indologists

"Besides the uncertain date of the Avesta, the cases of cultural, stylistic and lexicographical parallelism between texts of this description do not necessarily point to simultaneity."

"Many places in the Vedic literature attest to what may be called a pre-scientific interest in and study of the world, and to attempts at systematizing the knowledge resulting from this study. Much attention is paid to chronology and the calendar... astronomy, cosmology, and cosmogony. This scientific concern is wholly determined by man's ritual and religious interests and constitutes an integral part of one and the same harmonious view of life and the world. This does not, however, exclude the occurrence of references to a certain knowledge of anatomy, embryology, and medical practice. Nor did some linguistic facts—as far as they were utilizable for ritual purposes—escape the authors' notice."

"It is now generally agreed by most authorities on the subject that the Aryan linguistic vestiges in the Near East are to be connected specifically with Indo- Aryan, and not with the Iranian, and also that they do not represent a third, independent group, and are not to be ahscribed to the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Aryan."

"The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically, but it is nevertheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology."

"The geographical horizon of the Avesta is almost exclusively eastern Iranian, but it does have some references which indicate the presence of Proto Indoaryans in northern central Iran, bringing them within striking distance of the Near East. These are the references which occur from time to time in the Avesta to the Mazanian daevas. The adjective in question (mdzainya-) is derived from *mdzana-, the name of a coun try which happens not to occur as such in the Avesta, but whose location is indicated by the fact that it has always been known to be connected with the country later known as Mazandaran, i.e. the territory between the southern shore of the Caspian sea and the Alburz mountain range. In the later tradition this figures prominently as a region hostile to the Iranians and as a notorious home of Devs. The presence of daevas in Mazana indicates the presence of daeva-worshippers, and since we have seen that the daeva-worshippers were the Proto-Indoaryans, we can conclude that the Avestan references to Mazanian daevas indicate their presence also in this region."

"As T. Burrow puts it in his book The Sanskrit Language (Delhi ed. 2001: Motilal Banarsidass, p.4): The relations between the ancient Iranian and the language of the Vedas is so close that it is not possible satisfactorily to study one without the other. Grammatically the differences are very small; the chief differentiation in the earliest period lies in certain characteristic and well-defined phonetic changes which have affected Iranian on the one hand and Indo-Iranian on the other. It is quite possible to find verses in the oldest portion of the Avesta, which simply by phonetic substitutions according to established laws can be turned into intelligible Sanskrit. The greater part of the vocabulary is held in common and a large list could be provided of the words shared between the two which are absent from the rest of the Indo-European."

"The Aryans appear in Mitanni from 1500 BC as the ruling dynasty, which means that they must have entered the country as conquerors."

"In addition, in his The Sanskrit Language T. Burrow finds a few traces of the Sanskrit language among the documents of the Kassite dynasty of Babylon: “In a list of names of gods with Babylonian equivalents we find a sun-god Suriyas (rendered Samas) which must clearly be identified with Skt Surya. In addition, Maruttas the war-god (rendered En-Urta) has been compared with Skt Marut … Among the kings of this dynasty one has a name which can be interpreted as Aryan: Abhirattas: abhi-ratha – ‘facing chariots in battle’.”"

"Burrow, whose The Sanskrit Language (1973) is still the authority in this field, says: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family" (34); he also states that root nouns, "very much in decline in the earliest recorded Indo-European languages", are preserved better in Sanskrit, and later adds, "Chiefly owing to its antiquity the Sanskrit language is more readily analysable, and its roots more easily separable from accretionary elements than… any other IE language" (123, 289)."

"“… in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It woul be easy to produce, more or less ad infinitum [,] a list of forms like Skt nabhi-, Gk omphalos ‘navel’, which although inherited directly from the primitive IE period, and radically related [,] are irreducible to a single original. In fact detailed comparison makes it clear that the Indo- European that we can reach by this means was already deeply split up into a series of varying dialects.”"

