Origin of Vedas.pdf

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ORIGIN OF VEDAS

By K S Krishnan

March 7, 2016


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Contents

0.1 preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1 Vedic Literature 91.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 The Origin of the Concept of Indo-European Language Family 11

2.1 The Indo-European Language Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3 Theories Regarding Origin of Indo–European Languages 17

3.1 Linguistic Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

3.2 Kurgan Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3.3 Anatolian Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

3.4 The Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

3.5 Out of India theory(OIT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463.5.1 Evidences for Large Migrations from Ancient India . . . . . . 48

4 Origin of Vedic Language 57

4.1 Archaeological Evidences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

4.1.1 Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or BMAC . . . . 64

4.1.2 Evidence from Harappa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

4.1.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

4.2 Elite Dominance and Trickle in Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

4.2.1 The Mitanni Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

4.2.2 George Erdosy‘s Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

4.3 Anthropology and Aryan Invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1024.4 Vedic Ritual Mathematics and Indo-European Chronology . . . . . . 103

4.5 Evidences from the Vedas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

4.5.1 The Dasarajna Hymns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

4.5.2 Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

4.5.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

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4.6 Rg-Veda and the Iranian Avesta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

4.6.1 History of Avesta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1134.6.2 Contents of Avesta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

4.6.3 Similarity Between Vedas and Avesta . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

4.6.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

4.7 Evolution of Indic Languages–Some Unresolved Issues . . . . . . . . 135

4.7.1 Retroflexion in Indo Aryan Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

4.7.2 Substitution of ‘r’ for ‘l’ in Indo Iranian Languages . . . . . . 137

4.8 The Horse and Indo-Aryans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

4.9 Genetic Evidences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

4.10 The Sarasvati River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

4.11 Astronomical Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

4.11.1 Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

4.11.2 Other Astronomic Evidences From Vedic Literature . . . . . 172

4.11.3 Evidence of Kali Yuga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

4.11.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

4.12 Meaning and Contents of Rig-Veda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

4.12.1 Structure and Organisation of Rgveda . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

4.12.2 Meaning of Rig-Veda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

5 Conclusion 203

0.1 preface

I had started writing this as brief notes, mainly for my own reference, as I tend toforget what I read. The materials and data for it were collected from various sources;various internet pages as well as written texts during the past few years. In courseof time, the notes became unmanageable, as they were too many. It was then that Ibegan to write it in the present form. It was never meant for anybody else. This mayhave resulted in some inconsistencies and repetitions that escaped my editing. Asthe sources are varied, it is possible that some of the information may be outdated,contested or even of doubtful authority. Thus, in case anybody happens to read it,it should be treated only as a source of preliminary reading on the subject.

I am also not able to acknowledge the sources of some of the information and dataI have included here, as I did not make a note of it at the time I read it. I hope theseare not significant, as these should be mostly bits and pieces I picked up in casualreadings. In any case I have no claim of deep scholarship in the subject, or rathersubjects, I have dealt with in this book and will have no hesitation in admittingit, if it turns out that some of these bits and pieces had appeared in some other


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document earlier. Besides, my intention in undertaking this work is only to present

facts and data and their different interpretations, already in the public domain, ina consolidated manner and not to attempt development of new interpretations or anew model on my own.

Even though I have obtained the information contained in this book from varioussources, this is not a ‘cut and paste’ job. The language is mostly my own, exceptwhere I have quoted the text, and I have arrived at the final conclusion on my own.

The origin and expansion of Indo-European Languages in the pre-historic pastis a deeply mysterious and interesting subject. Indo European languages are spokenby almost half the humanity now and the geographical spread of these languagesvirtually covers the earth. This is so unlike all other known language families, asall these, more or less, have remained within their limited geographical areas. The

circumstances and dynamics of the spread and enormous expansion of Indo-EuropeanLanguages in Eurasia in pre-historic times is not quite clear at present. We do havemany theories, but all of them have too many week points and leave too manyquestions unanswered. An enormous number of scholarly works on the subject haveappeared in the past 150 years, each of which is in disagreement with others inrespect of various aspects of the problem. Almost every aspect of it is controversial.

