Aryan Invasion Theory

[Surya Deva]

Namaste,

A historical debate is currently going on between myself and Copernicus in the "Watch analogyr" thread in the theology forum. As that debate is off-topic there, but a good debate nonetheless, I am starting this thread here to continue the debate here.

For those who are not familiar with Aryan invasion theoy(AIT): AIT is the theory that states that a sub group of the Aryans known as the Indo-Aryans invaded India around approx 1500BCE and started the Vedic civilisation in India(which was the beginning of HInduism). According to this theory the original homeland of the Aryans was in Central Asia, somewhere around the Russian steepes. They were nomadic, savage and Cauacasian and spread throughout Indo-Europe through conquest by virtue of their superior weapons, horses and chariots and bronze swords. This theory is very significant in dating Indian history. The arrival of the Indo-Aryans is seen as a major sheet anchor in dating Indian recorded history, which is started at the time they arrived in approx 1500BCE.

HOWEVER

This theory is highly controversial, especially in India. It is outright rejected by Hindu nationalists who see it as nothing more than a racist and political theory from a colonial and white supremist mindset. It is also rejected by a growing number of Indian scholars and non-Indian scholars. In fact, from the very outset this theory was controversial with both Indian and Western scholarship. Despite this, this theory was accepted as a consensus view and has been accepted as fact since.

In recent times the controversy has returned with the findings in modern archeaology through excavactions of the Indus valley civilisation(IVC), which has found no evidence whatsoever for an Aryan invasion of India. In fact, on the contrary it has been found that the IVC already has Aryan features. Such as: fire-altars used in Aryan fire sacrifices, Swastikas, standardized metric systems which are later used in later Aryan Vedic texts. It has also been found the geographical facts contained in the early books of the Rig Veda describe the geography of the IVC, and a thriving river which had dried up in 1900BCE but was thriving prior to 3000BCE. Most of the Indus settlements and cities have been found alongside this river. This naturally leads to conclusions that the Aryans were already in India during the IVC.

The implications of the Aryans being in the IVC are stagging for world history and has lead to the development of a counter-theory to Aryan invasion theory: Out of India theory(OIT) that is the Aryans were not nomads and savages, but civilised people from the IVC. They migrated out of India and took with them their language and cultures throughout Indo-Europe, thereby civilising various parts of the world.
The other implication is to revise Indian history completely by moving the date of the Aryans in India back by thousands of years. This would change the date of every important historical event and figure in Indian history.

Western scholars accuse OIT theorists of being revisionists and nationalists. Indian scholars accuse AIT theorists of being racists and and white supremists. It is a highly charged and lively debate. I invite everybody to participate.

I am an OIT proponent by the way.

 

[Breathe]

I reject the Aryan Invasion theory, personally - at least, the Invasion Theory about a more civilized, Aryan (Indo-European) race conquering the other tribes of India and suppressing them, and using the Vedic religion to do so - I disagree with that.


I agree with the majority of things Surya Deva has mentioned.

I see some of the ideas put forth, like the racial interpretations of groups mentioned in the Rig Veda, to be rather simplistic if I'm honest - some AIT theorists see that Dasa/Dasyu come with the term "krsna tvac" and take it literally as meaning something like "black people" to show that the Indo-Europeans were attacking the native Indian tribes who were black skinned. They, however, forget that languages have metaphorical meanings. We have a similar one in English still to this day; "he has the blackest heart", for example - black can be seen as a negative colour, and I'm guessing that in Sanskrit it is the same.

Yet, such people would overlook "ansana" (mouthless) [RV 5.29.10] which is also used in conjunct with the term Dasyu and not see it as literal, so one either has to cherry-pick what is literal and what is a metaphor for an opponent, or claim that the Indo-Europeans were at war with faceless black people. :areyoucra

For me, the Sarasvati River being described as drying up in the Mahabharata. The Sarasvati river dried up about 1900BCE, and many AIT proponents claim that the Aryans appeared about 1500BCE, that doesn't add up: the Aryans apparently wrote about a river drying up after they got there, and if one claims the Aryans wrote the Rig Veda, then why would they write hymns about a river that had dried up three hundred or so years prior to them coming on to the scene, short of changing the timeline?



However, I'm not quite sure I buy all of the OIT either: I don't believe that the Indian people went out of India and went around civilizing and/or conquering other tribes or anything like that. The idea of a civilization moving out of Africa, going east to India, settling and then going west again through to Europe doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Whilst there are definitely parallels between the languages, and religions of the Indo-Europeans that show they are related to one another, I don't think it's a case of particular tribe of people taking over or civilizing another.

Hell, look at the similarity between Sanskrit and Avestan in some instances:

təm amavantəm yazatəm
tam amavantam yajatam

surəm damohu scvistəm
suram dhamasu savistham

miθrəm yazai zaoθrabyo
mitram yajai hotrabhyah

-- Source: Ancient Scripts: Avestan​

​

I find Zoroastrianism fire-prayers and Vedic Yagyas to be strikingly similar, too.



Just this fool's musings. I'm hardly qualified to make any assertive stance, but I thought I'd throw my half a cent in, and hopefully I will come away with more knowledge. Please forgive me if I have made any mistakes.

 

[TJ73]

Please correct me if I am wrong. Are ther not 3 "races"? Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongolid. And aren't the inhabitants of India caucasians? Iam not following thistheory well and this clarification would help me.

 

[Copernicus]

Actually, Surya made reference to a discussion in a different thread that had developed into a side discussion about the roots of Sanskrit, not Aryan Invasion Theory. There was no debate over AIT, and I suggested that we stop the discussion at the point that he began to bring up the racism charge. As a linguist, I am quite happy to talk about the linguistic issues, which Surya seems to have dismissed without even being aware of what they are. As I pointed out in that thread, I do not care whether the Indo-European tribes that came to inhabit northern India invaded or moved in peacefully. I do not think that there is enough evidence one way or the other to support such a debate. Hence, in order to avoid a descent into pure sophistry, I will not debate AIT. Count me as an agnostic on that one.