"On February 16, 1918 I went to Suratagadha* [Suratgarh] again, to make from there a tour to the west and explore the ancient theris,† which my travellers had referred us being found in large numbers all along the dry bed of the Ghagghar. This river, locally known under the name of Hakaro or Sotara, but commonly referred to as the nali ‘canal,’ or dariyava ‘sea,’ irrigated in ancient times all the northern part of what now forms the territory of the Bikaner State, from Bhatanera [Bhatnir]—the modern Hanumanagadha [Hanumangarh] to Vijnora [Bijnor, close to the international border], and thence running across the territory of Bahawalpur, went to join the Indus."

"From the vestiges of antiquity which are still abundantly scattered along its bed, it is clear that the Ghagghar once bathed with its waters a florid and prosperous region. Now the bed is dry, and like an immense road of glaring whiteness, crosses a scene of desolation, which is only broken here and there by a small village built of mud, or a field of rape-seed. Otherwise the river bed is barren, a clean sheet of argil, slippery and impracticable to the camel in the rains, hard and intersected by cracks during the rest of the year, and on both its banks and sometimes even in the middle the ancient theris raise their heads all red with fragments of bricks and pottery."

"For hundreds of years before Buddha's time, movements were in progress in Indian thought which prepared the way for Buddhism."

"Barring any new discoveries, neither internal evidence from the Veda, nor archaeological evidence, nor linguistic substrata alone can make the turning point in any given hypothesis. This situation should be the most persuasive case of all for scholars to allow the questions to unite them in interdependence, rather than suspicions to divide them in monistic theory-making. It is far too early for scholars to begin taking positions and constructing scenarios as if they were truths."

"Hindus have a greater respect for the spoken word than do people in the West. Not only every word in a mantra, but practically every sound and every word in the language is called akshara in Sanskrit, which means "the indestructible." Akshara is also a name for God. A true mantra should be sung not spoken. Indian scriptures call Brahma the Creator "the first singer." Our world is said to have sprung from the mantra he sang. In the West, these ideas are probably utterly foreIgn, and yet there are traces of similar teachings.""

"The fire-altars of Kalibangan and Lothal are so far without parallels at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Indeed, it has been asked [by Raymond and Bridget Allchin]: "Fire- worship being considered a distinctly Indo-Aryan trait, do these {ritual hearths of Kalibangan] carry with them an indication of an Indo-Aryan presence even from so early a date?" This hypothesis new seems quite plausible to me, if "Indo-Aryan" here is understood to refer to carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran, who had become quickly absorbed into the Indus Civilization, culturally and linguistically. It is supported further by the cylinder shape of the famous Kalibangan seal showing a Durga-like goddess of war, who is associated with the tiger. The goddess on the Kalibangan cylinder seal is said to be similar in style, especially the headdress, to one depicted on a cylinder seal from Shahdad [in Kerman on the desert of Lut in Iran, a major centre of the Bronze Age cultural tradition]. Seated lions attend to a goddess of fertility on a metal flag found at Shahdad."

"As a philologist, I lack the archaeological knowledge to tackle the problem in all its aspects."

"Other such Dasa demons are 'the loud-shouting Dasa with six eyes and three heads', a boar ivaraha) whom Trita slew with his metal-tipped inspired speech (RS 10,99,6), Urana with 99 arms and Arbuda (RS 2,14,4), and the Dasa Vyarnsa who wounded Indra and struck off both of his jaws, before Indra smashed his head with the weapon (RS 4,18,9; 1,101,2). The Dasa dragon (ahi) , from whom Indra wrests the waters (2,11 ,2), has a counterpart in the A vestan aii! dahako."

"The Indo-European homeland need not be identical to the area of horse domestication, but should be connected to it. The ways in which names and technical knowledge . . . spread should be explored."

"The lack of a clear Proto-Indo-European word for 'donkey‘, given the presence of domesticated donkeys throughout most of the territory where horses were domesticated and where the Indo-European tribes must have lived, can be explained by assuming that *ekhwos was originally used with the meaning 'donkey‘ as well as 'wild horse; horse‘. ...[the PIE speakers lived in] Central and Eastern Asia, where paleozoological data show that the domesticated donkey is a recent introduction."

