretension to eternity ... On the foundation of love for one's own people, there lurks the presentiment that at some time in the distant future, this people no longer will exist, and this presentiment lends a sweetly poignant gravity. But in any event, the thought of the necessary eternity of the people is there, and, strong or weak, it has an effect. [2]
Rosenzweig makes the striking observation that precisely <b>because the Christian peoples have come to believe in their own eternity, and cannot accept the idea that they will be exterminated, as the ancient peoples did, their concept of war changes radically. </b><b>War raises the possibility of the destruction of the people, continued Rosenzweig, and for just this reason it becomes a religious event. </b><b>The ancient peoples fought wars, but the center of their civic life was the official cult, with its rites and sacrifices.</b><b> For modern Christian peoples convinced of their own Election, war itself becomes the supreme act of collective religion.  </b>

This was written during World War I by a serving German soldier, and uncannily describes the quasi-religious attitude that the European nations brought to the war.

Mercifully, Rosenzweig died in 1929, before the triumph of National Socialism. But his sociology of religion would have recognized in <b>Adolf Hitler's "Master Race" a Satanic parody of Election, and in the Aryan claim on eternity, the existential terror before the prospect of extinction. </b>

Sharansky wants to fall back on old-fashioned national identity, <b>yet in Europe, national identities were not a sui generis expression of ancient culture and ethnicity.</b> On the contrary, as Rosenzweig reports, Christianity turned European national identity into a parody of Israel's Election. Europe was only half-Christianized. Christianity - at least in its Western, Catholic or Protestant manifestation - demands that the individual repudiate the sinful flesh of his Gentile origin, and by water and the Spirit be reborn into a new people, that is, the People of Israel. <b>From the (Western) Christian perspective, God's promise to Abraham remains valid: it is simply that Christ's sacrifice on the Cross makes possible the miraculous rebirth of each individual Christian into Israel. </b>

<b>The trouble with European nationalism is that the Europeans did not want to be saved by repudiating their Gentile flesh and joining Israel of the Spirit, namely the Church. On the contrary, they wanted to be Elected, that is, accorded eternal life, but in their own French, German, Italian or Ukrainian skins. </b><b>That is the not-so-secret source of anti-Semitism.</b> A<b>ll European nationalism is hostile to Israel, for the existence of Israel stands as a reproach to the pathetic pretensions of each European nation to immortality. In its most extreme form, namely Hitler's, the obsession takes hold of the existentially challenged nation that in order for it to be the Chosen People, the original Chosen People must be exterminated. </b>

<b>European national identity is dead and gone for tragic reasons, which is to say very good ones, and the thin broth of European cosmopolitanism that bubbles in its place is not a substitute so much as tasteless residue. When the dogs no longer want to live forever, they don't trouble to have puppies, and in a few generations the problem resolves itself through depopulation and ruin.</b>

It was the genius of <b>John Paul II, the last great hero of Christian Europe, the pope who brought down communism, to understand that the true Europe needed Israel. Not the Europe of the peoples, but the Europe of the universal Church, required the living presence of Israel as the exemplar of a People of God, and John Paul II declared God's Covenant with the Jewish people to be eternally valid, and instituted diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. </b>

Sharansky's sympathy towards an old-fashioned European patriotism that never existed in the way he portrays it, and died a hideous but well-deserved death during the 20th century, stems from another motive. The legitimacy of the Jewish state is under attack by enemies who claim that the world has moved beyond the national state altogether.

At the conclusion of his book, Sharansky at last quotes the critic whose attacks on Israel well may have motivated the book, Professor Tony Judt of New York University. In an often-cited 1993 New York Review of Books essay, Judt denounced the fact that Israel "is an ethnic majority defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three at the expense of inconvenient local minorities", in which "Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges", which do not belong in "a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law".

<b>Judt wants the dissolution of the Jewish state into a bi-national state with the Palestinians. Long a utopian fancy among such leftists as the late Martin Buber, the bi-national state has become the core strategy of the Palestinians. [/b[b]]Rather than conclude a two-state agreement with Israel, the Palestinians hope to drag things on until demographics and the world's impatience with the running sore in the Middle East give them the majority in a reconstituted Palestine. </b>That is a serious danger, not merely a utopian project, and Sharansky is right to be alarmed about it.

His practical conclusions, though, seem quite odd. He argues that democracy will solve the problem, although it is hard to understand why. Hamas came to power in Gaza through democratic elections, and Hezbollah's power in Lebanon was enhanced by democracy. Israel's nemesis, Iran's missile-rattling President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, won democratic elections.

