this is the kind of headline that the indian ELM puts out.
well, witzel is maybe not quite there, but he's making progress and taking tiny little steps. the first step is acceptance of his error. now that even this fellow -- their trump card -- is denying the AIT i wonder what the marxists and christists have up their sleeve.
some 'miracle' no doubt, like that jesus on a chapati scam, or on the side of a freeway in the us, or on an old cheese sandwich on the one hand.
on the other, claims that the 'people's' 'revolution' is going to usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and peace and goodwill towards all men; and yea, the lion with lie with the lamb.
yeah, and pigs will fly.
but good diversionary tactics.
thanks to arun
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: arun s m
From: Bal Ram Singh
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 14:58:33 -0400
Subject: Press Release: Scientists Collide with Linguists to Assert
Indigenous origin of Indian Civilization
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Indic Studies
July 3, 2006
Press Release
Scientists Collide with Linguists to Assert Indigenous origin of
Indian Civilization
Comprehensive population genetics data along with archeological and
astronomical evidence presented at June 23-25, 2006 conference in
Dartmouth, MA, overwhelmingly concluded that Indian civilization and
its human population is indigenous.
In fact, the original people and culture within the Indian
Subcontinent may even be a likely pool for the genetic, linguistic,
and cultural origin of the most rest of the world, particularly Europe
and Asia.
Leading evidences come from population genetics, which were presented
by two leading researchers in the field, Dr. V. K. Kashyap, National
Institute of Biologicals, India, and Dr. Peter Underhill of Stanford
University in California. Their results generally contradict the
notion Aryan invasion/migration theory for the origin of Indian
civilization.
Underhill concluded "the spatial frequency distributions of both L1
frequency and variance levels show a spreading pattern emanating from
India", referring to a Y chromosome marker. He, however, put several
caveats before interpreting genetic data, including "Y-ancestry may
not always reflect the ancestry of the rest of the genome"
Dr. Kashyap, on the other hand, with the most comprehensive set of
genetic data was quite emphatic in his assertion that there is "no
clear genetic evidence for an intrusion of Indo-Aryan people into
India, [and] establishment of caste system and gene flow."
Michael Witzel, a Harvard linguist, who is known to lead the idea of
Aryan invasion/migration/influx theory in more recent times, continued
to question genetic evidence on the basis that it does not provide the
time resolution to explain events that may have been involved in Aryan
presence in India.
Dr. Kashyap's reply was that even though the time resolution needs
further work, the fact that there are clear and distinct differences
in the gene pools of Indian population and those of Central Asian and
European groups, the evidence nevertheless negates any Aryan invasion
or migration into Indian Subcontinent.
Witzel though refused to present his own data and evidence for his
theories despite being invited to do so was nevertheless present in
the conference and raised many questions. Some of his commentaries
questioning the credibility of scholars evoked sharp responses from
other participants.
Rig Veda has been dated to 1,500 BC by those who use linguistics to
claim its origin Aryans coming out of Central Asia and Europe.
Archaeologist B.B. Lal and scientist and historian N.S. Rajaram
disagreed with the position of linguists, in particular Witzel who
claimed literary and linguistic evidence for the non-Indian origin of
the Vedic civilization.
Dr. Narahari Achar, a physicist from University of Memphis clearly
showed with astronomical analysis that the Mahabharata war in 3,067
BC, thus poking a major hole in the outside Aryan origin of Vedic
people.
Interestingly, Witzel stated, for the first time to many in the
audience, that he and his colleagues no longer subscribe to Aryan
invasion theory.
Dr. Bal Ram Singh, Director, Center for Indic Studies at UMass
Dartmouth, which organized the conference was appalled at the level of
visceral feelings Witzel holds against some of the scholars in the
field, but felt satisfied with the overall outcome of the conference.
"I am glad to see people who have been scholarly shooting at each
other for about a decade are finally in one room, this is a progress",
said Singh.
The conference was able to bring together in one room for the first
time experts from genetics, archeology, physics, linguistics,
anthropology, history, and philosophy. A proceedings of the conference
is expected to come out soon, detailing various arguments on the
origin of Indian civilization.
Bal Ram Singh, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Indic Studies
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road
Dartmouth, MA 02747
Phone: 508-999-8588
Fax: 508-999-8451
Email: bsingh@umassd.edu
Internet address: http://www.umassd.edu/indic
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 14:58:33 -0400
Subject: Press Release: Scientists Collide with Linguists to Assert
Indigenous origin of Indian Civilization
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Indic Studies
July 3, 2006
Press Release
Scientists Collide with Linguists to Assert Indigenous origin of
Indian Civilization
Comprehensive population genetics data along with archeological and
astronomical evidence presented at June 23-25, 2006 conference in
Dartmouth, MA, overwhelmingly concluded that Indian civilization and
its human population is indigenous.
In fact, the original people and culture within the Indian
Subcontinent may even be a likely pool for the genetic, linguistic,
and cultural origin of the most rest of the world, particularly Europe
and Asia.
Leading evidences come from population genetics, which were presented
by two leading researchers in the field, Dr. V. K. Kashyap, National
Institute of Biologicals, India, and Dr. Peter Underhill of Stanford
University in California. Their results generally contradict the
notion Aryan invasion/migration theory for the origin of Indian
civilization.
Underhill concluded "the spatial frequency distributions of both L1
frequency and variance levels show a spreading pattern emanating from
India", referring to a Y chromosome marker. He, however, put several
caveats before interpreting genetic data, including "Y-ancestry may
not always reflect the ancestry of the rest of the genome"
Dr. Kashyap, on the other hand, with the most comprehensive set of
genetic data was quite emphatic in his assertion that there is "no
clear genetic evidence for an intrusion of Indo-Aryan people into
India, [and] establishment of caste system and gene flow."
Michael Witzel, a Harvard linguist, who is known to lead the idea of
Aryan invasion/migration/influx theory in more recent times, continued
to question genetic evidence on the basis that it does not provide the
time resolution to explain events that may have been involved in Aryan
presence in India.
Dr. Kashyap's reply was that even though the time resolution needs
further work, the fact that there are clear and distinct differences
in the gene pools of Indian population and those of Central Asian and
European groups, the evidence nevertheless negates any Aryan invasion
or migration into Indian Subcontinent.
Witzel though refused to present his own data and evidence for his
theories despite being invited to do so was nevertheless present in
the conference and raised many questions. Some of his commentaries
questioning the credibility of scholars evoked sharp responses from
other participants.
Rig Veda has been dated to 1,500 BC by those who use linguistics to
claim its origin Aryans coming out of Central Asia and Europe.
Archaeologist B.B. Lal and scientist and historian N.S. Rajaram
disagreed with the position of linguists, in particular Witzel who
claimed literary and linguistic evidence for the non-Indian origin of
the Vedic civilization.
Dr. Narahari Achar, a physicist from University of Memphis clearly
showed with astronomical analysis that the Mahabharata war in 3,067
BC, thus poking a major hole in the outside Aryan origin of Vedic
people.
Interestingly, Witzel stated, for the first time to many in the
audience, that he and his colleagues no longer subscribe to Aryan
invasion theory.
Dr. Bal Ram Singh, Director, Center for Indic Studies at UMass
Dartmouth, which organized the conference was appalled at the level of
visceral feelings Witzel holds against some of the scholars in the
field, but felt satisfied with the overall outcome of the conference.
"I am glad to see people who have been scholarly shooting at each
other for about a decade are finally in one room, this is a progress",
said Singh.
The conference was able to bring together in one room for the first
time experts from genetics, archeology, physics, linguistics,
anthropology, history, and philosophy. A proceedings of the conference
is expected to come out soon, detailing various arguments on the
origin of Indian civilization.
Bal Ram Singh, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Indic Studies
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road
Dartmouth, MA 02747
Phone: 508-999-8588
Fax: 508-999-8451
Email: bsingh@umassd.edu
Internet address: http://www.umassd.edu/indic
45 comments:
An encouraging sign, certainly. But I'm still sceptical. Keep in mind that negating AIT will almost certainly put the "Indo-European" Urheimat in India. And western scholars would never even dream of agreeing to that. Right now their holy grail is being attacked and they're going to defend it fiercely. I'd love to see how this all will end up. Like I've always believed, the best way to move forward is to simply forget about convincing westerners and carry all the research and acadamics on our own. I think that's the best we can hope for, at least for now. Once we've stacked up evidenve against AIT over here, maybe then we can try to convince them.
Christians have FAITH. FAITH explains everything---walking on water, holy grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, condensation on windows, etc etc.
BUT---Hindus have to PROVE their faith. What a fair trade!
I wish I could just say that I "have faith", along with those millions of children that christian priests have raped and ravaged.
I'd rather worship a rat than a grilled-cheese sandwich!
After all, the RSS chief's charge that Brijesh Mishra, the NSA of Vajpayee's govt. was two timing with his covert support to Sonia Gandhi is not without foundation.
BRIJESH MISHRA A CIA AGENT
Posted on April 14, 2005 1:2 AM EST
On September 27, 2001 Rahul Gandhi MP and his Columbian live in girl friend of Kerala backwater tourist centre fame, Juanita alias Veronique, was arrested in United States of America’s Logan airport in Boston, by the FBI. Rahul was having an Italian passport and was carrying suitcase full of dollars. Some say it was about $2 billion or was it $2 million. This huge dollar amount generated suspicion with the US authorities. Rahul and his girl friend was thus detained by FBI. FBI suspected that Rahul was carrying terrorist funds or drug money for laundering in US. Rahul called his mother Sonia Gandhi in India. In turn Sonia called Brijesh Mishra, the former National Security Advisor and a key aide to former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at the Prime Ministers Office. Brijesh Mishra intervened on behalf of our PM Vajpayee with the US Administration for the release Rahul from FBI custody. Rahul Gandhi was released only when the Indian Ambassador intervened and gave assurances to the State Department that Rahul Gandhi will be produced for any future enquiry by FBI. Not only that as a patriot, it was the duty of Brijesh Mishra to find out the reasons for the arrest and inform our CBI to take necessary further steps. Brijesh Mishra did not do any such thing. The incident clearly shows that Brajesh Mishra was working for Sonia, that he had deep connections with US state department. In short Brijesh Mishra is a traitor.
In Sep 2004 when Washington played host to Young political sons, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada (all Congress Party), and Manvendra Singh (a lone BJP fellow) followed by liquor baron who got himself elected to a the Rajya Sabha, Vijay Mallya (Janata Party) and ever smiling Rajiv Shukla of the Congress. Yet one prominent face was missing which was that of Rahul Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi didn't go to USA with the young politicians. It was Shukla who conceived the idea of the Indo-US Parliamentary Forum to create a counterpart to the India Caucus in the US House of Representatives. Rahul Gandhi had to avoid going to the U.S. forever, because of the pending police questions he could be arrested again by FBI if he ever steps in to US. What money Rahul Gandhi was carrying? Was it another Bofors type pay off? Was it Columbian drug money on behalf of his Columbian girl friend? Or was it fund for Osama Bin Laden group, as it is known that the Muslim terrorists are using Christians as front men for laundering terrorist funds as the normal banking channels are being monitored by FBI.