Here is my position: Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. It is a liturgical language that belonged to the Indo-Iranian branch of that language family. Linguists usually credit Sir William Jones with having proven the claim that the language family descended from an earlier, unrecorded language that is now dubbed "Proto-Indo-European (PIE)" (although there were quite a few other scholars who had developed such a claim). Linguists in 19th century Europe developed techniques for reconstructing proto-languages, based on sound correspondences between cognate words in the alleged daughter languages. This allowed them to develop a large set of proto-words for PIE. Based largely on reconstructed vocabulary (for PIE was not a written language and there are no records of it), linguists have been able to establish with reasonable confidence that the original homeland of PIE speakers was outside of India (which is sometimes called an "urheimat hypothesis". India was once considered as the historical homeland for PIE, but the linguistic evidence points solidly further to the west (see the Wikipedia page for a map).

As far as I can tell, Surya is completely unaware of the linguistic basis of the urheimat hypothesis. He does not know how languages are reconstructed, nor does he have any real understanding of linguistics as a field of study. (I have been a professional linguist for 40 years.) As a self-described Hindu nationalist, he clearly has an emotional stake in overturning the standard urheimat claim and re-establishing the PIE homeland in India. Hence, he likes to get into debates over AIT, which is not the real discussion here. In fact, Surya has tried to turn my discussion with him into that and make it seem like I was defending AIT. Here is what Surya last posted in the other thread. As you can see below, he actually dismissed the well-established fact that Indo-European languages derive from a common ancestor language:

I am familiar with the linguistic theory and I conclude

1) It is not conclusive
2) It is contradicted by hard empirical evidence

1) First of all, we will begin with facts. PIE is not an actual language that has been discovered, it is a language that has been constructed with linguistic theory. There is no conclusive proof that such a language ever existed. Secondly, the fixing of the origin of original source of PIE was based on spurious theories of linguistic centre of gravity: which states that the origin of a language is to be found where you find the most members of the family and highest diversity. As most of the Indo-European languages are found around Central Asia, it was concluded that the origin was somewhere in the Steeps of Russia. This conclusion was not taken to be axiomatic by other Western scholars at the time, some of which favoured the origin to be in India itself. However, the central Asia thesis was accepted because of its political significance. This lead to Aryan race myths and white supremacy movements(Later used by Nazism).

So for you to argue to posit origins of Aryans in India serves the political agenda of Hindu nationalism, it can equally be argued that to maintain the origins of Aryans in Central asia as Caucasians serves Western political agendas. In fact the Aryan notion has been used for many political agendas in the West.

Unfortunately, for the West, they will have to humble themselves to the fact that there exists different civilisations in the world and these different civilisations differ on various things. Indian civilisation has its own traditional systems of science, medicine, education, economics, religion, literature and its own history - that has nothing to do with the West. Nowhere in Indian history does it mention Aryans coming from outside of India. On the contrary we have a continuous 10,000 year old history recorded by our historians in great detail of the geneology of dynasities that have ruled in India going back to Vedic times, which is the start of Indian civilisation. We have our grammatical tradition and our own language of scholarship(Sanskrit) and a vast scholarship on the Vedas which is thousands of years old. There is a very precise way of reading the Rig Veda using the vyakarana method(Sanskrit grammar) which has been taught to Vedic scholars again since thousands of years.

Now one fine day a Western man turns up in the 19th century and says that thousands of years of our scholarship is wrong, our history is wrong, our Vedas are wrong. Then they proceed to tell us what is right: what is right is that we were invaded by the ancestors of the West in 1500BCE who bought our Vedas. That the original founders of the Vedas were nomadic savages, racists and tyrants and not philosophers and seers. That our 10,000 year history is in fact wrong, and our history is only 3000 years at most. They tell us our grammatical tradition is wrong, and that they have superior methods in reading our own Vedas. Then they tell us we are an inferior race and that we accept the hegemony of their pure breed Aryan race - who have come back to recivilise us.

I am sorry but how can you expect an Indian to not see this as racism? Pretty much our entire history has been rewritten by a people who know barely any Sanskrit, in contempt of thousands years of our own scholarship and our own scholars at the time(who were just as bemused as I am by what the Western scholars were doing)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, it must be admitted to go to a foreign land with a long history and then rewrite their history requires extraordinary evidence. What evidence did the Western scholarship furnish? They didn't furnish any evidence whatsoever. They made up a linguistic theory, and the leading Western scholar even admitted he was guessing.

Linguistic theories are not evidence and nor is linguistics a hard empirical science. Extraordinary evidence must be furnished to show that the Aryans came from Central Asia into India in 1500BCE. And there is absolutely no evidence to date to support this conclusion.

However, hard empirical evidence has indeed shown the opposite. The Indus valley civilisation is consistent with the descriptions in the Rig Veda. The Rig veda describes its geography, its rivers. Fire-altars which are used in Vedic fire sacrifices have been found in the IVC. In addition major Aryan symbols like swastikas have been found there. Moreover, the Rig Veda describes and extolls a river that had long dried up before 1500BCE. This dried up river was the main locus of the majority of Indus settlements and cities found. Therefore it is clear the Aryans were already in India during the times this river was thriving.

This means only one conclusion is possible because the Indo-European migrations started around 2000BCE. The Aryans migrated out from India, rather than vis versa. They took their Aryan culture and language with them and the language proliferated around Central Asia and degraded(Sanskrit is more complex than other IE languages) over time. This conclusion is of course obscene to Western scholarship for it suggests non-Western origins for Western civilisation.

The nationalism argument cuts both ways. Rather, we should take out the nationalism factor from our honest discussion of the matter and simply focus on the preponderance of evidence.