"If horseback riding really did began at the turn of the IV mil. B.C. before the dispersal of Proto-Indo-European, it did not leave traces in the vocabulary of the later dialects. . . . Thus it cannot be proven that this type of ancient . . . horseback riding had originally been connected with Indo-Europeans."

"Indeed Ivanov (1999), who has undertaken by far the most comprehensive study of the cognate terms for horse in Indo-European as well as the adjacent languages of Northern Caucasian and Hurrian, points out that "the Indo-European homeland need not be identical to the area of horse domestication, but should be connected to it. The ways in which names and technical knowledge . . . spread should be explored"."

"As Elizarenkova (1992) notes, "either one comes to know things due to archaeological findings and in this case their names and purpose may remain unknown, or only the names of the things are known from the texts, but the things themselves, as well as their purpose, are unknown" (129)."

"Sir Mortimer's theory is sustained by no literary evidence, it must rest entirely on archaeological facts and their interpretations."

"“An essential characteristic of the vocabulary of this text is polysemy,” argues Tatyana J. Elizarenkova (1995: 285), who notes that double references create “serious obstacles for our comprehension of the text [...] In a large group of Vedic words this polysemy acquires a symbolic character.”"

"In Old Iranian, Proto-Aryan s has become h. In old Persian an ethnic name Daha- is attested, also as a proper noun in the administrative tablets found at Persepolis; the masculine plural is used as the name of a province of the Persian empire, placed before the similarly used name of the Sakas in a Persepolis inscription of Xerxes (h 26). In the Greek sources Herodotus (1,125) is the first to mention the people called Daoi, as a nomadic tribe of the Persians. More accurate information on them , however, is delivered by Alexander's historians. According to Q. Curtius Rufus (8,3) and Ptolemy's Geography (6 ,10,2) , the Dahas lived on the lower course of the river Margos (modern Murghab) or.. in the northern steppe area of Margiana. Pomponius Mela (3,42), based on Eratosthenes, tells that the great bend of the river Oxus towards the northwest begins near the Dahas (juxta Dahas), Tacitus (Ann. 11,10) places the Dahae on the northern border of Areia, mentioning the river Sindes (modern Tejend) as the border. These placements agree neatly with that of Namazga V culture of Margiana and Bactria [in greater Iran]."

"Parpola's account has received criticisms from various other quarters. Sarianidi (1993b) notes: It should be indicated that the available direct archaeological data contradict the theory, suggested long ago, concerning the intensive penetration of the steppe Andronovo-type tribes into traditional agricultural areas. Direct archaeological data from Bactria and Margiana show without any shade of doubt that Andronovo tribes penetrated to a minimum extent into Bactria and Margianian oases, not exceeding the limits of normal contacts so natural for tribes with different economical structures, living in the borderlands of steppe and agricultural oases."

"The same terms are applied indifferently to the human enemies of the Aryans and to the fiends, and no criterion exists by which references to real foes can be distinguished in every case from allusions to demoniacal powers." "Individual Dasas" whom Keith picks out as human examples "are Ilibica, Dhuni and Chumuri, Pipru, Varchin , and Cambara, though the last at least has been transformed by the imagination of the singers into demoniac proportions"."

"Dasyu, a word of some- what doubtful origin, is in many passages of the Rigveda clearly applied to superhuman enemies... Dasa, like Dasyu, sometimes denotes enemies of a demoniac character in the Rigveda."

"We learn from the Vedic Index: "In some passages the Panis definitely appear as mythological figures , demons who withhold the cows or waters of heaven ... It is difficult to be certain who a Pani was. It is, however, hardly necessary to do more than regard the Panis generally as non-worshippers of the gods favoured by the singers; the term is wide enough to cover either the aborigines or hostile Aryan tribes as well as demons. ""

"It is certain ... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India., .. If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river, south of the modern Ambala."

"Nothing is more unsatisfactory than to attempt to define Indo-European society on the assumption that the Indo-Europeans knew only what can be ascribed to them on con- clusive evidence. Ex hypothesi, there were great dispersals of peoples from the original home, and those who wondered away were unquestionably constantly intermingling with other peoples . . . and it is not to be wondered at that in new surroundings new words were employed; still less can it be a matter of surprise that peoples which ceased to be in contact with natural features soon dropped the names which had become use- less."