Brijesh Mishra has strong connections with Sonia Gandhi's Italian family through his daughter Jyotsna. Jyotsna is married to an Italian and lives in Italy. So it is not surprising that there was no investigation when Sonia lied about her birth date, and birth place. Sonia Gandhi first declared her birth date as 1944 and birth place as Luciana. This was confirmed by the Italian embassy which submitted her birth certificate to our Home ministry in 1983. Sonia Gandhi’s name was Antonia Maino as per this certificate. This true birth certificate was submitted by the Italian embassy to the Indian Home Ministry when Antonia Maino applied for Indian citizenship. When Rajiv Gandhi married Antonia Maino newspapers had written that both of them were of the same age. It also confirms that Sonia’s birth year was 1944. . Antonia Maino’s father, who was a mason and a fascist, Signor Stefano Maino, was a prisoner-of-war in Russia from 1942 till Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1945. It is obvious that Maino cannot be the father of Antonia Maino. So the date of birth and place of birth of Antonia Maino alias Sonia Gandhi had to be changed to cover up this fact. Her new date of birth became December 9, 1946, and her place of birth became Orbassano. . Instead of investigating all these fraud by Sonia Gandhi, Brijesh was working for Sonia Gandhi while heading Prime Minister Vajpayee’s Office. Even after the UPA government came in to power Brijesh is holding a secret official position in the present UPA government that entitles him to a diplomatic passport. This should be called the biggest treachery in modern India.
Brajesh Mishra refused to authorize from February to May 2004 period the arrest of the CIA spy in RAW, .Rabinder Singh, despite repeated request for permission. This urgent request for arrest was asked by RAW official Mr.Amar Bhushan. It looks like Brijesh Mishra himself was working for CIA and thus by not permitting the arrest of a traitor enabled the CIA spy, Rabinder Singh to escape to USA in mid May 2004. From this one can guess the capability of our Vajpayee who only dropped the corrupt N.K.Singh, but refused to let go the traitor Brijesh Mishra in spite of warnings.
N Korea just tested some missiles, including a long-range TaepoDong2 which failed. Pak may want to check the warranty on its 'Ghauri'.
mahashivaji:
That article sure got my attention. Can you provide a link to where it's from?
I'd rather worship a rat than a grilled-cheese sandwich!
# posted by mahashivaji : 7/04/2006 9:21 AM
Dont you already do that??
avatars/preachers are debarred from using cheap language on this blog. mind your language!
otherwise they will be (rightfully)stripped of their titles, although it was excused in the beginning when the preacher/avatar was still in the initial learning phase.
if it continues after that, the preacher will be fired.
_
Interesting:
"Interestingly, Witzel stated, for the first time to many in the
audience, that he and his colleagues no longer subscribe to Aryan invasion theory."
_
Kaalan,
Ignore daisies. All he knows is to threaten.
Ignore daisies. All he knows is to threaten.
Thanks preacher, since you don't recognize the name calling, one can conclude this is your standard of counter view.
Some of his commentaries
questioning the credibility of scholars evoked sharp responses from other participants
Watch out next witzel mail, he may find name calling.
who use linguistics to
claim its origin Aryans coming out of Central Asia and Europe.
How many names these witzels have called since hundreds of years ?
here is wietzel's report
I went down to Dartmouth, MA, to take a look at the
“Symposium on Aryan/Non-Aryan Origin of Indian Civilization.”
The Aryan invasion of India is a 19th c. theory that no serious
scholar today takes seriously, but that plays a great role in current
Indian and NRI (Indian immigrant) politics in the US (as we have seen
in California recently).
Scholarly speaking, what is to be explained is the introduction into
South Asia of an Indo-European language (Vedic Sanskrit), of
Indo-Iranian poetry, poetics and religion, as well as some of the Vedic
material culture (horses, chariots, etc.) This is fervently denied by
Hindutvavadins as the cannot allow that a central part of their culture
that continues until today has come from the outside. In their eyes,
this would threaten the supposedly indigenous character of the (North)
Indian Vedic civilization, and thus, much of the roots of later
Hinduism.
I went to Dartmouth as to take a stand in what promised to be a
Hindutva-centered meeting that was to propound the victory against the
so-called “Aryan invasion theory”.
Also, as not to leave our archeologist and geneticist colleagues alone,
exposed to severe doses of Hindutva and being unwittingly co-opted, as
has happened before (such as in the Long Beach conference some 3 years
ago).
People were flown in from as far as Europe and India to attend the
“symposium”. Clearly, some major funding is behind this effort “to
settle the theory of an Aryan Invasion” at c. 1500 BCE.
This so-called symposium was fun, if you can savor the nutty “theories”
these people propound. There were just a few exceptions among the
speakers from the Hindutva mindset (see list below):
* P. Eltsov, a young archeologist (PhD Harvard, now at Berlin) who gave
a grand view of indian civilization based on indigenous ideas of the
development of culture, from texts such as the Puranas (that have never
been used for that purpose).
* P. Underhill, well known Stanford geneticist, gave an overview of Y
chromosome studies relating to India (see below for details).
* V. K. Kashyap, of the National Institute of Biologicals at New Delhi,
gave a serious genetic paper (overview of recent mtDNA and NRY
studies related to India), but unfortunately his conclusions were again
quite Hindutva-like (see below)
* Makarand Paranjpe, (JL Nehru U., Delhi) gave a macro-civilizational,
post-colonialist speech, clearly inspired by measured nationalism . It
was a plea for the decolonizing of the Indian mind (now 50 years after
independence!), but he is not of a Hindutva mindset.
* Dr. Asiananda, Intercultural Open University, Netherlands, gave a
Blavatsky-inspired talk, free from Hindutva. Instead, he actually
quoted Parpola and Witzel with approval (what a combination!). He
proposed a grand scheme of ‘megacycles’ in history: the pre-vedic,
postvedic and transvedic civilization, into which we enter now,
supposedly: the beginning of a new Axial Age: a great Asian peace zone
expanding world wide. Sure. Just ask the emerging new powers in Asia
and South America.
As the last few cases show, the meeting was as nutty as expected. A few
characterizations about the hard core Hindutva characters and their
camp followers.
N. S. RAJARAM
was stuck, as is usual with him, in the 19th century (Max Mueller),
though now (after having posed a historian Indologist for the past 15
years) he wants to be a scientist again, using modern science to
explain the Vedic age.
He gave his usual erroneous overview of the word aarya in the Rigveda,
underlining that aarya does not mean a ‘race’ but just is cultural term
(as long explained, unbeknownst to him, by Kuiper, 1955), that and
means ‘noble’ (which is wrong as Thieme has shown long ago). He also
denies that the Aarya distinguished themselves from others in the RV
(again untrue) and maintained that seeing Arya a “race” was a product
of European thought and was necessary for German nationalism in the
19th c. and unification in 1870/71. (Well, ask Bismarck whether he ever
read the Vedas or studied comparative linguistics).
Of course, Dr. R. is unaware of the fact that arya, aarya – he
mentions only aarya-- in the RV means something else, (probably
‘hospitable’, i.e. “us’) and he is unaware of the seminal study of the
term by Thieme ( Der Fremdling im Rigveda. Leipzig 1938; Mitra and
Aryaman. New Haven 1957; JAOS 80, 1960, 301-17 the latter two in
English).
Once again, he expressed his nonacceptance of comparative historical
linguistics, which “would not exist without Sanskrit”. A typical
Indo-centric view, that neglects that other language families were
discovered earlier than the Indo-European one, and that the
establishment of IE ling. could have proceeded without the knowledge
of Sanskrit: it merely was facilitated by Skt as the constituent
elements of words (root, stem suffix, endings) are a little clearer
their than, say in Greek or Latin.
In short, historical and technical ignorance, which characterized all
of his writings of the past 15 years. (He cannot even get the
intellectual history of the 19th c., right as he depends on secondary
and tertiary sources).
Then, he cherry-picked from other sciences, such as genetics (“which
shows that there was no recent immigration into India!” -- see below),
archaeology, etc. Again, without clear understanding of the procedure
of these sciences and the way some of their “results’ are arrived at,
by speculation. Thus, when he talks about the connection between the
Harappan civilization and the Veda (“by one group of people”), he
cherry-picks some similarities and neglects the fundamental differences
between the city civilization of the Harappans and the (largely)
pastoral, semi-nomadic Rgvedic culture.
All of this as to show that a “paradigm change” in understanding early
Indian history is underway. Well, just in his own mind and that of his
camp followers. (I will not go into details here. I have discussed all
of this madness of alleged paradigm change in along and tedious
fashion in EJVS 2001)
Instead, as he has now noticed that the Rigveda represents a maritime
civilization (see below, BB Lal’s talk), he wants to move on and study
the connections between Harappan and Rgvedic civilization on the one
hand, and the S.E. Asian (such as Cambodia) ones on the other. He is
clearly inspired by the popular books of S. Oppenheimer, and his failed
“paradise in the east”, based on the Toba explosion of c. 75,000 BCE
(ironically when Homo Sap., sap. had not yet left Africa).
Focusing, like Oppenheimer, on SE Asia Rajaram attributes, against
recent botanical data, the origin of rice agriculture to the Cambodian
Tonle Sap area some 12 kya ago, thus at 10,000 BCE. But we know that
domesticated oryza japonica originated in S. China and oryza indica in
the eastern parts of N. Indian plains, all quite a few millennia later
than 12 Kya.
Obviously I opposed these points in the discussion period (as mentioned
above) and ironically encouraged him to get all departments of
linguistics abolished world wide….
(By the way, no words by Rajaram about his proposed 2nd vol. of
“translations” of the Indus signs. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask him
about it. What a pity!)
S. BAJPAI
This former, rather unproductive Prof. of history at the CA State
University (Northridge) was very active in the long ranging CA
schoolbook debate that he “won” -- of course, only in his mind. He
wanted to show that the theory of an “Aryan” invasion or even influx
into India was just a myth, and that the Vedic and Harappan (Indus)
civilizations were connected: by identifying the area of the Seven
Rivers (Sapta Sindhavah), the Sarasvati River, and the epicenter of
Rgvedic culture.
In doing so, he did not repeat what specialists have known for long,
that the 7 rivers define the greater Panjab area, but he propounded the
strange idea that the western Panjab rivers (Jhelum, Indus etc.) were
excluded… Note that this “result” excludes much of Pakistan and E.
Afghanistan (whose rivers are of course clearly mentioned in the text)
As for the Sarasvati, he tried to show that this is a “mighty” river in
Haryana State (northwest of Delhi), again something well known to
specialists. He propounded the typical Hindutva theory that this river
flowed from the mountains (Himalaya) to the ocean (samudra), neglecting
the studies of K. Klaus (in the Eighties) that showed that samudra
means many things in the Veda, including lakes. Thus, he overlooked the
point that the Sarasvati (Sarsuti)-Ghaggar-Hakra river ended in a delta
and in terminal lakes in the Cholistan/Ft.Derawar area in Pakistan,
well east of the Indus. He also overlooked the recent studies by two
Indian and two German geologists who have pointed out (Current science
2004) that the “great river” of the Harappan and Vedic period could
not have been so large anymore as its area does not show mineral
deposits of Himalayan glaciers. This renders a perennial glacier-fed
river into a smaller, monsoon fed one that could not fill the 10 km
wide river bed of former times.