On the other hand, Sharansky denounces the "authoritarian Chinese regime that seems the smallest expression of identity as a threat to its rule" and "brutally represses Tibetans, Uyghurs and others". The fact that China has deep concerns regarding the intentions of Muslim radicals among the Uyghurs in its far west is of enormous strategic benefit to Israel, however. China has no particular sympathy for Israel, but Israel and China have a common enemy.

<b>On the other hand, Israel's involvement with the Georgian cause against Russia (including the prominent role of Israeli advisors in the ill-fated Georgian army) may be one of the stupidest things the Jewish state has done since its founding. </b>Russia appears to view Israeli missile defense as part of the overall American effort to encircle Russia with anti-missile systems in Poland, the Czech Republic, and so forth, and may retaliate by selling sophisticated anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems to Syria and Iran.

Sharansky has every right to detest Vladimir Putin, given his suffering at the hands of Soviet state security, but he is apocalyptically wrong to complain that the United States has not done enough to strengthen Georgia, Lithuania and Ukraine against Russia.<b> Russia is in a position to do enormous harm to Israel if it chooses to ally itself with Israel's enemies, and well may do so if it perceives that Israel has joined the United States in placing pressure on its borders. That, pardon the expression, could lead to a disaster of Biblical proportions. </b>

Sharansky's mistaken view of identity does nothing to temper this writer's pessimism concerning Israel's strategic position. <b>Perhaps God wants to call attention to Israel's Election by making the Jewish state depend on His miraculous intervention, rather than on its own good sense.</b>
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[Guest]

This is promising to be another blockbuster from shrikant talageri. I cqant wait to get my hands on the book

I am planning to return to a more active role in the forum after the conference on January 11
Right now i am frightfullty busy
T e Rigveda and the Avesta: the final evidence

by Shrikant G. Talageri[B]

-- New Delhi, Aditya Prak., 2008, xxxviii,379p., bibl., ind., 23cm.
ISBN 9788177420852 Rs.750 (hb), Rs. 350(pb)
About This Book.

The single most significant unresolved problem in the study of World History today is the problem of the geographical location of the Original Homeland of the Indo-European family of languages. This is because this is the most important family of languages in the world in terms of the number of primary as well as secondary speakers, as also in terms of geographical spread, ethnic diversity, and political and economic clout. This family of languages has twelve branches (two of them, Anatolian and Tocharian, now long extinct): the extant branches, from west to east, are Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan. The question of where exactly the original homeland of this diverse family was located has been a hotly debated issue among linguists, historians and archaeologists, and, especially in India, where the issue has acquired deep political overtones, also among politically inclined writers of every brand.

In his two earlier books, The Aryan Invasion Theory: A Reappraisal (1993) and The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), the author of this book put forward the hypothesis, backed by detailed arguments, data and evidence, that this Original Homeland lay in the northern parts of India, and that the other branches of Indo-European languages spread out from India to their respective historical habitats. In this book, he presents the final case with conclusive new evidence based on an unassailable interpretation of old but hitherto universally misinterpreted data. The result is a hypothesis which critics will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to counter and disprove.

The two highlights of this book are as follows.

One, the establishment of the Relative Chronology of the Rigveda vis-à-vis the Avesta and the Mitanni inscriptions, and of the Geography of the Rigveda; followed by a detailed analysis of the Internal Chronology of the (different parts of) the Rigveda; and, finally, the first steps in the establishment of the Absolute Chronology of the Rigveda in terms of the actual point of time BCE when the hymns of the text were composed.

And, two, the presentation of a linguistic hypothesis which shows finally and conclusively that the Indian Homeland hypothesis is the only hypothesis which explains all the linguistic problems which arise in the course of the quest for the Original Homeland.

All this has important and far-reaching implications, not only in resolving the academic question of the location of the Indo-European Homeland, and not only in resolving the question of the linguistic identity of the Harappan or Indus or Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization, but also in taking the beginnings of the history of Indian Civilization as we know it (as distinct from its prehistory, which is what the Harappan civilization amounts to in current historical discourse) back by several thousands of years:

While the beginnings of the history of the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian Civilizations are known to lie at least as far back as the fourth millennium BCE on the basis of detailed decipherable and deciphered records (inscriptions, scrolls, etc.), the beginnings of Indian Civilization as we know it could not really be traced far earlier than the mid-second millennium BCE, and even this only on the basis of back-tracking the stages of Vedic history (whether logically or illogically done) from the oldest known decipherable and deciphered records found in India: the Ashokan inscriptions of the latter half of the first millennium BCE.