"By taking the linguistic evidence too literally one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet but not rain or hands!"

"The word seems beyond doubt to be connected with the root seen in the Greek pernemi, and the sense in which it was used by the poets must have been something like 'niggard'. The demons are niggards because they withhold from the Aryan the water of the clouds: the aborigines are niggards because they refuse the gods their due, perhaps also because they do not surrender their wealth to the Aryans without a struggle. The term may also be applied to any foe as an opprobrious epithet, and there is no passage in the Sarnhita which will not yield an adequate meaning with one or other of these uses. But it has been deemed by one high authority?" to reveal to us a closer connexion of India and Iran than has yet suggested itself: in the Dasas Hillebrandt sees the Dahae, in the Panis the Parnians, and he locates the struggles of Divodasa against them in Arachosia. Support for this view he finds in the record of Divodasa's conflicts with Brisaya and the Paravatas, with whose names he compares that of the Satrap Barsentes [of Alexander's time] and the people Paruetae of Gedrosia or Aria [in the same period]. Similarly he suggests that the Srifijaya people, who wereconnected like Divodasa with the Bharadvaja family, should be located in Iran, and he finds in the Sarasvati, which formed the scene of Divodasa's exploits , not the Indian stream but the Iranian Harahvaiti. Thus the sixth book of the Rigveda would carry us far west from the scenes of the third and seventh which must definitely be located in India. But the hypothesis rests on .too weak a foundation to be accepted as even plausible"

"Another problem is how to account for Indo-Iranian isolates which have been borrowed into Uralic [...which form part of...] the new vocabulary, which most probably was acquired by the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia."

"I use the term substratum to refer to any donor language, without implying sociological differences in its status, so that 'substratum' may refer to an adstratum or even superstratum."

"In the case of Indo-Iranian, there may have been early differentiation between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches, especially if we assume that the Iranian loss of aspiration in voiced aspirated stops was a dialectal feature which Iranian shared with Balto-Slavic and Germanic (cf. Kortlandt 1978:115). Nevertheless, Proto-Indo-Iranian for a long time remained a dialectal unity, possibly even up to the moment when the Indo-Aryans crossed the Hindu Kush mountain range and lost contact with the Iranians."

"Starting with the assumption that loanwords reflect change in environment and way of life, we get the following picture of the new country of the Indo-Iranians. The landscape must have been quite similar to that of their original homeland, as there are no new terms for plants or landscape. The new animals like camel, donkey and tortoise show that the new land was situated more to the South […] This picture, which is drawn on exclusively linguistic arguments, is a strong confirmation of the traditional theory that the Indo-Iranians came from the north. […] as we have seen above, there are reasons to believe that the Indo-Aryans formed the vanguard of the Indo-Iranian movement and were the first to come into contact with the original inhabitants of the Central Asian towns. […] the Iranians […] were pushing from behind."

"...the Vedic index. This book is an encyclopedia of historical and sociological knowledge extracted by study of the Vedic texts. It is based on a thorough review of Orientalist research, including especially the work of German Orientalists, but it is at the same time very much a British reading of the Vedic texts and the Orientalist interpretation of them."

"The Sarasvatī comes between the Jumna and the Sutlej, the position of the modern Sarsūti . . . There are strong reasons to accept the identification of the later and the earlier Sarasvatī throughout [the Rig Veda]."

"The Greek form of the name, Parnos«: (from Iranian * Parna-) , corresponds to Sanskrit Pani-, if it is assumed to be a "Prakritic" development of the reduced grade form *Pmi-, The full grade seems to be found in the name Parnaya- attested as an enemy of the king (Divodasa) Atithigva in Rlgveda] Slamhira] 1,53,8 and 10,48,8. These names may go back to the same Aryan verbal root as the name of the Dasa king Pipru, namely pr- (present piparti, pr1)ati) 'to bring over, rescue, protect, excel, be able'. The ar:r• variation reflects a dialectal difference within Indo-Iranian. Some other proper names of the Dasa chiefs are also clearly of Aryan origin, for example Varcin- 'possessed of (vital) power' (ct. ~S varcas = Avestan varscan 'vital power')."