Hindutvavadins need the big river, that they say dried up in c. 2000
BCE, as they want to make it the center of the Harappan Civilization,
that they call the Sindhu (Indus) –Sarasvati civilization. (But, it
has been shown by R. Mughal in 1977 that this drying up happened in
stages, with several reversals. Not mentioned of course).
Bajpai had the great idea (not substantiated by historical leveling of
the RV) that the original Sapta Sindhu region was in the Sarasvati
area, (called “the best place on earth” in RV 3 ) and that the concept
was later expanded to include areas west and east of it. Strange that
the Avesta also has it (Videvdad), but Avestan was never mentioned by
this Indocentric person (who told me during a CA meeting that he is not
interested in materials from outside India). Nor was any attention
paid to the fact that RV 3 is a book that deals with the victorious
Bharata tribe, who settled in the Sarasvati area and naturally praised
this river to the skies… Such is the lack of background and scholarly
sense of this great historian.
His conclusion was that the Rigvedic civilization and the Harappan one
overlapped in one geographical area and also in time, as the RV “must
be older than 2000 BCE” since it still mentions the great Sarasvati
flowing to the ocean.
In sum, he now wants to reconstitute the history of the Harappan and
Vedic times: “the myth and baggage” of the Aryans as coming from the
outside must be given up. In the question period, BB. Lal (see below)
honed in on this erroneous idea that must be discarded, and Rajaram
added that scholars now need to take one more step: join archeological
and literary evidence (as if we and others had not done that, for
example at Toronto 1990 (Erdosy 1995) and in the yearly Harvard Round
Tables (since 1999).
Again, it became clear how narrow, Indocentric and uniformed the
Hindutva proponents are and how much they lack proper information on
past studies. P. Eltsov and I criticized some of the points mentioned
above. Time however always was too short during the meeting to go into
any detailed discussion of the many points mentioned, so I had to pick
and choose among some obviously inane proposals and the lack of
information and vision.
B.B. Lal
Lal is the former Dir. Gen. of the Indian archaeological service. At
that time, he has done some very good work, though he has published
little of it and is doing so only now, after severe public criticism in
India some 2 years ago.
However, after his retirement he became religious and Hindutva-like. I
still must make a streaming video of interviews he gave in 1985 to a
Japanese TV crew about his digs that were meant to follow the footsteps
of the (god!) Rama , from Ayodhya southwards across the Ganges and
beyond… Maybe I can do so this summer.
Lal too propounds the identity of the Vedic and Harappan civilizations.
Anyhow, he also billed himself as a Sanskritist this time -- but he
has never heard that Vedic Sanskrit is as different from the commonly
taught Classical one as Homeric Greek is different from Classical
Greek. Consequently, he made serious mistakes in his long discussion
of Rgvedic culture.
After blaming Max Mueller and M. Wheeler as originators of the Aryan
theory, and rejecting the old explanation that the invading Aryans had
driven the Dravidians southwards, he stressed the continuity of the
Harappan and Vedic cultures, and went on a textual spree:
If the Aryan Invasion theory was right, then how come that among
Rigvedic place names there are no Dravidian ones? (He never mentioned
the fact that many words have a third language origin, loans from a
prefixing, Austro-Asiatic like language). He then talked about plants
and animals as typical Indian (forgetting about temperate climate IE
words such as those for the wolf, otter, beaver, willow, oak, etc.),
and merely mentioned that the birch tree (another IE word) is not
found in the RV (it of course occurs prominently in post-RV texts, with
derivates to this day…)
Next came M. Witzel’s “abortive attempt” to find the immigration in a
Sutra text. The passage in question (BS’S 18) has found various
interpretations, and Lal, as a non-specialist, was of course not aware
of the fact that the Brahmana-like texts play with popular etymologies:
in case that of “going, moving” (I, ay) and staying at home (amaa vas),
which is found in the tribal names involved (Ayu, Amavasu), which I
had to point out to him. His summary, predicable again, was: no Aryan
invasion.
Next a discussion some terracotta “spoked wheels” in Harappan layers:
remember we need horses and chariots in pre-RV times! (An Indian
archaeologist had described them to me recently as spindle whirls,
confirming my own interpretation).
As expected he also found horses in archeology (figurines and the
Surkotada skeleton). I had to point out to him that the horse is a
steppe animal that was introduced into the near East and S. Asia only
around 2000 BCE, and that only by finding the phalanges of equids one
can decide whether we deal with a donkey, a horse or a half-ass
(onager, hemione) skeleton. Onagers still are found in the Rann of
Cutch.
Further a discussion of pur ”fort”, and sea trade with 100-oared boats.
As an archeologist, he had never heard that 100, 1000 are commonly used
as ‘many’ in Vedic texts and anyhow, the boat in question is a
mythological one, not one of human traders.
He also saw great rulers in the RV, just because samraat means
‘emperor’, in post-Vedic texts., Again philological failure. And so on
and so forth.
Finally, the Sarasvati again, drying up at 2000 BCE. Thus the RV must
be dated before that event. Indeed, Haryana settlements (the center of
RV culture, see above) go back to excavations showing a date of 6431
BCE (!) And genetics were thrown in for good measure (Sahoo 2006)
In sum, though the RV occupied only the northwest of the subcontinent,
it “overlaps in time and area with the Harappan civilianization”.
It is surprising how an established archaeologist can be so naïve, in
his old age, about facts from outside his field (palaeontology,
genetics, texts, linguistics) and still loudly proclaim his
‘revolutionary’ result (also in his latest book “The Sarasvati flows
on”.) I felt sorry for him that I had to point this out, but since he
is a well respected authority, it had to be done.
N. KAZANAS
Kazanas is the head of a new age-like institution in Athens (Greece).
He has studied some Sanskrit way back in Britain, and has joined the
anti-Migration bandwagon in recent years.
Interestingly, his talk put the RV not at 2000 BCE but at 3000 BCE and
earlier, but he still made the same assertion of a link between the
Harappan and Vedic civilization.
No problem: he has spoked wheels in an Indus sign where a man stands
above to ‘spoked’ circles; he has “plenty” horses in India, since
17,000 BCE (but, the Sivalik horse disappeared, like its American
relatives, in the megafaunal extinction around 10,000 BCE), all of
which fits the RV evidence of horses and chariots.
However, as indicated, he has the RV well before the Indus civ. : thus,
istaka ‘brick” is not found in the RV (never mind that it also is found
in Avestan and Tocharian, an old BMAC loan); pur does not mean fort or
town (W. Rau has shown in the Seventies that it means exactly that:
‘fort’); Rgvedic people were oceangoing; the RV has no fixed, built up
altars like the (supposed) Harappan ones at Kalibangan (well, what
about, e.g., RV 2.3.7 with 3 ‘ backs/hills’ for the 3 sacred fires?);
and echoing Sethna, the word for cotton is found only in the late Vedic
Sutra, while it has been found in the Indus civ.
His simpl(istic) summary: the RV must be older than the Harappan civ.
He also believes that many ideas and myths of the RV have been
forgotten after 3000 BCE, that the genealogies (which ALWAYS are
subject to expansion and contraction) found in the Brhadaranyaka
Upanishad add up to a Vedic period of some 900 years; that Achar’s
calculation of the date of the Mahabharata at 3067 (see below) shows
the age of Indian civ..
Then, that the mighty Sarasvati (see above) leads to a period of 3200
or 3800 BCE, his time of the RV (never mind the other Hindutva dates
given above). Additionally, saras in Saras-vati does not mean a lake
but the root sr means to ‘rush’. Well, Mayrhofer’s etymological
dictionary (which he quoted!) lists saras itself and links it with a
different root, as seen in Greek helos ‘swamp,’ which he --as a Greek--
did not mention. (See my discussion of his ideas in JIES 31, (2003),
107-185).
Finally, the “full agreement of “all archeologist’’ in not accepting an
Aryan invasion as there “never can be any peaceful immigration” Huh?
Which was “possible only thorough conquest by nomadic horse riding
barbarians.”
In sum, the usual omnium gatherum of disjointed elements that all can
be disputed (as I did of course), point by point.
Simply put: horses and chariots in South Asia at 3500 BCE (before they
actually appear, after 2000 BCE)?
N. ACHAR
N. Achar gave another version of his paper (already widely distributed
on the net) that dates the Mahabharata tale to 3067 BCE, based on
the description of the movement of some planets, some eclipses, etc.
If we were to take these descriptions (found in post-Vedic,
non-standard Epic Sanskrit) as a given, the (unanswered) question would
arise: how this knowledge would have been transmitted, from its form in
the Harappan language, to Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit, in an ever
changing medium like the epic.
Anyhow: what would the Mahabharata be without horses and chariots (at
3067 BCE??)
In discussion, he maintained his belief that the astronomical data are
based on actual observation and somehow made it into our present
version of the Mahabharata (compiled probably only around 100 BCE.!)
Y. “Rani” ROSSER
She was, in a certain way, the most amusing highlight of the meeting.
Talking at high volume, shouting at times, she complained about the
state of schoolbooks with regard to the ‘debunked Aryan Invasion
Theory’ and that the ‘paradigm shift’ away from it does not appear in
American schoolbooks or in Summer school-like meetings that inform US
high school teachers. She has started a project collecting statements
about various scholars about the theory.
More amusingly, she took pot shots at me three or four times, laced
with faulty memory and confabulation as well as plainly wrong
information, and including even personal items. As it turned out later
she was confusing my website (where she does not figure) with that of
a second generation India group on the web (IPAC). I had to tell her “
first read, then speak…” several times.
Not satisfied with this, she accosted me in the break period, loudly
calling me, quote, “an asshole” (twice) . So much spiritualism for this
sari-clad, self-professed Ganesha worshipper.
(Others had contended themselves with complaints that I had not
answered their email (Kazanas), etc., or that I had not taken up their
invitation to speak at the meeting. Why should I legitimize them in
doing so? -- After all his slander & libeling, Rajaram did not say
anything about me, of course not about his role in CA, but I
confronted him, and told him what I think of his defamation and
libeling since December. And too bad that Harvard did not buy his
libeling. No answer.).
Some such amusement apart, Rani Rosser clearly is very angry that I
disturbed her nicely planned scheme to saffronize CA schoolbooks (she
was involved in the planning and writing of the edits), and that I had
shown her ignorance on another list some 5 years ago. Another
Rajaram-like “forget me not” case.
Finally coming to some actual science:
P. UNDERHILL
Is a geneticist at Stanford U., and participant in our yearly Round
Tables. He gave an overview of the genetic data presently known for
India. It was loaded with caveats about what genetics can say about
ancient populations and how limited our knowledge actually is at this
moment. (Interestingly, Rajaram often interrupted and asked follow up
questions, as he now fancies himself as budding population geneticist).