The earlier records, of the Harappan Civilization, are not yet convincingly deciphered; and the interpretation of the signs on the Harappan seals (from the question of the identity of the language represented in those seals down to the question of whether or not, indeed, any language is represented at all in them) has been a matter of motivated debate: the academic scholars presume the language of the Harappan Civilization to be non-Indo-European, since the current academically accepted theory requires that the Indo-European "Indo-Aryans" could not have "entered" India far earlier than the latter half of the second millennium BCE.

However, ironically, decipherable and deciphered records are found in West Asia (Iraq, Syria, and even Palestine and Egypt), dating to the mid-second millennium BCE, which record the presence of "Indo-Aryan" speakers in West Asia at around the same time as they are supposed to have been entering into India. The presence of these "Indo-Aryans", the Mittani "Indo-Aryans", in West Asia has hitherto been interpreted as evidence of an "Indo-Aryan" group which broke away from the main body of "Indo-Aryans" somewhere in Central Asia, and moved westwards to appear in West Asia at around the same time as the main body of "Indo-Aryans" appeared in northwestern India.

But the analysis of the Rigvedic, Avestan and Mittani data in this book completely overturns this theory: it presents an unassailable case showing that the culture common to the Rigveda, the Avesta and the Mitanni records is a culture which developed in northern India in the Late Rigvedic Period, and that this Late Rigvedic Period followed earlier periods (the Middle Rigvedic Period, and, before that, the Early Rigvedic Period) which have different cultures and which preceded this common culture; and that not only the "Indo-Aryans", but also the proto-Iranians, in those earlier pre-Avestan and pre-Mittani periods, were inhabitants of areas deeper within northern India and had only started expanding westwards towards the end of the Early Rigvedic Period.

All this places the "Indo-Aryans" and the proto-Iranians deep within northern India at least as early as the early third or late fourth millennia BCE, with no connections further west. This lends legitimacy to an interpretation of Indian history with indigenous origins going back deep into the fourth millennium BCE, and brings Indian traditional Indian historical traditions (excluding, of course, all the mythical elements, exaggerations and interpolations which have seeped into them) as well as the Harappan civilization within the ambits of the academic study of the history of Indian Civilization as we know it.

To order:
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[Bodhi]

awesome!

[Husky]

At last. Have waited too long already.
Good news.

[dhu]

The following post by Talageri on the Mittani connection probably foreshadows his new findings: forum link. Indo-iranian homeland as India automatically pulls IE homeland in Eastern direction. In fact, archaism of the fringe phenomenon argues very strongly for an Indian center. Massa will have finishing heart attack soon. he is in ICU now.

[Shambhu]

"I am planning to return to a more active role in the forum after the conference on January 11"

Kaushal Gaaru, we are waiting!

[ramana]

dhu, Can you paraphrase what Sri Talgeri is saying so it can be disseminated widely?

[dhu]

The following is Talageri's post (referenced above): AIT-walas have been quitely supportive of Bjarte Kaldhol's negationist stance probably because they realize the strength of the Indic Mittani arguments. Obviously, they cannot fully endorse the 'no Mittani in ME' position because it would cast doubt on the AIT itself. But the 'Mittani from the East' thesis does not have these problems; the Indic migrants could not fully subsume the established civilizations of the ME, but the ruffians in the northern periphery were certainly much more malleable.

Mittani are part of a spectrum of Indic migrants to the Mideast: Kassites, Mittani, Sindoi, etc. Denying the Indic origin of these groups is essential to the AIT hoax because the periphery tends to maintain archaic elements like Kentum. If India is definitively sending out formative groups like Iranians and Kassites at a later time, it becomes a thousand times more likely that, at an earlier period, India had sent out archaic elements to the northern periphery. Additionally, the dates would correspond to a 10K dissemination of r1a1/M17 out of the East/Hindu Kush. Any way, Kaldhol is not denying an Indic provenance for some elements of the Mittani:

Kaldhol: ----When the Hurrian royal family (but not the Hurrian ruling class)<b> started using some possibly Indo-Aryan throne names, </b>the Hyksos had already been expelled from Egypt. Hurrians did not "penetrate Palestine" until the 14th century, and they were not "pushed" from any homeland outside Anatolia by a wave of Indo-Europeans.----

We are seeing the relegation of (so-called) Europe to the periphery in world history terms.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->*HOCK'S ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE OIT*

H. H. Hock presents various arguments against the OIT in two papers included in the volume "Aryan and non-Aryan in South Asia" (Ann Arbor, 1997, edited by Madhav M. Deshpande and Johannes Bronkhorst): "Out of India? The Linguistic Evidence" (p.1-17), and "Through a glass darkly: Modern 'racial' interpretations vs. textual and general prehistoric evidence on arya and dasa/dasyu in Vedic society" (p. 145-?).