 

[Oberon]

As you can see below, he actually dismissed the well-established fact that Indo-European languages derive from a common ancestor language:

Well established it certainly is. And to anybody familiar with the field, or willing to follow the experts in the field, the fact that PIE was a language (and now work is being done on the reconstruction of PreIE) is just fact. But I told you long ago that trying to explain a field to someone determined to reject it requires either giving up or building from the ground up. And you said:

I can easily explain the basic principles of historical reconstruction and why there is consensus among linguists on that score.

It is easily explained, but to someone who is both skeptical and ignorant of the field, such an explanation is bound to fail.

 

[Breathe]

I see. I agree with you, then, Copernicus.

 

[Copernicus]

It is easily explained, but to someone who is both skeptical and ignorant of the field, such an explanation is bound to fail.

Indeed, Oberon. I said that I could easily explain the principles, not that it would always would be worth the effort to do it. I tried to terminate the discussion, but Surya wanted to make a new thread in which to debate it.

BTW, you failed to quote me two sentences later: " It is true that there will always be people who fail to acknowledge the evidence, but that does not trouble me."

 

[Surya Deva]

Namaste Copernicus,

I think you misrepresented quite a lot of things I said, and added quite a lot of things I did not say. Let us begin with this first:

As you can see below, he actually dismissed the well-established fact that Indo-European languages derive from a common ancestor language

Can you please cite me where you think I said this, because I did not at all say this. It is a well established fact, first discovered by Sir Monier Williams that Indo-European language haves a common source. This is indisputable. However, whether that source is PIE is. PIE is like pie in the sky for me. It in need of proof. You yourself admit that we have never found any records of it, and there are no speakers of it today. So how do you know it really existed Face it, it is a complete theoretical reconstruction. Theory does not equal proof. It is my contention that Sanskrit is the original source and Sanskrit is a real language, and surely enough you can trace all Indo-European languages back to Sanskrit.

As a self-described Hindu nationalist

Where? Where have I described myself as a Hindu nationalist?

linguists have been able to establish with reasonable confidence that the original homeland of PIE speakers was outside of India (which is sometimes called an "urheimat hypothesis". India was once considered as the historical homeland for PIE, but the linguistic evidence points solidly further to the west (see the Wikipedia page for a map).

You are mistaking theory for fact here. It is a linguistic theory that the homeland for PIE is outside of India. There are other theories that say it is elsewhere. Simply, because there is a greater diversity of Indo-European languages to be found in the West is not conclusive proof that the origin of the source of these languages is in the West. A greater diversity of English spoken today is nowhere near the source of England. If we took an average of the greater diversity of English in the world today, the source would not be England.

There is another explanation possible which makes more sense. The Aryans who spoke Sanskrit migrated out from India into various directions, taking their language and culture with them. The language and culture then multiplied through several generations and became lesser and lesser complex(it is a fact that Sir Monier Williams noted that Sanskrit was more complex than other IE languages) The facts supporting this is that the closest language to Sanskrit, with very little corruption of the original Sanskrit is Avestan. Then the further the West you go the more corrupt it becomes, news letters are added, grammatical features are lost. This is consistent with the explanation of language diffusion beginning from India and then multiplying over several generations, become increasingly more corrupt.

It should be noted how you very conveniantly ignore the hard archeaological evidence and only look at linguistic theories. Do you not realise that the archeaological evidence is not at all supporting that the Aryans are from outside of India? How do you reconcile this with your PIE theory?

 

[Surya Deva]

As I pointed out in that thread, I do not care whether the Indo-European tribes that came to inhabit northern India invaded or moved in peacefully. I do not think that there is enough evidence one way or the other to support such a debate. Hence, in order to avoid a descent into pure sophistry, I will not debate AIT.

You are actually arguing in favour of AIT. The original AIT as proposed by Max Muller posited that the Aryans arrived in India around 1500BCE. It does not matter whether they arrived peacefully or came in gung-ho on their horses, the theory still contradicts and falsifies the entire history and scholarship of India, which records its civilisation going back 10,000 years ago to Vedic times. There is absolultely no record or no memory of the Aryans coming from outside of India - the only time, and I repeat the only time this idea appeared was during the 19th century when the British invented the theory. The 19th century was also a time when theories like Social Darwinism, inferior and superior race theories and measuring intelligence by measuring the skull were in vogue. In that time in professional psychology it was recognised as a mental illness if a slave tried to escape from its master.

Again I ask you why should an Indian not take what you are saying about Aryans arriving from the West as racist? It falsifies our entire recorded history and thousands of year old scholarship on the matter. Why are your scholars in a better position to tell us our history than our own scholars are? I am sorry but this attitude certainly reeks of racism and delusions of white supermacy.

based on sound correspondences between cognate words in the alleged daughter languages. This allowed them to develop a large set of proto-words for PIE. Based largely on reconstructed vocabulary (for PIE was not a written language and there are no records of it), linguists have been able to establish with reasonable confidence that the original homeland of PIE speakers was outside of India

I find this rather amusing. You claim that you have reconstructed PIE using "sound correspondences", but then say no records of PIE exist and no such written language has been found. How do you know for certain then that your reconstruction is right? In fact, if you have no records of PIE, how do you know there even was a PIE? You are presenting as proof a completely theoretical construction. That is begging the question. I want hard empirical proof for PIE ever existing at all. Linguistic theories are not hard empirical proof, but in need of proof.

Comparative linguistic is not a hard science, it is merely guessing by comparing words from different languages and inventing rules for how language changes. Archeaology, on the other hand IS a hard science. It is based on hard empirical evidence. On one hand we have your dated linguistic theories from the 19th century, and on the other we have mountains of archeaological evidence from the 20th century(and excavations continue to date in the 21st century) which completely contradict those theories and show the the Aryans to be already be in India during the IVC phase. Again, I ask you, how do you reconcile the hard archeaological evidence with your faith in the linguistic theories?