Underhill stressed the fact that we have little ancient DNA, and use
modern one as proxy material that is supposed to indicate actual
historical events. Second, that there is no direct connection between
genes, language and archaeology. Third, that different population
histories can create the same genetic landscape, that certain
demographic events may be hidden, and that late arrivals [such as the
Aryans] may not be easily detectable.
Fourth, that there always is the possibility that results of genetics
are cherry-picked to suit political desires (a clear hint of Hindutva
efforts), but that good science always is self-correcting.
He then proceeded to give some details of the Y chromosome landscape of
South Asia, pointing out some haplogroups that arose in India and
others that came for the outside.
Of special interest is R1a1-M17 (which he discovered in 1995) and that
has often been attributed to the spread of Indo-European (while
Hindutvavadins let it originate in India). That is a gross
simplification. According to him, it probably arose in the area around
the Hindukush around 10,000 BC (+/- 3000 years), and spread eastwards
and westwards. It has the largest impact on S. Asia (some 25%), but is
found from E. Europe to India.
However, its resolution, that means as subgroups of M17, still are too
inadequate, so that nothing specific can be said about a possible
(re-)introduction of a variety of M17 into S. Asia [along with the
Aryans].
He re-asserted this in the discussion, when BB Lal wanted to know more
about the chronology of this haplogroup. I also brought up the lack of
genetic resolution for any recent movements of people such as Aryans,
Turkic Muslims and British, as the error bar still is 3000 years for
events around 1000 BCE and later. He affirmed this, taking the wind
out of the sails of those who had used the Sengupta/Sahoo papers
(2005,2006) that dealt with events around 10,000 kya, as to refute an
Aryan invasion. I also brought up the Kivisild paper of 1999 that has
been used in the CA debate to show that “genetics had refuted an Aryan
migration” --- well, at 60,000 BCE, not at the likely date of 1500 BCE.
One can only hope that this and other ridiculous statements will now
disappear. Not easily, though, see the following:
V. K. KASHYAP
Kashyap is a DNA specialist at a national institute in Delhi. He gave
an even more detailed, valuable overview of the Indian genetic
landscape based on his project of studying 415 Indian populations.
However, some strange features appeared in his talk:
Dravidian at 50,700 kya
Austroasiatic at “??”
Tibeto-Burmese at 8-10 kya
Aryan at 3.5 to 5,.5 kya.
Dravidian at 50, 000? At that time, not even the hypothetical Nostratic
ancestor language had developed, not to speak of its daughter families,
such as IE, Dravidian, etc,
He then quoted some genetic papers with pro and contra for an Aryan
migration from Central Asia, and proceeded to Sahoo (2006) and his own
study: with similar results as those in Underhill’s. So far so good.
However the local atmosphere must have shaped his actual interpretation
of the data. For, he used them to show that there are [currently, I
add] no data for an Aryan Immigration and that the Aryan gene pool is
a myth.
In the discussion, Underhill intervened and stressed again that his
agrees with Kashyap’s genetic data. But that he hesitated to put a
specific origin on some of them, such as M17-R1a1 [which Hindutvavadins
have used for an Out of India theory of IE – at 10 kya ! ]. M17
could just as easily have arisen on the Iranian plateau and then have
moved into India, just as other lineages did. The lack of informative
sub-haplogroups makes it impossible to say anything more.
In sum: genetics has nothing to say yet about the Aryan migration. Too
bad for the Rajaram’s of this world.
(Kak did not come; nor was our old favorite, Dr. K, present nor his
buddy, the budding self-appointed linguist Kelkar who lives close by in
the Boston area).
(I skipped the other sessions, such as the one on the Indian family
system -- which, I hear, was just as nutty, apparently inspired by the
fear of loosing the joint family system and the Indian “racial”
identity when NRI children are intermarrying with Non-NRIs left and
right. And I skipped the “Workshop on Indian Civilization”, apparently
used for planning Hindutva style college text books,-- which would have
been even a greater loss of time and energy).
In the summary session, I stressed again that the “Aryan Invasion
Theory” is dead and gone, it is a 19th c. theory. But, not to be
misquoted, that they still have to explain how a temperate climate
Indo-European language got into the subcontinent (and Iran), along with
its poetics, religion and rituals. That they finally must learn some
linguistics and philology, and explain their facts. Just to cherry-pick
and cut and paste the interpretations of the various sciences does not
do.
In sum, as expected, another event that brought out Hindutva goals and
methods. A loss of time, sure, but these guys had to be confronted…
Cheers, M.W.
PS:
Here the official list which does not quite reflect the actual list of
speakers, as give above.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Symposium on Aryan/Non-Aryan Origin of Indian Civilization
Session I Chair: Vanita Shastri
4:00 PM – Dr. Petr Eltsov, Deutches Archaeologische Institut, Germany-
From Harappa to Hastinapura: A study of the earliest South City and
civilization from the point of view of archaeology and ancient Indian
literature
4:45 PM – Dr. N. S. Rajaram, Indologist - The Aryan Myth In Perspective
-History, Science and Politics
5:30 PM – Dr. Asiananda, Intercultural Open University, Netherlands -
Situating Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of Indian Civilization within a
Mega-cyclical View of Indian History
6:15 PM – Dr. Shiva Bajpai, California State University, Northridge -
Epicenter and Ecumene of the Rigvedic Aryans
Saturday June 24, 2006
Session II Chair: S. S. Chakravarti
7:30 AM – Registration and continental breakfast
8:30 AM – Dr. B. B. Lal, former Director General, Archeological Survey
of India - An Ostrich-Like Attitude Is Perpetuating -The ‘Aryan
Invasion’ Myth?
9:15 AM – Dr. Nicholas Kazanas, Omilos Meleton, Athens - Dating the
Rigveda and Indigenism
10:00 AM – Dr. Subhash Kak, Louisiana State University - Vedic
Astronomy and the Aryan Problem
10:45 AM – Break
Session III Chair: C. M. Bhandari
11: 00 AM – Dr. Yvette Rosser, UMass Dartmouth - Aryans and Ancestral
Angst.
11:45 AM – Dr. Peter Underhill, Stanford University – Patterns of
Y-chromosome diversity in the contemporary South Asian gene pool
12:30 PM – Dr. V. K. Kashyap, National Institute of Biologicals, New
Delhi, India - Aryan Gene Pool in India- Reality or Myth; Evidences
Revisited
1:15 PM – Lunch
2:15 PM – Dr. Makarand Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University -
Symposium Roundup
3:00 PM – Break
Not satisfied with this, she accosted me in the break period, loudly
calling me, quote, “an asshole” (twice) . So much spiritualism for this
sari-clad, self-professed Ganesha worshipper.
Wow! So this is not just Rajeev. All these Hindutva fanatics call names and they get offended when they are called names.
Wow! So this is not just Rajeev. All these Hindutva fanatics call names and they get offended when they are called names.
This is what I had posted before witzel's mail was posted. Witzel has not got rid of his christist racial ideas, even though he should be practising love. they get Indian recruits to defend them. Secularists were being paid huge sums for this aryan invasion theory, and now they pretend to disown themselves. WHy not witzel says it in plain english, that the racial theories were christist propaganda and were wrong ?
Witzel has been doing this all the time, his argument is recruiting more secularists and following the british pattern of waging a civillizational war. He is concerned when christists like Max Mueller is mentioned... Ohhhh
And Vamanan... You didn't know anything about race, did you ? Trolls.
The empire of the witzels is the same evil empire. I read he has targetted all people, just because they have opposed the racist theories.
Trolls!... and you were lecturing about name calling...
Poor Witzel....
In the summary session, I stressed again that the “Aryan Invasion Theory” is dead and gone, it is a 19th c. theory.
The emminents were using it untill few years . This is being used in lesser places still now. Their cadres are not well trained on how to obfuscate it even though secularists pay a lot of money to train their cadres for becoming a slave of western empire.
When a white man is at helm, there would many sepoys to defend these obnoxious stuff.
and you were lecturing about name calling...
You have done enough of that. Take that as a counter view of the definition.
vamanan understands neither the meaning of "name-calling" (which he did himself and then preached against), (he also ridiculed me endlessly simply because i stated my views on ait at the other post);
and nor does he understand the meaning of "threaten".
Kaalan is a lot better. He can understand some things.
_
I had a friend who once was typing his paper. I mentioned, see if you don't mention this aryan dravidian historical race wars, subjugation etc , then no conclusion in your paper need to change, because its focuss is different. So why do you write this ? He was trying to find a war and subjugation in language. His paper was trying to degrade the language we respect using fictional circumstances( He respects that too, it just that he is in an institution, in a system and papers are necessary, and there are reviewers... the witzels are at top guarding entry to higher hemisphere). His answer was that these aryan dravidian stuff is accepted without question. The incident is within last 3 years.
There needs to be an understanding of the witzels, and the framework in which they operate. Thanks to NRIs, who have courage to question these cartels. I pray for more success, I pray for energy to such people untill the cartel gives up the infamous german and colonial ideas to start with.
Lastly on vamanan:
since vamanan upholds only linguistics, let us do a linguistic analysis of his "innocent" question:
"Can you point to one article by Romila Thapar that says {the Aryan .... is about race}"
Now anyone which a high standard of understanding of English, (and there are many here, including Rajeev), knows that this is a euphemistic way of saying:
"You cannot point to one article by Romila Thapar that says {Aryans ...race}".
Thus, he had made a statement, (a loaded statement) and a challenge, in the guise of a question.
No one was fooled by that. And he still wants to point fingers at everyone for "not answering a simple question he asked".
Many of us here ARE highly advanced in lingusitics. We know when a question is not a sincere question.
Especially when the innocent question innocently began with "Mohanlal's Yoddha"...
_
Sonofabitch Vaman, (I am free to do all sorts of name-calling now),
witzel just goes on to throw mud on scientists for invalidating his beloved colonial racist aryan theory. Nowhere does he give proper proof of his conclusions.
darkstorm,
i'm afraid this kind of name-calling is extreme and this just contributes to blog/blog-owner getting a bad name, bad reputation.
using a strong adjective is different from name-calling.
a lot of american slang has now become legitimate adjectives, unfortunately, in american english.
so such words appear offensive to readers in india, but actually do not feel extreme to readers in america.
however, the word you used here is indeed not nice. so please, could i ask you not to do so in future ?
_
Hey Professor Witzel, You are again wrong! It is not aryan , but Dravidian tourist theory. It could even be Dravidian Invasion. This will nicely explain the existence of the Dravidian language, Brahui, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I am told Doctor Kalaignar Mookanar (Moo Karunanidhi) is getting my name recommended to the Nobel Committee for my discovery of the Dravidian Invasion Theory.
daisies, trolls like kalloo kallan and @##@#@# vaman deserve that.
Ohh come on daisies, dont spoil the fun here. Its been a long time since trolls have visited this blog. See they are so entertaining...
They just keep self flagellating and pointing out faults in us , but they are the most bigoted and fundamentalist themselves.
anyway, I will try, but I will not promise.
DarkStorm,
You offended even daisies. Bad Boy!
Darkstorm,
The purpose of this blog is not for your having fun in your chosen way.