The papers are interesting, and afford scope for some fundamental studies on certain points, which produce strong evidence on matters pertaining to the indo-Aryan problem, though, as we shall see, *not* in the direction indicated by Hock.

In the first paper, Hock touches on the "Vedic-Sanskrit=Proto-Indo-European" theory and the alternate "Proto-Indo-European-in-India" theory, and argues strongly against both. The first of these theories is, of course, untenable. But, in the course of his arguments, Hock deals with the issue of the Mitanni language in a debatable manner. In discussing the second theory, he takes up two issues, both of which invite debate: the "equine evidence", and the evidence of ancient IE dialectology.

In the second paper, he discusses the AIT arguments about the racial differences between the so-called invading (or immigrating or "acculturating"?) Indo-Aryans, *as derived from textual analyses*, and, fortunately, dismisses them as baseless. However, in the course of his paper, he presents other arguments from the AIT side on two issues, which, again, invite debate: the identity of aryas and dasas/dasyus in the RV, and the evidence of river names with particular reference to the identity of the
Sarasvati in the RV.

We will, therefore discuss the following issues here:

The Mitanni evidence.

The Equine evidence.

The evidence of ancient IE dialectology.

The identity of aryas and dasas/dasyus in the RV.

The Rivers, especially the Sarasvati, in the RV.

*A*. *The **Mitanni** Evidence.*

Hock argues against the arguments of S.S.Misra, "that the Mitanni form of Indo-Aryan must be later than Vedic Sanskrit and must have been imported to the Near East from India", and concludes, to the contrary, that the Mitanni language is in fact not a "form of Indo-Aryan" at all, but a form of *Indo-Iranian*, and that this "near Eastern variety of Indo-Iranian appears to predate the earliest attested stages of both Indo-Aryan (which has changed (*d*)*zh* to *h*) and Iranian (with *s*>*h*)" [HOCK 1997:3].

His *sole* argument, on the basis of which he reaches this conclusion, is that the Mitanni word "*wasanasaya* 'of the chariot', appears to reflect a stage prior to the change of pre-Indo-Aryan voiced aspirate *(d)zh>h, assuming that the word corresponds to Skt, *vahanasya* (see MAYRHOFER 1986, s.v. *vah-*)" [HOCK 1997:2].

Witzel, in the present volume under review here, modifies this to suggest that the language *is* indeed Indo-Aryan, but "an early pre-Rgvedic stage of IA, seen in the preservation of IIr –*zdh*-> Ved. –*edh*-, Iir *ai*> Ved. *e*, as well as in the absence of retroflexion .... there is no retroflexion in *mani-nnu*, or the Southwest Iranian, Elam. O.P. **bara-mani* and in the East Iranian dialect, Avest.: *ma**ini* (in spite of the very specific phonetic alphabet used by the Zoroastrians!) .... Mit. IA also does not have typical South Asian loan words such as *ani*'lynch pin'." (p.361-2).

He amplifies this in his footnote:

"Note –*zd*- in *Priyamazdha* (*Bi-ir-ia-ma-as-da*, Mayrhofer 1979:47 in Palestine, cf. *Priya-asva*: *bi-ir-ia-as-su-va*): Ved. *Priyamedha*: Avest. *–mazda*. Or, note retention of Iir *ai*> Ved. *e* (*aika*: *eka* in *aikavartana*), and retention of *j'h*> Ved. *h* in *vasana(s)saya* of 'the race track' = [*vazhanasya*] cf. Ved. *vahana-* (EWA II 536, Diakonoff 1971:80; Hock 1999: 2). Mit. IA also shares the Rgvedic and Avest. Preference for *r* (*pinkara* for *pingala*, *parita* for *palita*)" (p.389).

The evidence for the language being Indo-Aryan rather than Indo-Iranian is overwhelming — every single Mitannian "Aryan" word is Indo-Aryan, and an overwhelming majority of the words are absent or unknown in Iranian. Hock has to indulge in special pleading [HOCK 1997:2-3 footnotes] to explain away the absence of Vedic/Mitanni deities like *Varuna/uruwana*, or the Vedic/Mitanni numeral word *eka/aika*, in Iranian; but the evidence is much more wide-based: as Witzel puts it, the words cover "the semantic fields of horses, their colors, horse racing and chariots, some important 'Vedic' gods, and a large array of personal names adopted by the ruling class" (p.361)

And all these words point *towards* Indo-Aryan, and *away from* Iranian.