 

[Oberon]

I said that I could easily explain the principles, not that it would always would be worth the effort to do it.

Too true. This might be one of those times.

 

[Oberon]

I find this rather amusing. You claim that you have reconstructed PIE using "sound correspondences", but then say no records of PIE exist and no such written language has been found. How do you know for certain then that your reconstruction is right?

Because the sound changes are regular and systematic in such a way that they can be reversed.

In fact, if you have no records of PIE, how do you know there even was a PIE? You are presenting as proof a completely theoretical construction.

Evolution is theory. So is gravity. It's based on observations. So is PIE and Pre-IE.

I want hard empirical proof for PIE ever existing at all.

Proof is for mathematics and logic. Not science. Theories are as good as you get, even for "hard" empirical sciences.

it is merely guessing by comparing words from different languages and inventing rules for how language changes.

The dichotomy between hard and soft sciences isn't a great one. All sciences use theoretical frameworks from which predictions are made, and if these predictions are accurate, the theory is upheld. It isn't proved. The same is true with historical linguistics. Prior to the discovery of Linear B, we had an idea what features it would contain. The same can be sade for tocharian. Why? Because we already had a good idea (see especially Brugmann and Delbrück) what other daughter languages would look like. Studies in linguistics work with hard, empirical data, they work with other sciences (e.g. genetics), and they enable theoretical frameworks as accurate and useful as physics.

Archeaology, on the other hand IS a hard science. It is based on hard empirical evidence.

No, it isn't. It's based on a great deal of guesswork. Look at the work of Mariju Gimbutas. Here was an archaelogist who looked at tons of symbols and dolls and interpreted them all as being indicative of goddess worship and egalitarian matriarchies. Only there isn't anything like these societies in recorded histories, and other experts (Ucko, Fleming) came up with more likely intrepretations. But once again, the point is that archaelogists are often given lots of data without the ability to interpret it, and they provide the interpretation based on a theoretical framework.

Since you are interested in archaelogy, though, there is a good essay on the indo-european homeland in
Blench, Roger, & Spriggs, Matthew. (Eds). (1997). Archaeology and Language : Artifacts, Language and Texts. London: Routledge.

On one hand we have your dated linguistic theories from the 19th century

Hardly. See, e.g.

Meier-Brügger, Michael. (2002). Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Mallory, J. P., & Adams, D. G. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lehmann, Winifred P. (1993). Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London: Routledge.

Ridge, Don. (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic: A Linguistic History of English (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clackson, James. (2007). Indo-European Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

That will give you a great idea on recent work in this field.

Again, I ask you, how do you reconcile the hard archeaological evidence with your faith in the linguistic theories?

What hard evidence is that that contradicts mainstream scholarship in indo-european linguistics?

 

[Surya Deva]

Because the sound changes are regular and systematic in such a way that they can be reversed.

Please give an example. I personally don't think lanuguage changes according to some scientific laws. That sounds quite pseudoscientific to me. The changes for sound in language can be affected by many factors, one of the major ones being migration to another culture and mixing with their language. Take for example how English is spoken all over the world, each culture English enters, speaks English in a different way. If you compare Sanskrit with Avestan, they are virtually identical, except only the pronunication is different. There similarity is to be expected because India and Persia border one another, and difference in pronounication is to be expected because of their distance and distinct culture.

Evolution is theory. So is gravity. It's based on observations. So is PIE and Pre-IE.

You are comparing the quanitative empirical sciences to qualitative humanities. The humanities are not considered hard sciences. Their status as "scientific" is questionable in philosophy of science. In a hard empirical science we can measure things and test our theories. How do you test out your theory in comparative linguistics? It sounds like you don't test it at all and just accept it as fact.

Proof is for mathematics and logic. Not science. Theories are as good as you get, even for "hard" empirical sciences.

I have already mentioned earlier in the Watchmaker thread that theory is an invalid means of getting actual scientific knowledge and was rejected in Indian philosophy of science. A view that was held by Karl Popper as well. In any case there is a difference between the theories of empirical science and the theories of humanities. The theories of empirical science are open to falsification and can be tested. If linguistic theories cannot be tested and are not open to falsification they are not valid scientiic theories - they are pseudoscience.

The same can be sade for tocharian. Why? Because we already had a good idea (see especially Brugmann and Delbrück) what other daughter languages would look like. Studies in linguistics work with hard, empirical data, they work with other sciences (e.g. genetics), and they enable theoretical frameworks as accurate and useful as physics.

They evidently do not work with archeaology, because the archeaological evidence is not at all supporting what the linguists have concluded about the Aryan homeland. The archeaological evidence is showng that the Indus Valley already has Aryan features long before the date they predict of their arrival.

No, it isn't. It's based on a great deal of guesswork.

I appreciate that no science is perfect. All science is based on varyings degrees of guess work, including the hard empirical sciences. However, at least archeaology is based on finding actual hard artefacts and empirical evidence. Now, it is true that the interpretations that follow thereof are not always scientific, but at least they are open to falsification. In the case of IVC the hard artefacts and empirical evidence that has been uncovered is pretty conclusive.

* Fire altars that were used in Vedic fire sacrifices have been found
* Swastikas have been found that are a common Indo-European symbol
* A dried up river has been found that is described in the early books of the Rig Veda
* Several features that characterize later Hinduism and India have been found, such as the use of seals, standardized ratios for mud bricks. There is a perfect cultural continuity suggesting no external influence.
* Astronomical data gleaned from the Rig vedas shows them to be as old as 6000BCE.
* The Rig veda describe Indian geography and features consistent with what we find in the IVC
* The only civilisation in the world that would have the technological and scientific sophistication to produce the Rig Veda with its highly complex metre and language is the IVC.
The linguistic stability and philosophical sophistication of the Rig Veda does not at all suggest it is the product of nomads and savages, but the product of a developed civilisation.