"A. Parpola is an abundant writer, but not very rational."

"Perhaps it may be asked—is there then no limit? Can we equally go back to 3000 or even 4000 BCE? ... The highest possible date for the Vedic deities, and of many elements of Vedic culture, not to speak of possible reminiscences of older periods, is a very different matter."

"In order to account for this fact, we are bound to assume that the language of the original population of the towns of Central Asia, where Indo-Iranians must have arrived in the second millennium BCE, on the one hand, and the language spoken in the Punjab, the homeland of the Indo-Aryans, on the other, were intimately related."

"The etymologies of the names used by the Rgvedic Aryans of their enemies thus speak for their above suggested identification with the carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran, and for the proposal that these were speakers of an Aryan language."

"As these dosas, and especially the association between the gall and the fire, are already known in the Vedic literature, the tridosa theory cannot have been borrowed in India from Plato. On the contrary, as during the Persian domination of Greek Asian countries and a part of India, scientific intercourse has been easy, an influence of the Ayurvedic theories on those described by Plato is quite probable. In any way, we have several direct references in the Hippocratic Collection to the borrowing of some Indian drugs and Indian medicinal formulas in Greece. In the period of the expansion of Indian culture toward Central Asia and China, and toward Indo-China and Indonesia beyond the seas, Indian Ayurvedic medicine has been one of the main matters of export, along with astronomy, religions, and arts."

"Bühler (1894), utilizing evidence from ancient Jain and Buddhist sources, found it inconceivable that "the ancient Indians raced through the so-called Chandas, Mantra and Brahmana periods at a furiously fast pace" (246)."

"It is certain, as S. B. Dikshit and B. G. Tilak have amply emphasized, that it is only thus that one can interpret the statement of SB. In spite of the systematic doubt from Thibaut, Whitney . . . and other authors, who have refused to accept a conclusion arrived at by Dikshit and Tilak, the ancient dates attributed to some Vedic texts, referring to the Pleiads [Krttika], and not only the text of the SB, but also the Buddhist lists . . . point to a real determination of the vernal equinox and of the movement of the Sun through Pleiads."

"To conclude, the culture and proper names of the Mitanni Indo-Aryans were dominated by the horse and the chariot. Indeed, the Mitanni Indo-Aryans seem to have been the prime motors in the introduction of chariotry into the West Asian warfare around 1500 bce."

"The hymns specify by name individual Aryan kings and their Dasa or Dasyu foes , with genealogies. Thus Indra helped Divodasa Atithigva, the king of the Trtsus, in , vanquishing Dasa Sambara, who is mentioned about twenty times in the Rgveda. Divodasa's descendant was king Sudas, most famous for the battle of ten kings (RS 7,18 & 33 & 83). Sudas fought against Dasas as well as Aryans: RS 7,83,1 " ... Slay both the Dasa enemies and the Aryan: protect Sudas with your aid, a Indra and Varuna." Similarly Indra aided Rjisvan, son of Vidathin, to conquer Dasa Pipru, whose name occurs eleven times . .Dabhiti pressed Soma for Indra and was aided by the god, who sent to sleep 30,000 Dasas (RS 4,30,2) and bound a thousand Dasyus with cords (~S 2,13,9), so that the Dasas Cumuri and Dhuni were overcome and their castles destroyed (~S 6,18,8). Other probably historical enemies of the Aryans who are called Dasa and mentioned by name are Varcin, whose 100,000 warriors were slain by Indra; Drbhika and Rudhikra (E-S 2,14,3 & 5); Anarsani and Srbinda (~S 8,32,3); Arsasana (~S 1,130,8; 2,20,6); and Ilibisa (E-S 1,33,12). What an important role the struggles with their enemies played in the lives of the Aryans at this period is illustrated also by the names of some of their own kings: the son of Purukutsa was called Trasadasyu "one who makes the Dasyus tremble""