Witzel, therefore, only concentrates on showing that the "Mit. IA" words "belong to an early, pre-Rgvedic stage of IA" (p.361). And his evidence to this effect consists only of the absence of retroflexion (eg. in *mani-nnu*), the absence of what he calls "typical South Asian loan words" (the word *ani*, "lynch pin"), and the *ai* in *aika*, *zd* in *Priyamazdha*, and *zh* in *vazhanasya*.

The evidence is clearly flimsy and argumentative: the absence of retroflexion in Iranian is a separate matter. The absence of retroflexion in the Mitanni words is perfectly natural: Indo-Aryan languages migrating from India often tend to lose their retroflexes. It is possible that the Mitanni, like the Iranians before them (if they had retroflex sounds) and the Romanies or Gypsies after them (who definitely did), lost the retroflexes after emigration. In any case, the languages which borrowed and used the Mitanni words, in the records, did not use alphabets which had letters for retroflexes (and when, even today, millions of Indians write Indian words in the Roman alphabet without seeing any need to indicate the retroflex sounds, it would be too much to expect the non-IE languages which borrowed some Mitanni words to invent special alphabets to represent retroflex sounds if found in those words. Modern Arabic words used in Hindi, also, do not indicate the exact Arab sounds in the words). "Typical South Asian loan words" is an insolent phrase: How does Witzel decide that the word *ani*, "lynch pin", is a "typical South Asian loan word", and how does he decide that the word is absent in the Mitanni language? The sound *ai* instead of *e* in *aika* is too flimsy to be of any value as an indicator of its pre-Rigvedic vintage.

It is definitely not *my* claim that the Rigveda was composed in 5000 BCE or completed in 3100 BCE, or that the Mitanni language is a form of Prakrit. *But it is my claim that the **Mitanni** were emigrants from **India** in the Late Period of the Rigveda, which I have always roughly placed between 2300 BCE or so and 1500 BCE. And the evidence of the **Mitanni** words in **West Asia** proves this beyond the shadow of any doubt.** It is the same story, of ara ("spokes") or of the "Bactria-Margiana words", all over again*:

A large number of Mitannni names end with the suffix *–atti. *Parpola lists the following from the Mitanni records: *Biratti, Mittaratti, Asuratti, Mariatti, Suriatti, Intaratti, Paratti* and *Suatti* [= Vedic Sanskrit *Priyatithi, Mitratithi, Asuratithi, Maryatithi, Suryatithi, Indratithi, Pratithi* and *Suatithi*]. Other names end with the suffix –*medha* such as * Biiriamasdha/Priyamazdha* [=Vedic Sanskrit *Priyamedha*], the suffix –*asva*such as *Biiriaassuva* [=Vedic Sanskrit *Priyasva*], the suffix –*sena* such as *Biiriasena* [=Vedic *Priyasena*], the suffix –*ratha* such as *Tusratta/Tuiseratta* [=Vedic *Tvesaratha*], or *start* with the *prefix* *rta*- such as *Artaassumara* and *Artataama* [Vedic *Rtasmara* and *Rtadhaman*].

*Excluding the names Vadhryasva and Vrsanasva, which have a different grammatical form, and with the sole exception of one name (which is in fact an exception that actually proves the rule, as we shall see) names with the above suffixes and prefix are absent in the Mandalas of the Early Period and the Middle Period of the Rigveda, and are found only in the Mandalas of the Late Period (the non-family Mandalas I, VIII, IX and X, and in the only Family Mandala which falls in the Late Period, Mandala V*):

* *

*Atithi*: *Medhatithi * VIII.8.20

*Medhyatithi* I.36.10,11,17; VIII.1.30; 2.40; 33.4; 49.9; 50.9; 51.1; IX.43.3 * *

*Nipatithi* VIII.49.9; 51.1

*Mitratithi* X.33.7 **

*Medha*: *Asvamedha* V.27.4,5,6; VIII.68.15,16

*Priyamedha* I.39.9; 45.3,4; VIII.2.37; 3.16; 4.20; 5.25; 6.45; 8.18; 32.30; 69.8,18; 87.3; X.73.11