The archeaological evidence is overwhelmingly supporting India's own historical records which record their Vedic civilisation going back 10,000 years.

 

[Oberon]

Again, I ask you, how do you reconcile the hard archeaological evidence with your faith in the linguistic theories?

Before we go any further, I'd like an answer to this question: what archaeological scholarship are you referring to which contradicts the findings of historical linguistics?

 

[Copernicus]

Can you please cite me where you think I said this, because I did not at all say this...

It was probably the sentence "There is no conclusive proof that such a language ever existed." However, that doesn't mean that you didn't contradict yourself on this point elsewhere. Since you do not know how to prove the existence of proto-languages, you have no basis for making generalizations.

As Oberon has already pointed out, sound correspondences represent conclusive proof of a common ancestor language. One of the most important discoveries of 19th century linguistics was that sound change was regular. That is, pronunciations of words tend to affect classes of sounds rather than just individual word pronunciations. This discovery allowed linguists to develop methods for reconstructing historical languages. Two major methods were known as comparative and internal reconstruction. The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, actually reconstructed PIE back to the point where he was able to make the claim that certain sounds had existed in an earlier stage of the language that were not extant in any known Indo-European daughter. In the early 20th century, his "laryngeal hypothesis" was spectacularly confirmed when Hittite cuneiform was finally deciphered, revealing consonants in precisely the places he had predicted. That was an excellent example of a scientific verification of a theoretical prediction. BTW, Hittite also knocked Vedic Sanskrit out of its place as the oldest recorded example of an Indo-European language.

It is my contention that Sanskrit is the original source and Sanskrit is a real language, and surely enough you can trace all Indo-European languages back to Sanskrit.

I hate to break the news to you, Surya, but you cannot even trace Hindi back to Sanskrit. Sanskrit was a liturgical and literary language. It was not one of the common spoken languages (prakrits) that gave rise to modern northern Indian languages. Nor, for that matter, are modern Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian) descended from the Latin that is taught in schools. Modern languages descend from spoken variants of an earlier "proto-language". I will grant you that proto-languages are reconstructed ideals of an actual language, and it is unrealistic to take the reconstructions too literally as real spoken forms of the language. But it would be a mistake to take that as an excuse for dismissing their value in establishing geographical origins.

In the 19th century, the Indo-European scholar, Friedrich Schlegel, advanced the hypothesis that northern India was the original homeland of PIE speakers. His urheimat hypothesis was taken seriously and ultimately rejected on the grounds that reconstructed words of PIE suggested a different environment than actually existed in Northern India before 3,500 BC (the rough estimate at the time of when PIE existed as a unitary language). There is a pretty good description of the Indo-Aryan migration in Wikipedia along with its history. That page pretty much describes the position you reject and gives a little bit of information about the controversy that Hindu nationalists have been pushing.

Where? Where have I described myself as a Hindu nationalist?

You described yourself as a supporter of OIT, which you admitted was being pushed by Hindu nationalists. I have no problem with retracting that claim, if you feel that I have unfairly described your politics. Others can read your posts and draw their own conclusions. Just because you push OIT, that does not mean that you are Hindutva, but it is one of their signature issues, as you pointed out.

You are mistaking theory for fact here. It is a linguistic theory that the homeland for PIE is outside of India. There are other theories that say it is elsewhere. Simply, because there is a greater diversity of Indo-European languages to be found in the West is not conclusive proof that the origin of the source of these languages is in the West. A greater diversity of English spoken today is nowhere near the source of England. If we took an average of the greater diversity of English in the world today, the source would not be England.

You see, this is the problem. You just do not understand the lingusitic basis for the claim, so you make things up. Linguistic diversity has nothing at all to do with it. The most salient evidence is in the concepts represented by the linguistic forms--"birch tree", "salmon", "horse", "colt", "chariot", etc. By reconstructing PIE words, we can pinpoint the concepts that people talked about. The word for "salmon" names a fish that did not exist in ancient India. It is a word for a fish in most IE languages, but its cognates in Indic languages have other meanings such as "prize" or "jump". Schlegel's urheimat hypothesis was rejected early on for reasons such as this, and it is no longer considered a serious contender for the homeland. Nowadays, people tend to center their arguments around the Black Sea--steppes of Russia, Armenai, Anatolian peninsula, etc.

There is another explanation possible which makes more sense. The Aryans who spoke Sanskrit migrated out from India into various directions, taking their language and culture with them. The language and culture then multiplied through several generations and became lesser and lesser complex(it is a fact that Sir Monier Williams noted that Sanskrit was more complex than other IE languages) The facts supporting this is that the closest language to Sanskrit, with very little corruption of the original Sanskrit is Avestan. Then the further the West you go the more corrupt it becomes, news letters are added, grammatical features are lost. This is consistent with the explanation of language diffusion beginning from India and then multiplying over several generations, become increasingly more corrupt.

Sir Monier Williams died over a century ago. I'm sure that if he were alive today, he would spend a lot of time studying new developments and insights into language that had taken place since his death in 1899. I strongly suspect that he would have come to the same conclusion that modern linguists have--that Sanskrit was no more nor less complex than other contemporary Indo-European languages at that time. On the one hand, you dismiss the linguistic arguments for PIE as if they were mere speculation. On the other, you advance your own argument on the basis of someone who wasn't even alive when Hittite cuneiform was deciphered. I can only hope that you are beginning to understand why you should not be arguing linguistic theories without ever having taken a course or read a book on the subject.

It should be noted how you very conveniantly ignore the hard archeaological evidence and only look at linguistic theories. Do you not realise that the archeaological evidence is not at all supporting that the Aryans are from outside of India? How do you reconcile this with your PIE theory?