You are writing under your pseudo-name. You dont have to face society after any trashy language you use here.
But the blog-owner is known by his actual name. This blog is meant for a cause he believes in, and he also stakes his reputation here. Any trash written here belongs to him.
So, I think anyone using sub-standard language is doing a disservice both to the blog-cause and the blog-owner.
For your information, to date, I have NOT forwarded this blog link to ANYONE I personally know, because the language/expressions here often have been far, far below desirable standards.
I am sure a lot of people dont forward this blog-link to anyone.
Perhaps you could think about using this blog for a good cause, and not for having fun in your preferred way.
_
Daisies, I think you should go after the trolls only, and leave DarkStorm alone. If the blog-owner doesn't like DarkStorms's comments, he is free to remove it. I don't think we should try to police the good guys. Many a times DarkStorm's tactics are the only way to keep this blog from being hijacked by trolls
KapiDhwaja,
No, I will neither go after Darkstorm, nor after the trolls.
I will simply leave the blog.
I tried many a time to voice my concerns over the language here, over many months.
I have the choice to leave, if it finally does not suit me.
But out of concern, let me remind you that many people would have like me, not forwarded this blog to their friends. Some may even look down on Hindus. Thus, you only defeat your own cause.
Best Wishes,
_
daisies,
you can ignore the bad language just like some people here ignore us "trolls". This isnt a great analogy; even then... You dont stop going to the market to buy vegetables even though the language used there can be offensive to some. Same way, you can come here, get what you want and filter out what you dont want.
We all are annonymous on this blog and you are right; Rajeev is the only one who should really be caring. As long as he doesnt mind the language, the rest of us dont need to care.
KapiDhwaja, I see that you too subscribe to the defn of trolls, specific to this blog. Nice way to avoid answering any questions.
Kaalan,
I dont need your advice to make any choices for myself, I thought I clarified that.
Also, you are the preacher who came here this morning and indirectly called Rajeev a "Rat". (Anyone can see above, in the response to Mahashivaji's comment).
So, you have no preaching and advisory rights left here, on morality.
I also happened to see some more posts from you at the Thessalonica artcile. One was:
"Does anyone know any single person personally who has been converted forcibly by missionaries? I know a few "Hindus" who are insecure about missionaries preaching
simply because they just dont know enough about Hinduism to engage these missionaries in healthy debates."
My response to this is - none of here are babies, we have had first hand experience with Christians, and diverse experiences. LukewarmChristian who wrote here MAY be a true christian, but the college friend I mentioned claimed to be one, YET ridiculed my faith and my gods. He did not deserve an intelligent response from me, since obviously, his religion has taught him to despise Hindus, and hence cannot be considered a good one.
But of course, being smart physicists/mathematicians, we thrashed him (of course intellectually only), until he could no longer say anything to us.
And I repeat, Kaalan, you no longer have any preacher rights here. You cant call someone a Rat, and at the same time preach sermons here.
_
Daisies,
Well, much as I would have enjoyed calling Rajeev rat, I didnt mean him. I meant that some Hindus worship the rat (the actual animal). They feed the animals in temples. Perhaps, this is because the rat/mouse is Ganesha's vehicle. Maybe, there is another reason.
But either way, Hindus do worship rats or give them some kind of an importance.
So when mahashivaji says " I'd rather worship a rat than a grilled-cheese sandwich!", it is so clear from the statement that the idea of worshipping a rat is disgusting (for him) and he considers worshipping a grilled-cheese sandwich even more disgusting. But this is surprising because rats are treated with reverence in Hinduism, right?
Does my post make sense, then Daisies?
So, before you start claiming ulterior motives in each sentence that some write, perhaps, clear your thoughts. What if Dark Storm or KapiDhwaja wrote this sentence? Would you have infered the same?
Also, this leads me to a question. Where do Hindus stand on this issue of rats? Do they abhor them or worship them?
>Also, this leads me to a question.
> Where do Hindus stand on this issue of rats?
> Do they abhor them or worship them?
Depends.
We hate some rats(Kaalan), we love some rats(Ganesha's vehicle).
Thats hinduism.
:)
no offence meant. feeling tired and sleepy and fell in luv with my smart answer(childish grin).
So, before you start claiming ulterior motives in each sentence that some write, perhaps, clear your thoughts. What if Dark Storm or KapiDhwaja wrote this sentence? Would you have infered the same?
--- I have no interest in answering your hypothetical questions, although that may be your way of trying to paint me as whatever you want to.
The reason I thought you meant Rajeev is that in all those previous posts before that, you were commenting on all the people who write here, and calling them ignorant of Hinduism, and preaching your moral superiority to everyone.
So, it was most natural for me to think you were commenting on someone here.
_
So, before you start claiming ulterior motives in each sentence that some write, perhaps, clear your thoughts. What if Dark Storm or KapiDhwaja wrote this sentence? Would you have infered the same?
--- I am interested in answering your hypothetical questions, though that may be your way of paiting me as a bad person.
And anyway, a person who says "I would have liked to call him a Rat", is already guilty of calling him a Rat (in the moral sphere). The only place you can defend yourself with such arguments is in a court of law. Not in the moral sphere.
As for my asummption that you meant Rajeev, it is not surprising, because your prevsious posts here have mostly been dedicated to criticizing other bloggers, calling them ignorant of Hinduism, and calling yourself morally superior to everyone here.
_
Typo correction -
"I am not interested in answering your hypothetical questions".
-
Douplicate post happened because the first one actually disappeared from my screen. I thought I had lost the post.
_
Dear Rajeev,
Most of the times the comments under a blog tpoic are not at all related to the subject under discussion. more than 90% of the comments above dont even talk abt the subject under discussion. People are obsessed with their logic, intellect, decency etc...but not with their sense of discussing about the article...Alas..!! I feel disappointed.
Btw...Witzel accuses other scholars on the grounds that there are other meanings to words like "sagar" but he is not ready to accept that "arya" means "noble " and not only race. Doesnt that show that he is a commie and distortionist?
Surya,
You dont contribute here often, so perhaps your criticism is unfair.
As a commentor who has written useful things here quite often, I had to offer my opinions and my counter-views when I was repeatedly attacked by people like Kaalan and that other person.
So, when people come here to attack, expect some flames.
And you yourself have done exactly that - expressed a counter-opinion on others. So why point to others here ?
_
Surya,
I also think the blog isnt merely an information exchange forum.
The title is basically "Hindu Nationalist Perspective".
So if someone challenges views here, commentors usually find it necessary to respond, otherwise the blog would just be an online magazine for passive readers (who just want some good information for themselves).
Pkus, the blog has to be worth passing on to others, if not, this "cause" is going nowhere. Hence my emphasis on decency.
Otherwise, one might as well think of it as just a sport like soccer or cricket, or some other hobby.
_
oye kallooo,
whats your F**KING problem if I worship Rats or Monkeys.. ..
Ok, we will go to hell, all right. You will go to heaven. Happy?? Why are you putting a pole in your a**e for that.
How kiddish can some trolls get.
Hey kalloo, keep posting. I am enjoying this. Its been a long time since I have slashed apart secular progressives.
As for vaman, he is a programmed spam bot. Whatever you write in, his response will be standard. Just grammatical changes to one single sentence.
Dear Daisies,
how does my contributiong often matter when I make sense? Whatever I expressed above was related to the topic and I stick to it. Make whatever comments you want but let them be related to the topic under discussion.
The falut of our Hindus is this naivity to get deviated by these diversionary tactics of the people of faith. We talk, ponder, argue about silly issues while the semites are advancing into our terrotories in leaps and bounds. Anyway I do not want to preach here as I pressume that everyone is a bit sensible here.
Hi Surya,
Yes, your being an infrequent contributor is certainly an issue when you come up to criticize another contributor/s here.
If you have been following the other threads, you would notice that there were two people who came here to attack (in different ways).
So we were on the defensive. Each of us defended whatever we stood for.
You didnt care to defend, even though you are a reader. You were a passive observer. That's OK with me(and I'm sure others also), we're not complaining.
But you cant make rules for others asking them to stick to topic.
Can we make rules/request for you asking you to defend when people come to attack ? No. Will you accept such rules/requests ? No. It's really your choice.
Same with anyone else.
Also notice that while I was on the defensive against attackers (K, V), I was not at all up against Darkstorm. I simply stated my request.
Hope I was able to clarify.
Thanks.
_
http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no3/jvd-europeans.html
In Quest of Our Linguistic Ancestors
The Elusive Origins of the Indo-Europeans
John V. Day
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Proto-Indo-Europeans, they say, were the herdsmen who changed the world. But these days even the majority of well-educated people in the West have never even heard of them. They might tell you that the Aryans, who were Proto-Indo-Europeans under another name, had some connection with Adolf Hitler, but this information stretches their knowledge to the limit. This widespread ignorance among Westerners is cause for great shame, but it should be expected. For decades, educators in schools and universities have neglected Proto-Indo-Europeans. And although several scholars in recent years have written general books about them, readers seldom come across these works in bookshops.1 Non-readers never have the chance to learn about Proto-Indo-Europeans, either. It appears that neither the TV companies nor Hollywood have made a single documentary or movie on the subject. And yet, as the history of the world turned out, these Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been the most important people who ever lived.
Now, this is not Erich von Däniken's “Chariots of the Gods” or some other fanciful idea dreamed up by the unhinged or those wanting to sell mountains of books for a quick buck, although it must be admitted that over the years one or two misguided souls have tried to locate Proto-Indo-Europeans in such unlikely places as Tibet, the Sahara, Antarctica, and outer space. The real story of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been pieced together from meticulous work by brilliant linguists, mythologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists over the last two hundred years.
Scholarship understands a lot about Proto-Indo-Europeans, and yet they are still the most elusive of peoples. For one thing, nobody can pin down precisely where they lived—or even precisely when they lived, although it must have been at least four or five thousand years ago. Nobody knows what they called themselves or what their neighbors called them. "Proto-Indo-Europeans" is our modern term. None of the Proto-Indo-Europeans' literate neighbors recorded what they looked like or which customs they practiced. And we have no documents, not even a single word, written by the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves. In all probability, they had no writing.
Language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans
Yet scholars have identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans mainly by their spoken language. This language may not have been written down, but as groups of Proto-Indo-Europeans spread further afield in antiquity and lost contact with each other, so their original language diversified into daughter languages, and linguists can reconstruct a good deal of Proto-Indo-European from these daughter languages that “were” preserved in texts.