*Nrmedha* X.80.3; 132.7

*Sumedha* X.132.7

*Asva*: *Aghasva* I.116.6

*Istasva* I.122.13

*Rjrasva* I.100.16-18; 116.16; 117.17

*Ninditasva* VIII.1.30

*Marutasva* V.33.9

*Vyasva* I.112.15; VIII.9.10; 23.16,23,24; 24.22,23,28,29; 26.9,11; IX.65.7

*Vidadasva* V.61.10

*Syavasva* V.52.21; 61.5; 81.5; VIII.35.19-21; 36.7; 37.7; 38.8

*Sena*: *Rstisena* X.98.5,6,8

[Tvesaratha is found as a phrase, though not a name, in V.61.13]

*Ratha*: *Priyaratha* I.122.7

*Brhadratha* I.49.6; X.49.6

*Srutaratha* V.36.6

*Svanadratha* VIII.1.32

[possibly also *Dasaratha* I.126.4 and *Aristaratha* X.6.3]

*Rta: **Rtastup* I.112.20 **

[*Rtadhaman* itself, as a name or phrase, is found in post-Rigvedic Samhitas]

The word *mani*, referred to by Witzel, is another example. The word is *very* common in the post-Rigvedic texts, and in all later periods, but, in the Rigveda, it is found only in the Mandalas of the Late Period, namely, in I.33.8 and 122.14.

In addition, it may be noted, about the Mitanni and late Rigvedic names beginning with *Priya*- above, that it is not just *names*, but *all* compound *words* with *priya*- as the first element are restricted *only* to the Mandalas of the Late Period, and are *very* common later on, but completely missing in the Mandalas of the Early and Middle Periods of the Rigveda.

The only exception referred to by us above, ie the only name found in Mandalas earlier than those of the Late Period, is the name *Citraratha*, found in a Mandala of the Middle Period, in IV.30.18 (and again, later, in X.1.5). This, far from disproving the rest of the evidence, *actually confirms it.* The only two other names which, although occurring in Mandala I, are found in the upa-mandalas of the *Middle Period*, are the names Istasva and Rjrasva. *All these three names, the three earliest occurrences in the Rigveda of the categories of names listed above, together provide us with the period and area of the provenance of these names: they all refer to the great battle "beyond the Sarayu" between the forces of Rjrasva (Arjaspa) and Istasva (Vistaspa) in Afghanistan in the early part of the Middle Period of the Rigveda, in which Citraratha (a Puru or Vedic Aryan, who fought on the side of the Iranians) was killed [see TALAGERI 2000:214-224].This battle took place after the events of the Early Period which took place in Haryana, and then in the Punjab, and the subsequent westward expansion [see TALAGERI 2000:210-14].*

In my earlier writings, both in my books as well as in my debates with Witzel-etc., I have always expressed my unwillingness to postulate "hard dates" for the events in the Rigveda without "hard evidence" like dateable inscriptions and documents, etc. Nevertheless, Witzel-etc. compelled me to express my precise views on the subject, which I did (roughly): Early Period — 3400-2600 BCE; Middle Period — 2600-2200 BCE; Late Period — 2200-1400 BCE. Witzel-etc. introduced the subject of spokes (*ara*) and "Bactria-Margiana words", both of which confirmed my dates, at least for the Late Period. Now, the subject of the Mitanni words, again reintroduced by Witzel, has led to an examination of the Mitanni evidence, which clearly provides irrefutable evidence for my dating for the Late Period once more, this time on the basis of actual dateable inscriptions and documents — if not in India, then in West Asia. *The Mitanni are clearly emigrants from India in the Late Period of the Rigveda*.

All this overwhelming evidence cannot be ignored or refuted, and it is my hope that at least scholars like Hock, if not evangelical crusaders like Witzel, will care to weigh the evidence and reconsider their positions.
* *
*Source: Note from Shrikant Talageri, Dec. ** 16, 2005*

The rest of the arguments by Witzel, about the *ai* in *aika*, the *zd* in *Priyamazdha*, and *zh* in *vazhanasya*, are too minor to stand out against all this evidence: it may be noted that the actual word *Priyamedha* itself is found in the Mandalas of the *Late Period* of the Rigveda as the name of a prominent Rishi; and the word *vahana* (if indeed the Mitanni word corresponds to *vahana*; and not to *vasana* as held by Misra and denied by Hock in HOCK 1997:2) is not yet found as an independent word, but only as a suffix in compound words, in the Rigveda. The only explanation is that the Mitanni people, in their movement from India to West Asia through the Iranian areas, may have been influenced by Iranian dialects in the forms of a few words.