Actually, I think that it points in the opposite direction, since the lingustic argument relies on archaeological information. There is a consensus outside of India that it indicates a different point of origin. Harappans, for example, did not bury their dead with chariots or horses, but those kinds of burials support the Kurgan hypothesis, among others. There is no good evidence that the Harappans even domesticated horses, but words about horses and chariots are universal in Indo-European daughter languages (as it did in the vedic literature). The chariot was an invention that probably facilitated the spread of Indo-Europeans.

 

[Copernicus]

You are actually arguing in favour of AIT. The original AIT as proposed by Max Muller posited that the Aryans arrived in India around 1500BCE..

No, Muller's idea of violent spread did not really fit the model for linguistic migration. After Hittite was discovered to be Indo-European in the 1920s, scholars began to reject the violent invasion theory of language spread. Indo-Aryan culture probably spread more as did languages after the Roman Empire collapsed--through mass migrations. Migrations were fairly common in ancient times, and the Indo-Europeans appear to have arrived in the late Harappan period, as that civilization was in a state of collapse. Hence, Hinduism assimilated many of the features discovered in the ruins of the Harappan culture.

Again I ask you why should an Indian not take what you are saying about Aryans arriving from the West as racist? It falsifies our entire recorded history and thousands of year old scholarship on the matter. Why are your scholars in a better position to tell us our history than our own scholars are? I am sorry but this attitude certainly reeks of racism and delusions of white supermacy.

Surya, when you start spouting this kind of chauvinistic BS, you come off as incapable of reasonable discourse. Nobody is a racist for saying that the Aryans came from outside of India any more than you are a racist for saying that ancestors of most modern Americans came from Europe and Africa. This is an empirical question and calling people racist for disagreeing with your opinion on the matter is really rude.

I find this rather amusing. You claim that you have reconstructed PIE using "sound correspondences", but then say no records of PIE exist and no such written language has been found. How do you know for certain then that your reconstruction is right? In fact, if you have no records of PIE, how do you know there even was a PIE? You are presenting as proof a completely theoretical construction. That is begging the question. I want hard empirical proof for PIE ever existing at all. Linguistic theories are not hard empirical proof, but in need of proof.

You want the proof? You can't handle the proof! If you really wanted proof, you would acquire enough linguistic background to understand what sound correspondences are and how one arrives at them. They are based on the oldest extant records of the various branches of IE. For example, Germanic languages tend to be represented by Gothic, Celtic by Old Irish, Indic by Vedic Sanskrit, etc. In the 19th century, there was initially a "majority rule" principle involved, such that if two languages had a "p" and three had a "b", then "b" won. However, linguists have come to understand that sound change is directional, so their methods of reconstruction became more sophisticated. Nowadays, we understand a great deal more about how phonology works, so we can make better projections of what the original phonetic structures were. Any two languages on the planet are going to have some similarities in vocabulary that just occur by chance, but the ability of researchers to establish sound correspondences across prospective cognate sets (sets of words assumed to be related) is considered beyond the possibility of chance. So it is taken as concrete proof of derivation from a common ancestor language. Comparative reconstruction only works well for languages that go back a few thousand years--the time at which written records appeared. Beyond that, language relationships get much more speculative. For example, many linguists now believe that Turkish, Korean, and Japanese are genetically related, but the evidence for that is much less reliable than the Indo-European evidence, which is the best-researched language family on the planet.

Comparative linguistic is not a hard science, it is merely guessing by comparing words from different languages and inventing rules for how language changes. Archeaology, on the other hand IS a hard science. It is based on hard empirical evidence. On one hand we have your dated linguistic theories from the 19th century, and on the other we have mountains of archeaological evidence from the 20th century(and excavations continue to date in the 21st century) which completely contradict those theories and show the the Aryans to be already be in India during the IVC phase. Again, I ask you, how do you reconcile the hard archeaological evidence with your faith in the linguistic theories?

As I have already pointed out, the 19th century methods are dated. Most of the real progress on the debate has been made since then. It was in the 19th century that your Sir Monier Williams wrote, yet that is where you turn to get support for your outdated "India urheimat" hypothesis. The biggest breakthrough on the IE language family since then from a linguistic perspective was the discovery that Hittite was Indo-European, which was one of the factors that completely knocked the India urheimat hypothesis out of contention. You have based your argument not just on outdated information, but on an inability to look at the matter objectively. You approach it from the perspective of an Indian chauvinist who is less interested in facts than in fighting battles with an imaginary conspiracy of racist foreign scholars determined to disrespect Indian culture and history. That is pure delusion on your part.

 

[Surya Deva]

Namaste,

Apologies for replying late. I have been both busy with other matters, and busy reading more on linguistics in order to understand where you are coming from. I must admit, linguistics does go over my head, and this is perhaps because I have no grounding in this field. I am honest enough to admit the limitations of my knowledge

The field I do have grounding in is philosophy, religion and history, so I will not overstep into your field by discussing linguistics too much with you. However, I will say this much. If linguistics is really a science, its theories are subject to the same falsification criteria as scientific theories are, and as a theory it is not certain knowledge. It is subject to revision and falsification(even hard physical sciences are falsified)

The construction of PIE through the method of looking at sound correspondences and reconstructing the letters in PIE, words and meanings and predicting directionality of migrations is theoretical. I am not going to argue whether these methods are valid or not, again due to my ignorance of linguistics, but I am sure you can admit that PIE is a theoretical construction. It is therefore not certain knowledge.

It is futile to try and convince me this is certain knowledge when it is clear to me it is theory. I so far only see evidence that it is the most succesful theory, but it is not fact.