Consider, for example, some words in ancient languages that mean mother.2 The word mother in ancient Greek was meter, in Latin it was mater, and in Sanskrit, a language spoken in northern India over 3,000 years ago, it was matar. All these words correspond so well that linguists can reconstruct from them the original Proto-Indo-European form for mother as mater. (The modern English word mother, incidentally, derives from Proto-Indo-European via another route altogether, from its Germanic branch in ancient northern Europe.) Similarly, linguists can compare Greek nephos, Latin nebula and Sanskrit nabhas—all words meaning mist, fog or cloud—to obtain the Proto-Indo-European form for cloud. These words indicate only that Proto-Indo-European people recognized their mothers and experienced cloudy days. But linguists can go much further. Among the hundreds of Proto-Indo-European words that have been reconstructed are the numbers one to ten; the other family members of father, brother and sister; the body parts of eye, ear, nose and mouth; such trees as ash, birch, pine and willow; and such domestic animals as cow, sheep, goat and pig. Proto-Indo-European vocabulary was so precise, linguists tell us, that it even distinguished between words for breaking wind audibly and inaudibly.3
Furthermore, the parts of grammar that survive in Proto-Indo-European's daughter languages closely resemble one another. Pupils who study Latin often begin by learning amo, amas, amat ─ I love, you love, he loves. These verb endings of -o, -as, and -at find parallels in other languages, such as the comparable verb endings in modern German of -e, -st, and -t.
Linguists use a similar comparative method to determine that Proto-Indo-Europeans sorted nouns by gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and number (singular, plural, or dual [for two of a kind]). Each noun, moreover, had eight cases, depending on its purpose in a sentence, and each one had a different ending. Thus every Proto-Indo-European who opened his mouth to speak a few words realized that a noun like mother or cloud had 72 possible endings to choose from. Proto-Indo-Europeans may not have used writing, which was being invented by their contemporaries in the highly centralized economies of Egypt and Mesopotamia to count goods and register taxes, but they evidently did not suffer from low IQs.
The daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European can be grouped into such branches as Celtic, Greek, and Germanic, so that in the modern world English, Dutch, and German languages, for example, all belong in the Germanic branch. We know from ancient written texts that Indo-European languages—the languages that the original Proto-Indo-European developed into—have for thousands of years covered much of Europe and Asia.
During this period, Celtic languages were spoken across vast regions from central Europe to Iberia. Consider the linguistic map of Europe and Asia during the 1st millennium B.C., the period in which some of the earliest evidence for the location of early Indo-European languages appears.4 Across northern Europe, running from west to east, were Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic branches, while the so-called "Iranian" branch was spoken on the steppe before moving southward into Iran itself. In Italy existed the Italic branch, its best-known member being Latin, and further east in ancient Europe there were Thracian, Illyrian, Greek, and Albanian branches. During early historical times, the Armenian branch was sited in Asia's far southwest and the Indic branch in south central Asia. Languages descended from all these Indo-European branches of Europe and Asia survive today. But some other branches have died out, such as the Anatolian and Phrygian in Anatolia (which is what prehistorians call Turkey) and the Tocharian in northwest China.
As noted above, this particular survey of Indo-European languages dates to roughly the first millennium B.C. Any such map can have only a rough date, because, for a variety of reasons, the extent of languages will change over time. For example, Celtic used to be spoken over much of western Europe but is nowadays confined to Brittany and the fringes of Britain and Ireland. This doesn't necessarily mean that Celts themselves were driven to Europe's western rim by Romans invading continental Europe and Anglo-Saxons invading England. More probably, ancient Celtic-speakers and their descendants stayed put on the land, and, over time, simply changed their speech. When natives have new rulers who speak an alien language, it must be in the natives' interest to start learning it.
Race and Indo-European Languages
Incidentally, ideas about mass migrations being common during prehistoric times arose in the Victorian age, when Europeans really were migrating en masse to the Americas and the colonial empires. But prehistoric people had no guns, railroads, or steamships, and would have found it much harder than nineteenth-century European colonists to migrate and to conquer natives. Anthropologists rarely find skeletal evidence of mass migrations in prehistory, because the skeletal record largely speaks of biological continuity. So too does Europe's genetic record, for the most part, even going as far back as the Ice Ages.
The discovery that ancient and modern Indo-European languages were spoken over a vast area came as a big jolt to educated people in the nineteenth century. They were staggered that all these languages were descended from a single ancestor. Indeed, the great French linguist Antoine Meillet likened the impact of the discovery of the Indo-Europeans to Columbus's discovery of the New World.
Meillet was right. For one thing, because scholars can reconstruct a good deal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans' language—and, by similar comparative methods, their customs and mythology—we moderns can glimpse a prehistoric mentality. No longer restricted to such humdrum archaeological finds as stone tools and charred seeds, we can get inside the minds of the distant Proto-Indo-Europeans and understand their outlook on life.
Many people also find something intriguing in the idea that one fairly small prehistoric population and its descendants somehow managed to expand across most of Europe and much of Asia, disseminating their language and culture on the way. After all, the Proto-Indo-Europeans' descendants provided much of the language and culture for the civilizations of ancient India, Iran, Greece, Rome, and Celtic and Germanic Europe.
Not surprisingly, Proto-Indo-Europeans were greatly admired by such earlier racial historians as the Count de Gobineau and Madison Grant and, of course, the Aryans were also the favorite people of Adolf Hitler. This enthusiasm for Proto-Indo-Europeans as the ancestors of the white race and European culture has contributed to the contemporary taboo against Westerners identifying too closely with their racial origins.
The racial origins of the Proto-Indo-Europeans are, like race and IQ or race and crime, a red-hot subject. Take the case of Professor Wolfram Nagel of Berlin University, who in 1987 argued in the journal of the German Oriental Society that Proto-Indo-Europeans must have been racially northern European.5 He didn't say they were a master race or destined to conquer the world, just that they were northern European. Although Professor Nagel had reached the top of his profession, his reasoned arguments based on ancient texts and artworks so appalled the learned society that they fired the journal's editors and debated whether to expel him (although in the event they allowed him to stay). This incident offers an insight into the totalitarian climate that intellectuals work under in "democratic" Germany.
Similarly in France, two intellectuals whose books and articles describe Proto-Indo-Europeans as racially northern European—Alain de Benoist,6 the leading figure of the French New Right, and Professor Jean Haudry—are routinely vilified as Nazis. Westerners are living in a strange world, when discussing the origins of their people and culture can land them in so much trouble.
The Search for the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ Homeland
As noted above, the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland has long been the subject of speculation. One might begin the search for it by deciding if the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language offers any clues about where or when its speakers may have lived. Proto-Indo-European had words for houses, for taming animals, for wagons and for pottery, implying that its people must have lived during the Neolithic or even later, which gives us a general time-frame for the period of archaeological cultures and skeletal material that prehistorians should be examining.7 In addition, the earliest words from one of Proto-Indo-European's daughter languages, Hittite in Anatolia, appeared around 1900 B.C., and so Proto-Indo-European itself must have existed at least a few centuries earlier, before developing into Hittite, and so perhaps before about 2500 B.C.
Proto-Indo-Europeans can therefore be placed vaguely in time. But prehistorians struggle to pin them down geographically. Over the years, scholars and cranks alike have offered dozens of apparent solutions to the problem of the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Many seemingly ingenious proposals have seized on just one reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word, such as beech or salmon, to determine where these occurred in prehistoric times and delimit the homeland, but so far no proposal has worked. All these proposals turn out to be too vague. (One Icelandic linguist offered an especially bizarre idea, arguing that the harsh sound of some Proto-Indo-European words imitates seabirds living around the Baltic.)
Turning to more serious matters, once ancient people had given up hunting and gathering, which necessitated roaming across wide territories, and had taken up the Neolithic, including farming and settling down into hamlets and villages, becoming more or less rooted to the soil, their populations became relatively isolated from one another, and over time their languages also became isolated, accumulating more and more differences from one another. Judging by parts of the world that even now have a Neolithic way of life, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans would have been more or less the size of, say, Poland.8
In tracing Proto-Indo-European origins, anthropology offers three main kinds of evidence in Europe and Asia. First, the genetic data, though so far almost all our data comes from modern populations. Second, the masses of information from ancient times about physical types, and most important of all about hair and eye pigmentation—information that comes from texts, artworks and mummified corpses. Finally, the ancient skeletal remains. Now, anthropologists cannot immediately deduce from any archaeological culture's skeletal remains that, in life, its people spoke Proto-Indo-European. All we can do with ancient skeletal material is determine cases of population movements, and then decide if any such movements match the relevant period of Indo-European expansions and the relevant lands penetrated by Indo-Europeans. Likewise with modern genetic material, we can use it only to locate ancient population movements that might correspond with Indo-European expansions.
The ancient texts and artworks recording human pigmentation offer a different kind of evidence. After all, these texts and artworks come from, or are about, historical societies that were certainly Indo-European-speaking, and so some, if not all or even many, of the people in these societies were descended from Proto-Indo-Europeans, as I hope to show later.
Anyway, let's begin with the genetic evidence. Any similar article written in 2020 will discuss at length the evidence of ancient DNA. Ancient DNA taken from human teeth and bone will revolutionize the study of prehistory. It will tell us about the sex of individual ancient humans, their familial relationships and their biological affinities and ancestries. Geneticists might one day draw up a family tree for all the populations of ancient Europe and Asia. And once geneticists have located the genes controlling hair and eye colors, we can speculate about the likely pigmentation of ancient human populations. We shall also use DNA from ancient domesticated crops and animals to explain how early farming expanded.
At present, though, ancient DNA has revealed only that modern humans are not, as Carleton Coon once believed, descended from Neanderthals.9 But as for Indo-Europeans, current studies of ancient DNA tell us next to nothing.
Many prehistorians have used modern genetic data to work out where Proto-Indo-Europeans came from and how they expanded, but most of their ideas are chasing down blind alleys.10 For example, many analyses try to match modern genetic boundaries with modern or ancient linguistic boundaries, arguing that neighbors who speak different languages rarely marry each other, and so over time their populations have diverged genetically. But populations divided genetically and linguistically are also often separated by such physical boundaries as mountains and seas, and this factor complicates matters inextricably.11
This article touches very briefly on a few of the more important findings from genetic studies. First of all, it turns out that, in genetic terms, modern Europe is very homogeneous, and northern Europe even more so. Genetic distances between northern European populations are usually low—between English and Germans, for example, English and French, and English and Irish. In contrast, many genetic distances in southern and eastern Europe are a good deal higher, such as those between Greeks and Hungarians, and Greeks and Yugoslavs.12
Genetically, Greek and Yugoslav populations are among the least typically "European." And the significance of this impinges on Colin Renfrew's hypothesis that around 7000 B.C. Proto-Indo-Europeans were farmers in Anatolia, and indeed farming so well that their big population increases enabled them and their descendants to spread across most of Europe in the course of thousands of years, mixing with indigenous Europeans on the way.13 Yet it seems odd that Greeks should be divided by fairly large genetic distances from Hungarians and Yugoslavs if Anatolian farmers really had expanded via southeast Europe en masse. One might expect such a large-scale population movement to have homogenized gene pools in southeast Europe.
A particular kind of DNA is mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which has nothing to do with shaping physical or personality traits. Both males and females carry mtDNA, although only mothers pass it on, and when it is inherited there are occasional mutations. In consequence, geneticists can examine mtDNA lineages to determine how they evolved into new types. And comparing lineages from different populations allows us to work out where various lineages arose and, if we estimate mutation rates, when they arose.