Yours sincerely

Shrikant G. Talageri<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

Nichols is at the level of Einstein compared to the pedestrian fare dished out by the usual eurocentric culprits. Here are a few of her points:

1. The northern and southern trajectories meet in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana aka Gandhara
2. The northern and southern trajectories carry archaic forms outwards which are subsequently isolated from innovations in the center; this accounts for an archaic kentum periphery and a more recent satem center; the alternative is having a contemporaneous kentum and satem expanding in opposite directions with special superhuman exceptions for early Hittite, Tocharian, and Bangani in the East !!
3. The early separation of hittite and tocharian results in their straddling the originating locus; in contrast, a western locus would mean trajectories in widely opposite directions for these two early branches.

Expansion from a significant demographic center is necessary to explain the patterns; only South Asia fulfills this empirical criteria:
http://anthropology.net/2008/02/05/mtdna-v...s-through-time/

Talageri quoting Nichols:
http://www.bharatvani.org/books/rig/ch7.htm

Summary of R1a1 and R2 evidence (R1a1 was used as a euro marker until it was discovered that the highest diversities and frequencies are to be found in Kashmir, Puunjab, and UP; predictably, there was a big hysterics and other tamasha):
http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts...yan-debate.html

North by Southeast by Subhash Kak:
http://subhash-kak.sulekha.com/blog/post/2...y-southeast.htm

The Cradle that is India by Subhash Kak:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/08kak.htm

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->But, Johanna Nichols (1997, 1998) presents an alternative model for the epicenter of the Indo-European linguistic spread which addresses this eastern homogeneity in a strikingly different manner. Nichols' Indo-European homeland thesis, which is the most recent homeland theory at the time of writing, places the origin of the Indo-Europeans well to the east of the Caspian Sea, in the area of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana. Since this is adjacent and partly overlapping the area where the Out-of-India/Indigenist school would place the homeland, her theory merits some attention. Nichols' theory is partly predicated on the geographical relationship between loan words emanating from Mesopotamia into Indo-European via other language families (see Nichols 1997 for details), and partly for her assertion that the principle that area of greatest homogeneity of a language family is indicative of its locus or origin is demonstrably false for the languages of Central Asia. She cites Iranian, which spread over enormous stretches of Asia in ancient times, and Turkic, which likewise spread over major portions of Asia. as examples of languages whose greatest diversity occured in refuge areas on the western periphery of their point of origin.

In Nichols' Bactrian homeland, PIE -expands- out of its locus eventually forming two basic trajectories. The language range initially radiates westward engulfing the whole area around the Aral sea from the northern Steppe to the Iranian plateau. Upon reaching the Caspian, one trajectory expands around the sea to the North and over the steppes of Central Asia to the Black Sea, while the other flows around the Southern perimeter and into Anatolia. Here we have a model of a continuous distribution of PIE without postulating any migrations whatsoever. By the third or second millenium BCE we have the proto-forms of Italic, Celtic, and perhaps Germanic in the environs of Central Europe and the proto-forms of Greek, Illyrian, Anatolia, and Armenian stretching from northwest Mesopotamia to the southern Balkans (1997: 134). Proto-Indo-Aryan was spreading into the subcontinent proper, while proto-Tocharian remained close to the original homeland in the Northeast.

As this expansion was progressing into Europe, a new later wave of IE language, Iranian, is spreading behind the first language spread. Sweeping across the steppes of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the deserts of north Iran, the Iranian dialects separated the two preceding trajectories -- which up till that time had formed a continuum -- into two non-contiguous areas(one in central Europe to the North of the Caspian Sea, the other in Anatolia to its south). In time, the two original trajectories coincided in the Balkans. The Southern trajectory had meanwhile formed a continuous chain of Dacian, Thracian, Illyrian, Greek, and Phrygian spreading from west Anatolia to the Danube plain (ibid.: 136) From the northern trajectory, Italic spread to Italy from Central Europe, and Celtic to its historic destination, followed, in time, by Germanic which was followed, in turn, by Balto-Slavic. All these languages spread by expansion -- there are no migrations throughout this whole immense chronological and geographical sequence.