I would like you to read this academic article on the linguistic aspect of AIT:

Linguistic aspects of the Aryan non-invasion theory

The author concludes:

We have just looked into the pro and contra of some prima facie indications for an Out-of-India theory of IE expansion. Probably none of these can presently be considered as decisive evidence against the AIT. But at least it has been shown that the linguistic evidence does not necessitate the AIT. One after another, the classical proofs of a European origin have been discredited, usually by scholars who had no knowledge of or interest in an alternative Indian homeland theory.
It is too early to say that linguistics has proven an Indian origin for the IE family. But we can assert with confidence that the oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat and for an Aryan invasion of India is wanting. We have not come across linguistic data which are incompatible with the OIT. In the absence of a final judgment by linguistics, other approaches deserve to be taken more seriously, unhindered and uninhibited by fear of that large-looming but in fact elusive "linguistic evidence for the AIT".

After reading this article over and over again I am in agreement with the author that the linguistic evidence does not conclusively establish that the Indo-Aryans are foreign migrants, but in fact the current linguistic evidence could be comparible with OIT as well.

In Indian logic, if there is no relationship of invariable concomitance between the premise and the conclusion then the argument is invalid. e.g., if I look at the wet lawn and conclude it has rained. This is invalid, because it is also possible the lawn is wet because a dam broke nearby, because somebody poured water over it.

In this case there is no relationship of invariable concomitance between the linguistic evidence and AIT/AMT, and therefore it is invalid to conclude that the linguistic evidence has proven AIT and AMT. There are other explanations possible, such as OIT.

Another condition in Indian logic is that the relationship between the premise and the conclusion must not be disproven by empirical evidence If it is disproven, then it means it is an invalid argument. e.g., If I say that fire is cold. This is invalid, because it is contradicted by empirical evidence which proves it is hot. In this case the linguistic theory that predicts that the Aryans originated from Central Asia and entered India in 1500BCE, is contradicted by actual empirical evidence: archeaological, astronomical, geological, textual and genetic evidence. I have now read several different articles presenting the empirical evidence, and it turns out that that it falsifies the the linguistic theory of AIT/AMT.

I will discuss the empirical evidence in a later post.

 

[Surya Deva]

Surya, when you start spouting this kind of chauvinistic BS, you come off as incapable of reasonable discourse. Nobody is a racist for saying that the Aryans came from outside of India any more than you are a racist for saying that ancestors of most modern Americans came from Europe and Africa. This is an empirical question and calling people racist for disagreeing with your opinion on the matter is really rude.

I think in the same vain to accuse me of being Hindutva or a Hindu nationalist just because I support and argue what my own scholarship says is chauvanism and really rude. So If you wish to avoid discussion on political motives, it is best to keep such accusations out of this discussion and to focus only on the evidence presented in the discussion.

I will say, however, in defense of my allegation of racism. It is a fact that Western scholarship on India and non-western cultures has been historically racist. I can, if you want, quote major Western scholars who were proponents of AIT/AMT, on the racist things they said about Indian, Indians and its culture and the clear agendas they admitted to. If you have any wish to understand why so many Indian scholars are playing the racism card, you have to put this into context:

Prior to the British arriving in India and subjugating its people, Indians had their own social systems and institutions, own religions, their own scholarship, their own sciences, medicine, industries, languages, literature, drama, art and a history going back several millenias. All of this was falsified by the British. This amounts to the negation of an entire civilisation.

We were told that all our scholarship was wrong. That our histories that recorded the continuous development of our civilisation over approx 10,000 years was all fabricated nonsense. We were told that philosopher-seers of our religion that composed the Vedas, were in fact nomadic savages that arrived from Central Asia. We were told that our millenias year old scholarship on the Vedas and our Sanskrit grammar tradition were all false, and the British were in a better position to tell us about our own Vedas and history. Then we were told that anything good we had in philosophy, science and mathematics was all borrowed from the Greeks, and rest was irrational, superstitious etc. We were told we were a constantly invaded people and never had any unity of civilisation. We were told that we were heathens, pagans with a beastly religion(the words of Sir Winston Churchill) and we needed to be civilised. In our own land we were called "dogs" and allowed to starve to death(25 million Indian people died over 100 years of British rule) All our industries were taken out and our education system was abolished. In public, our women were taken and raped by British men, sometimes in front of their families to humilate us.

In dating our entire civilisation the most latest dates were sought, because earlier dates would make us contempoaries of Mesopotamia. Muller, who fixed the date of 1500BCE for the beginning of our history, calculated it based on the biblical history of the world being created in 4004BCE. The massive amount of political, scientific and economic development our civilisation experienced was condensed into a period of a few centuries.

If this is not racism, what is it?

 

[Valjean]

Please correct me if I am wrong. Are ther not 3 "races"? Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongolid. And aren't the inhabitants of India caucasians? Iam not following thistheory well and this clarification would help me.

Only three? We're much more colorful than that!
There are lots of racial classification schemes. Almost all identify numerous races: Amerind, inuit, San, Negrito, Pygmy, Polynesian, Negroid, Caucasian, Australian Aborigine, Mongoloid (3 types) and more.
Both the Dravidians and Aryans are usually identified as Caucasian.

Of course, the whole race thing has fallen into disrepute. Anthropologists today consider these differences pretty much arbitrary and biologically insignificant.

 

[Copernicus]

...If linguistics is really a science, its theories are subject to the same falsification criteria as scientific theories are, and as a theory it is not certain knowledge. It is subject to revision and falsification(even hard physical sciences are falsified)

I would say that scientific theories are not "absolute knowledge". However, one can be fairly certain of the truth of some theories. Falsifiability does not mean false. The linguistic evidence that Indo-Aryans originated outside of India is fairly conclusive.

The construction of PIE through the method of looking at sound correspondences and reconstructing the letters in PIE, words and meanings and predicting directionality of migrations is theoretical. I am not going to argue whether these methods are valid or not, again due to my ignorance of linguistics, but I am sure you can admit that PIE is a theoretical construction. It is therefore not certain knowledge.

Nor is any scientific conclusion. Scientific theories are always subject of falsification. If they cannot be falsified, then they are not scientific. The thing is, though, that the preponderance of evidence is against OIT.