Bryan Sykes and others classify modern European mtDNA in nine major lineage groups. Sykes finds that eight of these nine groups arose in Europe as long ago as the Upper Palaeolithic, during the time of the Ice Ages.14 But one lineage group which originated in southwest Asia entered Europe during the last 10,000 years and currently occurs across much of Europe, perhaps comprising 17% of modern European lineages, although another study puts it at more like 10%.15 This lineage group, Sykes argues, ran in two streams—one common along the Mediterranean coast to Spain, Portugal and from there along the Atlantic coast to Cornwall, Wales and western Scotland, the other common in the river valleys of central Europe. And these two streams, he suggests, reflect ancient Anatolian farmers spreading northward and westward across Europe.
As for the problem of Indo-European expansions, Sykes's deduction makes a neat solution. It explains how Indo-Europeans managed during prehistoric times to advance across most of Europe and part of Asia. However, his theory doesn’t makes any sense—at least, not as far as Proto-Indo-Europeans are concerned. Proto-Indo-Europeans appeared later on. For one thing, the age and distribution of the mtDNA stream along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts might be an echo of another migration altogether—the migration that thousands of years later took megalithic tombs around the coasts of western Europe.16
Sykes's hypothesis also runs into difficulties with the skeletal remains.17 Several studies of early Neolithic skeletal material find that, contrary to his hypothesis, remains from the Balkans don't really resemble remains from southwest Asia. So were these two populations related? In addition, we cannot be certain that early Neolithic remains from central Europe closely match remains from the Balkans. So this apparently unstoppable advance from Anatolia via the Balkans to northern Europe is, judging by the skeletal record, by no means proven. But even if it took place, such a population movement might still have no connection with the expansions of Indo-Europeans.
Indeed, linguists can apparently reconstruct Proto-Indo-European words for items of material culture that first appear in the archaeological record, as far as we know, only from the fourth millennium B.C. onwards. Some of these words are for wagon, axle, wheel, and reins.18 But if Proto-Indo-Europeans still existed as a unified population at this late date, then they cannot have begun separating as long ago as 7000 B.C., when wheeled vehicles were still unknown.
The pattern of languages tells a similar story. Archaic languages that preserve Proto-Indo-European forms are often found on the edge of the Indo-European world. Many correspondences link, for example, Germanic in northern Europe and Tocharian in central Asia. Indeed, the Indo-European branch retaining the highest percentage of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words—about 67% of them—is Germanic, followed by Greek with 60% and Baltic with 54%.19 Again, if farmers had taken thousands of years to migrate across Europe from an Anatolian homeland, one might expect that Germanic and Baltic would have the fewest original words, because migrants traveling ever further into new country for thousands of years, and marrying with natives on the way, would find their original vocabulary becoming more and more diluted.
Consider also the similarity between Indo-European mythologies. Scholars of religion consider the three great reservoirs of Proto-Indo-European mythology to be Rome (think of Mars and Jupiter, Romulus and Remus), Scandinavia (think of Thor and Odin), and India (think of Indra the warrior-god and Agni the fire-god).20 Yet, just like the most archaic languages, these three regions sit right on the edge of the Indo-European world, thousands of miles apart. But if Anatolian farmers and their descendants had trekked across Europe and Asia, think how much Proto-Indo-European mythology would have been lost by the time, thousands of years after setting out, that they eventually settled in such distant lands as Rome, Scandinavia and India. So perhaps Indo-European settlers made fairly swift expansions to their new lands, where they established themselves.
Ancestral Clues From Antiquity
Information about how pigmentation was distributed in antiquity provides crucial evidence in understanding where Proto-Indo-Europeans originated and how they expanded, and is far too useful to be disregarded. Many students of Proto-Indo-European origins examine genetic data, and some even consider skeletal remains. But very few in recent years have said anything about ancient texts and artworks recording pigmentation. Linking Proto-Indo-Europeans with a specific pigmentation became a huge taboo once the National Socialists began promoting their doctrine of "blond Aryans," even though similar ideas go back as far as the 1820s.21 But we should ignore taboos of political correctness.
Yet ancient sources about pigmentation are often scarce. A further problem is that the earliest useful texts from each Indo-European branch vary so much in period. The earliest useful texts about pigmentation from India come from the mid-second millennium B.C., whereas those from Ireland and Scandinavia were composed two thousand years later. Ideally, ancient peoples would have compiled anthropological surveys, but these simply don't exist. Descriptions of historical figures provide a rough population sample, although even the Greeks of the classical period virtually never reported the coloring of their greatest men. And so anthropologists must also examine the pigmentation of mythical figures and deities, working on the assumption that their physical appearance mirrors the real-life people who admired or worshiped them.
The Indo-European world covers so many lands and eras that this article will consider just six of the many regions where Indo-European-speaking peoples lived in antiquity: Ireland, Rome, Greece, Iran, India, and Xinjiang (which used to be known as Chinese Turkestan) in northwest China.
For evidence of how the Celts described themselves, we might turn to the highly traditional society of early medieval Ireland. One excellent source from Ireland is the epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, otherwise known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, probably composed as late as the seventh or eigth century A.D. and lying at the heart of early Irish literature. The Táin and other Irish works contain some valuable descriptions of mythological heroes.22 In the world they depict, beautiful women generally have fair hair and blue eyes, and the great warrior-heroes, although varying more than the women, also tend to have fair hair and, when bearded, always fair beards. Moreover, early Irish tales often regard men who have dark hair as somewhat alien, because some ugly giants and male slaves are dark-haired, and even a few important dark-haired warrior-heroes are regarded as marginal figures.
In ancient Rome, some valuable descriptions of physical traits are embedded in the biographies of early emperors. The earliest nineteen Roman emperors, from Caesar up to Commodus at the end of the Age of the Antonines in A.D. 192, offer a small but exceptionally useful population sample.23 Of these nineteen emperors, four have no descriptions and two are described only as gray-haired. But whereas one or perhaps two of the remainder have dark hair, five are described as having fair or fairish hair. And whereas three have dark eyes, nine have blue or grayish eyes, and indeed five of the first seven have blue or grayish eyes. For example, Augustus and Nero had fairish hair and blue eyes, Caesar had dark eyes, and Hadrian had dark hair and blue eyes. Although upper-class Romans tended to have a light pigmentation, they were greatly outnumbered by the Roman masses, who overwhelmingly had dark hair and eyes.
In Greece, Homer's two epics from the eighth century B.C., the Iliad and the Odyssey, are among the earliest texts in Europe containing useful information about pigmentation.24 When characterizing his Greek warrior-heroes, Homer says nothing about the coloring of Agamemnon, but he does picture Achilles, Meleager, Menelaus, and Odysseus as fair-haired—a coloring that coincides with their youthfulness. Certainly by classical times, however, the great majority of Greeks had dark hair.
Useful information about real rather than fictional Greeks comes from Polemon, the second most important Greek writer on physiognomy, who wrote as late as the second century A.D..25 Polemon explains that "the pure Greek" of his time has fair skin and red hair, and resembles the man inclined to literature and philosophy, who has fair skin and fairish hair. Polemon may have drawn these ideas from Pseudo-Aristotle, the most important Greek physiognomist, who in his third century B.C. Physiognomica declares that the most perfect male type is the lion with its fair mane.26
Fair Indo-Europeans from the Caspian to Turkestan
Turning to Iranians, I remarked earlier that speakers of Indo-European's so-called "Iranian" branch must have lived on the steppe before infiltrating southward to Iran, where non-Indo-European Elamites already had a civilization. Now, Greek and Roman writers in the centuries before and after Christ stated that Iranian-speaking peoples north of the Black Sea and Caspian had fair or reddish hair and blue eyes.27 One especially trustworthy source is Ammianus Marcellinus, because he had visited the Black Sea region, unlike the writers who simply relied on others' reports, and he portrays the Alans with fairish hair.
From Iran itself, although nowadays housed in the Louvre in Paris, comes the Archer Frieze of glazed bricks, which was created about 500 B.C. to represent the bodyguards of Darius I.28 Most of the eighteen or so archers on the frieze have dark skin, hair, and eyes, but a few have blue eyes. This frieze originally stood outdoors, causing the pigment for archers' skins to darken over time. But we do have some brick fragments showing paler skin, and Annie Caubet, the director of the Louvre's Department of Oriental Antiquities, told me in a letter that pinkish skin probably came from the frieze's portrayal of Darius himself.
Many similarities in language, as well as in mythology and culture, are shared by the Indo-European's Iranian and Indian branches, which implies that, wherever the Proto-Indo-Europeans had their homeland, the Proto-Iranians and Proto-Indians must even then have been neighbors who resembled each other physically. One similarity is that the Indo-European peoples in Iran and India both referred to themselves as Aryans. The Iranian king Darius I, in a famous rock inscription, calls himself "an Aryan of the Aryans," and the very word Iran developed from Aryan. These days, more and more linguists are returning to the older opinion that the term Aryan occurred throughout the Indo-European world, cropping up, for instance, in the Old Irish word aire meaning "noble, free," and hence Ireland's name of Eire. To the Proto-Indo-Europeans, it seems, Aryan meant peer or comrade or perhaps an ethnic term.29
In India, the earliest known Indo-European text, coming from the later second millennium B.C., is the religious work, the Rig-Veda.30 Only one god in the Rig-Veda has anything like a human pigmentation, and he is the great warrior-god Indra. In personality and attributes, Indra resembles the Germanic god Thor, and even his fair hair and beard resemble Thor's red beard.31 Throughout the Rig-Veda, Indra often helps the warlike Aryans—the Indo-European invaders of India—to battle against the native Dasas and Dasyus, who are portrayed as dark-skinned. In contrast, the Rig-Veda refers to Aryans as white and having an "Aryan color."
Later works from ancient India also offer useful sources, and one of them is the very long Mahabhasya, composed in northern India by the grammarian Patañjali in the second century B.C. 32 In this work, Patañjali, making a philosophical point about objects having and lacking attributes, casts around for an illustration that makes obvious sense to his readers. Nobody, Patañjali says, would look at a dark-skinned man and imagine that he was a brahmin, from India's highest caste. Instead, he goes on, everyone knows that brahmins have fair skins and kapila-kesa hair, which translates as "brown" or "reddish-brown."
Finally, abundant evidence comes from Xinjiang in northwest China, the home of people speaking Indo-European's Tocharian branch. Unfortunately, ancient Chinese sources rarely comment on the physical appearance of foreigners. But they do record that the Yuezhi, who may have been Tocharians under another name, had fair skins, and that the Wusun's descendants, again possibly Tocharian, had green (or blue) eyes and red beards.33
Some of the best evidence for Tocharians is artistic, because they were painted on murals in Xinjiang during the later first millennium A.D. One example is the so-called Cave of the Sixteen Sword-Bearers at Kizil.34 Of these sixteen knights, five have white hair and eleven have light red hair. Marianne Yaldiz, the director of Berlin's Museum for Indian Art, where the murals are now housed, told me in a letter that the eyes are a sort of gray-green-blue. Although the men wear Iranian-style dress and stand in an Iranian-style pose, historians generally regard them as Tocharians.