The corollary of Nichols model is that the assumed variegatedness of the western languages is only due to the fact that the later Iranian languages had spread and severed the contiguity of the northern and southern IE trajectories (which had previously formed an unbroken continuity around the east coast of the Capsian) while leaving behind Indo-Iranian and a stranded Tocharian to the east. The variegatedness of western languages is actually due to their situation on the western periphery of the original locus, or homeland. This model might also address the issue of why PIE did not evolve into more dialects in the putative homeland: the later westward spread of Iranian obliterated all of the eastern parts of the proto-continuum except for Indo-Aryan to its east, and the isolated Tocharian to the Northeast.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Brentjes argues that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian, eastern European, or Caucasian origin in the Mitannian area </b>and associates with an Indo-Aryan presence the peacock motif found in the Middle East from before 1600 BCE and possible as long ago as 2100 BCE ( Brentjes 1981, p. 147 in Bryant 2001, p. 137).<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Preserving national identity</b>

Sandeep B (Pioneer 23 Jan 09)

As long as the Indian collective consciousness preserved the primacy of Vedic national unity, India could be invaded but not broken. And it is to this that we must return to keep India united

Last week, two seemingly unconnected articles appeared about India. They were unconnected in time but unified by theme. Rajiv Malhotra’s “We, the nation(s) of India” in Tehelka (17 January) was a dispassionate analysis of the dangers today’s India faces mostly from within but powerfully abetted by fissiparous forces from outside. The Belgian scholar, Koenraad Elst’s review of Shrikant Talageri’s latest book Rigveda and the Avesta: Final Evidence refocuses on one of the defining periods of pre-ancient India, which is still the subject of much controversy in Indological studies worldwide, and which has far-reaching effects both today and in future.

Rajiv Malhotra’s piece identifies the extent of divisiveness that, if left unchecked, will splinter India sooner than later. He calls into evidence an array of internal and external factors contributing to this phenomenon from such diverse fields as academia, media, white supremacy, pop Hindu gurus, history, politics, sports, and Bollywood. He concludes that today’s urgent need is for the ‘Indian genius’ to “improvise, innovate, and create a national identity worthy of its name.”

In other words, to wage a long, aggressive, and decisive battle to rediscover what India has lost. To abandon Jawaharlal Nehru’s ill-understood Discovery of India in favour of a true Rediscovery of India. To study why Alexander’s invasion was akin to an ant-bite to India but why India suffered massive casualties on all fronts at the hands of successive Muslim marauders. To that end, Shrikant Talageri’s book must be made mandatory reading to all Indians with the national interest at heart.

A polyglot, poet, scholar, a fierce proponent of Sanatana Dharma, and a warm friend, Shatavadhani R Ganesh terms Rig Vedic India as the ‘most romantic period’ in the entire history of this nation. A cursory reading of the literature about that period shows us that it was a very ‘happening’ era — from sweeping natural changes to revolutionary inventions in metallurgy, politics, town-planning to intense philosophical speculation, the India of 5,000-plus years past was an exciting time to live in. Most significantly, it was the womb that nurtured the defining seed of an entire civilisation and way of life sustained till today. That despite continual natural threats — of rivers drying up, of cattle dying and other unforeseen natural disasters — Rig Vedic India was able to produce such masterpieces of philosophy as the Nasadiya Sukta is verily a wonder.

All things were equal as long as the natives accepted the Aryan Invasion Theory. In a line, the AIT negates all achievements of ‘native’ Indians using the following concocted narrative: The 5,000-year-old Indian history is one unbroken tale of alien invasions, and thus, the credit for all achievements doesn’t really belong to them. In a stroke, this provided the logical premise for the imbecilic grand conclusion that India was never a nation. Our early home-grown Communists zealously championed this ‘theory’ for several decades.

However, it is now part of academic history that each new scholarly investigation in this area drawn from different disciplines — archeology, linguistics, and maritime studies — was an additional nail added to the coffin of the spurious AIT.

As Elst shows, Talageri’s new book draws evidence directly from the internal chronology of the Rig Veda. But Talageri’s masterstroke lies in paying the AIT proponents back in their own coin. He uses about two centuries’ worth of AIT scholarship and reaches precisely the opposite conclusion: No Aryans migrated into India. To quote Elst, “Talageri compares the contents of the oldest layer… books six, three and seven; of the middle layer, books two and four; and the youngest layer, comprising books one, five, eight, nine and 10. Covering every verse… and comparing the three periods, he finds a shifting focus in the names of animals, plants, rivers, landscape features, technology, ancestors, ethnic groups, and in personal name types and verse forms… the old layer was indubitably composed in the Yamuna/Saraswati region, which was to remain the centre of gravity of Vedic culture; the middle layer’s horizon expands westwards as far as the Indus; while the youngest parts are also familiar with Afghanistan. This is exactly the opposite of what the AIT predicts.”

This is where Indians need to trace their ‘national identity’ to. This also demolishes the dubious ‘Dravidian identity’ thereby razing the paper-thin foundation of Karunanidhi’s brand of politics. As long as the Indian collective consciousness preserved the primacy of this Vedic national unity, India could be invaded but not broken. And it is to what we must return to reunify India.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->