It is futile to try and convince me this is certain knowledge when it is clear to me it is theory. I so far only see evidence that it is the most succesful theory, but it is not fact.

I do not need to convince you of anything. You need to convince yourself. So far, you seem determined to convince yourself that the consensus of opinion on OIT is false. If you would look at the evidence objectively, I think that you would arrive at a different conclusion.

I would like you to read this academic article on the linguistic aspect of AIT:

Linguistic aspects of the Aryan non-invasion theory

Oh, yes. Konraed Elst. He is a well-known proponent of Hindutva ideology. You do not consider yourself Hindutva, but you are utterly convinced of their arguments.

Elst's two-part article is tedious and full of errors, half-truths, and omissions. It is the work of a scholar who is completely out of his depth when he examines linguistic arguments. Indeed, I have my doubts that he knows what an isogloss actually is, since he talks about languages "having them". It is a line on a map that distinguishes linguistic usage. In any case, most of his argument is similar to the type of writing you get in holocaust denial treatises. The author talks at great length about irrelevancies such as Saussure's laryngeal hypothesis, even though they ultimately have very little to do with urheimat theories. He does that in order to convince the reader of his grasp of the literature, even though an expert in that literature can easily see that he doesn't understand what he is talking about. Most of the arguments against OIT have to do with the meanings of reconstructed words, which he does not spend much time examining. Why would he? He is not trained in comparative reconstruction, let alone internal reconstruction (which was the basis for the laryngeal hypothesis).

In Indian logic, if there is no relationship of invariable concomitance between the premise and the conclusion then the argument is invalid. e.g., if I look at the wet lawn and conclude it has rained. This is invalid, because it is also possible the lawn is wet because a dam broke nearby, because somebody poured water over it.

If your only evidence is wet grass and you have no other corroborating evidence of any kind, then the inference that it rained would be weak. This has nothing to do with "Indian logic". It is the same in western logic.

In this case there is no relationship of invariable concomitance between the linguistic evidence and AIT/AMT, and therefore it is invalid to conclude that the linguistic evidence has proven AIT and AMT. There are other explanations possible, such as OIT.

However, given the preponderance of the evidence, OIT is not probable. In fact, it appears extremely improbable.

Another condition in Indian logic is that the relationship between the premise and the conclusion must not be disproven by empirical evidence If it is disproven, then it means it is an invalid argument. e.g., If I say that fire is cold. This is invalid, because it is contradicted by empirical evidence which proves it is hot. In this case the linguistic theory that predicts that the Aryans originated from Central Asia and entered India in 1500BCE, is contradicted by actual empirical evidence: archeaological, astronomical, geological, textual and genetic evidence. I have now read several different articles presenting the empirical evidence, and it turns out that that it falsifies the the linguistic theory of AIT/AMT.

Actually, not even Elst went that far, although I am sure that he would have liked to. Basically, his argument was that "AIT" was not proven and that the objections to "OIT" (as he understood them) were not conclusive. The "empirical evidence" that you presented earlier in this thread was insufficient to carry much weight against the consensus of scholars who have studied this question for a very long time.

I think in the same vain to accuse me of being Hindutva or a Hindu nationalist just because I support and argue what my own scholarship says is chauvanism and really rude. So If you wish to avoid discussion on political motives, it is best to keep such accusations out of this discussion and to focus only on the evidence presented in the discussion.

You support your argument with "scholarship" from a well-known Hindutva partisan! Look, it makes no difference whether you are a card-carrying member of their movement. You find their propaganda highly persuasive. You read Elst's essay over and over by your own admission. You could have spent your time more profitably by reading some alternative points of view instead of those filtered through his eyes.

But I do agree with you that this is no place to start throwing around charges of racism, although you are the only one who keeps bringing them up.

I will say, however, in defense of my allegation of racism...

Oh, please don't!

...If this is not racism, what is it?

I think that we should try to examine the arguments without going in to what motivates people to make them. I do not criticize the OIT position because it is promulgated by Hindutva supporters. I criticize it for being inaccurate and misleading about the facts.

 

[reve]

There is always an unresolved muddle but race has very little to do with it. In Ancient Egypt there were several races from the blonde 'Lybians' to the black fellahin who seemed to do all the agricultural work whoever was in charge. There are two clearly different races indiginous there before the first pharaohs arrive around 3200BC. What is striking is the use of hardened copper and megalthic sculture arriving around the world at a similar time with altars, ziggurats, pyramids etc. The Book of Enoch and Genesis suggest around 3500BC (thye days of Jared) an alien race descended on Mount Hermon (Lebanon/Israel) which fills in a lot of gaps including linguistic changes and writing's origin. These 200 'angels' were subsequently detained here, unable to leave and were attracted to human females with the recorded result that heroic and monstrous children were born to them and started the havoc we have now. I note that it has taken then over 5000 years to start to build craft that may be able to return them to where they came from one day. But they have always had the spiritual capacity to travel and possess most humans at will. It is never discussed officially (British Museum etc) and Mount Hermon is an ignored but exceptional archaeological site in the middle of a war zone, covered with dolmens and a stoneage temple atop. The Adam race seems to have had a similar origin some 5 centuries before the Hermon landing. Note Genesis does state another creation of men and women before Adam is mentioned. He is not the first man perhaps the first 'red man' as the word adham suggests this. You may note that there is at Baalbek (Secrets of Enoch suggest Adam is buried in Lebanon) a vast stone over his possible grave and even now no one understands how it was moved there. So I think that we need to look elsewhere for Aryan invasions and language origins. There is no doubt that there was culture and religion on the planet before 3500BC and 4000BC (Adam) but it changed from a Mother Goddess universal culture to one of rivalry between the gods. My memories may be somewhat dusty of the research I did many years ago. 1500BC is late and very human by comparison.