Still, all of these sixteen figures are stereotyped. To find individual portrayals, we must turn to other murals in Xinjiang that are three hundred miles further east at Bezeklik.35 Murals at Bezeklik chiefly portray typically Chinese faces, although all these Mongoloids are stereotyped. In contrast, the minority of Caucasoids on the murals are rendered as individual portraits, as in one cave at Bezeklik which portrays about six or seven Buddhist monks who have Caucasoid features. These Caucasoid monks are apparently a distinct ethnic group—unlike the Mongoloids, they all have heads shaven on top, and all wear similar gowns—and are almost certainly Tocharians. One or two of these Caucasoid monks have dark hair and brown eyes, but most have reddish-brown hair and blue or green eyes.
In recent years, archaeologists working in Xinjiang's Tarim Basin have excavated more than one hundred Caucasoid mummies, thanks to a desert climate and salty soil’s having preserved corpses. Even some mummies 3,000 years old look as though they were buried days ago. These Caucasoid mummies have typically northern European faces, with prominent noses, unslanted eyes, and hair that is usually fair or light brown.36 Although the mummies' eyes have long since perished, we know that two infants were buried with stones placed over their eyes, one with green stones and one with blue, colors perhaps representing their irises.37 Judging by the mummies' location, historians conclude that at least the great majority of these Caucasoids were ancestral Tocharians.
Origins on the Steppe?
Does this brief survey of pigmentation in ancient Ireland, Rome, Greece, Iran, India, and Xinjiang tell us anything? I think it clearly does. Light-haired and light-eyed types were found all over the ancient Indo-European world, even in lands which at present are overwhelmingly dark in pigmentation, such as Rome and India. And traces of these northern European types occurred especially among the warriors who comprised each society's ruling class.
Ireland had an abundance of fair-haired warrior-heroes. Most of the early Greek warrior-heroes had fair hair, too. In fact, most of the early Roman emperors had fair or fairish hair and blue eyes. The Iranians who lived on the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Sea were also described by foreign observers as having fair or fairish hair. Indian Brahmins have been characterized as having fair skins and brown or reddish-brown hair, and the Indian warrior-god Indra apparently had fair hair as well. Finally, the mummies and murals of Xinjiang reveal that most Tocharians had fair or brownish hair and blue or green eyes.
Moreover, Indo-Europeans often seem to have been small minorities in the countries they penetrated: the Celtic warrior-class in Ireland; the Roman patricians; the few Homeric heroes and the so-called "pure Greeks" of later years; and the Aryans battling against the many natives in India. Then again, the majority of Tocharians in Xinjiang apparently had light pigmentation, as did most Iranians living on the steppe.
Indeed, many prehistorians believe that the Proto-Indo-European homeland lay on the steppe, which, if true, might explain why steppe Iranians retained the Proto-Indo-Europeans' northern European physical type. A steppe homeland, moreover, would have been a good basis for Indo-European expansions. Steppe groups during the third millennium B.C. and earlier lived mainly by cattle and sheep herding, and by at least the third millennium B.C. they had also domesticated the horse. Down to historical times, such other steppe pastoralists as the Huns and Mongols have been highly mobile horseriders and warlike, too, living in the midst of poor farmland and consequently raiding neighbors for food supplies. So if Proto-Indo-Europeans did originate on the steppe, they may also have been highly expansionist.
To confirm that Proto-Indo-Europeans did originate on the steppe, we must find traces in the skeletal record of prehistoric steppe groups expanding across the known Indo-European world—to Xinjiang, Iran, India, Greece, Rome, and northern Europe. The evidence of pigmentation surveyed above implies that Indo-Europeans were usually minorities in the lands they entered, and must have expanded from their homeland in smallish groups. This finding tallies broadly with the skeletal record, which in general points to continuity in prehistoric Europe and Asia, where population movements on a large scale were the rare exception.
But prehistoric steppe groups did extend as far east as southern Siberia and Xinjiang, as demonstrated by both archaeological evidence and the remains of robust skeletal types.38 At present, though, traces of these steppe groups have not been found entering Iran or India, and neither can they be located as far west as Italy. In the northern Balkans, prehistoric steppe groups are certainly represented by skeletal and archaeological remains, but did they penetrate as far south as Greece? Archaeological traces of steppe groups largely peter out before Greece, but the renowned Grave Circle B at Mycenae resembles steppe tombs, and the very rugged nobles buried here also resemble steppe groups.39 Steppe groups definitely expanded as far westward as central Europe as well, judging by the three thousand steppe graves known in eastern Hungary, and, although the females buried here seem lightly built, the males are similar to robust steppe types.40
But did steppe groups reach northern Europe? It is there that several important Indo-European peoples first emerge into history: Slavs, Balts, Germans, and Celts. The archaeological record is ambiguous: there are many disputed parallels between the Late Neolithic culture of northern Europe, known as Corded Ware, and Neolithic steppe culture, although vague cultural parallels can't automatically be attributed to migrating groups. The skeletal remains are less ambiguous, however, because they show no traces of steppe groups reaching northern Europe. The typically Corded Ware skulls from Germany, Czechoslovakia , and Poland are high and have narrow faces, whereas steppe crania are low and have broad faces.41
The archaeological and skeletal evidence seems to leave us with three possibilities. First, that steppe groups did reach northern Europe, but in such small numbers it makes it nearly impossible to detect them. Second, that steppe groups didn't reach northern Europe, which proves that, at least in this region, steppe groups were not transmitting Indo-European speech. Third, that steppe groups didn't need to reach northern Europe, because Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in a vast homeland that encompassed the steppe and northern Europe.
The puzzle remains. But steppe groups must somehow be implicated in Proto-Indo-European origins. They, and they alone among prehistoric groups, expanded to much of Europe and Asia where Indo-European languages were known to have been spoken. Perhaps one day archaeologists and anthropologists will determine exactly the prehistoric links, if any, between the steppe and northern Europe. Scholars might also have a clearer picture about Indo-European influences in eastern Asia—on the civilizations of China, where Indo-Europeans may have introduced bronze-working and the chariot, and Japan, whose mythology bears unmistakable affinities with Proto-Indo-European mythology.42
What we can declare is that Indo-Europeans tended to expand in small groups, and that in the great civilizations of Ireland, Rome, Greece, and India they and their descendants were heavily outnumbered minorities who were concentrated in the ruling classes. I take it that Indo-Europeans were ruling these lands because they had somehow dominated the natives by force of arms, although the archaeological evidence for this assertion scarcely exists. So far, prehistorians have found it perplexing to explain from the archaeological record how Indo-Europeans arrived in any land and established themselves as the commanding power.
And what happened to these Indo-Europeans? It appears that at least Europe and southern Asia were so densely populated by Neolithic times that small groups of newcomers would have made little biological impact on the natives. Since Proto-Indo-Europeans began expanding about five thousand years ago, two hundred generations have passed, and the few drops of their original blood have been lost in an ocean of non-Indo-Europeans. Traces of light hair and eyes crop up now and again in modern Iran and northern India, and even in Xinjiang, where Dolkun Kamberi, a local expert on the Caucasoid mummies, has green eyes and light brown hair. Light hair and eyes are more common in modern Greece and Rome and especially Ireland, although in northern Europe most traces probably predate any incoming Indo-Europeans.
In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper class. Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later historians to determine what became of them. The evidence found in ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type, although that isn't something one reads in modern books about Roman history. In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny minority. Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to wither away. Consider a bleak statistic. We know of about fifty patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had survived.43 The decay continued in imperial times. We know of the families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five, but, just one generation later, all trace of half of these families had vanished.44
If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from Indo-European history.
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John V. Day, Ph.D., is the author of Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence (The Institute for the Study of Man, 2001) and is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Lost Philosopher: The Best of Anthony M. Ludovici.
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End Notes
1. For an excellent introduction to the subject, see Shan M.M. Winn, Heaven, Heroes, and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. See also John V. Day, Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2001.
2. In the interests of clarity, linguists have transliterated the Greek, Sanskrit, and Proto-Indo-European words in the following examples into the Roman alphabet, removed any accents, and used only the root of each word without any suffixes.
3. For a survey of modern English words that ultimately derive from Proto-Indo-European, see Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
4. It is not only Indo-Europeans that had a wide language family. Uralic, for example, comprises Finnish, Lapp, Estonian and Hungarian and various languages of northwest Asia. But in modern Europe the only significant peoples who do not speak Indo-European languages are Basques, Hungarians, Finns, Estonians, and Georgians. Together, these non-Indo-European-speakers number only about 25 million out of over 500 million Europeans.
5. Wolfram Nagel, "Indogermanen und Alter Orient -- Rückblick und Ausblick auf den Stand des Indogermanenproblems," Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 119, 1987, pp. 157-213.
6. Alain de Benoist, "Indo-Européens: à la recherche du foyer d'origine; quatre remarques finales," Nouvelle École 49, 1997, pp. 13-105.
7. Day, pp. 4-6.
8. Day, p. 8.
9. Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, p. 126.
10. Patrick Sims-Williams, "Genetics, Linguistics, and Prehistory: Thinking Big and Thinking Straight," Antiquity 72, 1998, pp. 505-27.
11. Day, pp. 253-66.
12. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 270.
13. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
14. Day, p. 277; Sykes, pp. 184, 196.
15. Day, pp. 279-80.
16. Day, pp. 278-9.
17. Day, pp. 221-33.
18. J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, eds., Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997, pp. 481, 625-8.
19. Day, p. 24.
20. Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, paperback edition, 1989, p. 39.
21. Day, p. 125.
22. Day, pp. 107-13.
23. Day, pp. 102-6
.24. Day, pp. 87-92.
25. Day, p. 94.
26. Day, pp. 94-5.
27. Day, p. 57.
28. Day, pp. 134-6.
29. Puhvel, p. 45; Mallory and Adams, p. 213.
30. Day, pp. 74-9.
31. Day, pp. 79, 115-16.
32. Day, pp. 80-2.
33. Day, pp. 58-9.
34. Day, pp. 137-8; J.P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, plate XII.
35. Day, pp. 138-9; Mallory and Mair, Plate XIII.
36. Day, pp. 351-5; Mallory and Mair, pp. 181-200.
37. Day, p. 352 n. 1.
38. Day, pp.184-7, 190-4.
39. Day, pp. 199-200.
40. Day, p. 209.
41. Day, p. 206.
42. Mallory and Mair, pp. 324-6, 327-8; Michael Puett, "China in Early Eurasian History: A Brief Review of Recent Scholarship on the Issue," in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 2 volumes, 1998, pp. 699-715; C. Scott Littleton, "The Indo-European Strain in Japanese Mythology: A Review of Some Recent Research," Mankind Quarterly 26, 1985-6, pp. 152-74.
43. Arnaldo Momigliano and Tim J. Cornell, "Patricians," in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, New York: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 1996, p. 1123.
44. James Paton Isaac, Factors in the Ruin of Antiquity: A Criticism of Ancient Civilization, Canada: no publisher, 1971, p. 421. See also Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan T. Possony, The Geography of Intellect, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963, pp. 106-9; Ilse Schwidetzky, Das Problem des Völkertodes: Eine Studie zur historischen Bevölkerungsbiologie, Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1954, pp. 43-53.
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