All these theories are essentially based on linguistics. But linguistics cannot de-termine chronology or dates of phases of language evolution it is enquiring into; but,at best, only a comparative order. Attempts have been made to solve this by linkingarchaeological discoveries with historical linguistics. But then archaeology cannotdetermine the language spoken by the people who produced the artefacts recovered

by it, unless a piece of writing from that period that we can read is also recoveredfrom the same stratigraphic context. There is nothing that really can connect archae-ological finds, other than actual writing, to languages except subjective inferences,asbones and pots found in archaeological digs do not talk. Here we are enquiring intopatterns of human migrations almost a millennium before writing was first inventedanywhere.

From the turn of the century we began getting results from Archaeogeneticsbased on Y-DNA mutations, which can throw light on ancient migrations. Furtherimprovements of these methods has resulted in development of tools to extract similarinformation from autosomes also and now to extract it from ancient DNA data, it‘sanalysis and interpretation, which is revolutionising our understanding of prehistory,

as ancient population migrations can be reconstructed far more clearly than before.Though the methods of archaeogenetics seems to be promising, it has not been ableto resolve the issue emphatically, as the pattern of the DNA mutations are foundto be extremely complex. Also data sets of ancient DNA available for study formdifferent locations at present is so limited that it may not be enough to arrive at anemphatic generalised conclusion.


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Part of the difficulty in unravelling the mystery arises from the fact that most

of the language forms in use in the relevant period have become extinct now. Theearliest attestation of an Indo–European language is from the end of third millen-nium BCE. By then not only the original Porto Indo–European dialect, but also it‘sdirect proto daughter dialects had undergone so much transformations and evolutionin their syntax, semantics and phonetics, that these original dialects had probablybecome unrecognisable from their historical known forms or had become incompre-hensible by speakers of the first attested forms of the language family. we now dependon forms of these dialects, reconstructed using tools of historical linguistics. Thesereconstructed forms are used to build the tree of language families and the order of it‘s different nodes, apart from the syntax, semantics and phonetics of the extinctdialect forms. Thus the reliability of these reconstructed forms are of crucial impor-

tance. But it is not clear how reliable these are. Models of various related theoriesinvolve reconstructed proto-languages. But the existence of these proto-languages isat best conjectural, as there is no direct or even indirect empirical evidence for theiractual existence. As one author said, these conjectures will be inadmissible in anycourt of law.

We could be certain about these reconstructed forms only if we have clear empir-ical evidence like a written text from that period, as the reconstruction of unknownproto-languages is inherently subjective. In the absence of archaeological finds of writing, enquiries and interpretations regarding the forms, and more important forus, the pattern and chronology of branching of the language family, have to often re-lay on subjective logic and arguments. Models based on such speculative arguments

can only be a hypothesis; even good hypothesis, but not widely accepted theories;leave alone historical facts. These differing perceptions and profusion of models pointto the distinct possibility that there are still gaps in our understanding of the ac-tual process of Indo-European language group‘s origin and expansion as well as thehistory of Indic Languages in pre-historic times. It will probably require far moreresearch in different domains like linguistics, archaeology, genetics and other relatedfields to unravel the mystery and arrive at an acceptable model which can accountfor all known data, without the need to ignore adverse data.

My primary focus in this book is on the ‘Origin of Vedas’ and ‘Vedic Language’and it‘s arrival in India in pre-historic times. But since Vedic Language is clearlyan Indo-European Language, I have tried to go into various theories regarding the

origin and expansion of Indo-European Languages also.The mainstream view now is that Vedas were composed by a group of nomadic

pastoralists who trickled into Indus Valley from Central Asia and were living inpresent day Punjab and nearby areas in around 1500 BCE. Our current knowledgeabout these Vedic Aryans, Vedas and the Language Vedic are mired in controversieswith arguments and counter arguments based on linguistics, archaeology, anthropol-


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ogy, geography, geology, hydrology, astronomy, demography, genetics and evidence

from Vedas itself. None of these arguments, and models constructed based on themcan be considered conclusive as most of them seem to be hypotheses based on evi-dences that may have alternate explanations or based on data and techniques thatmay have room for refinement. As I am not an expert who can authoritatively com-ment on these arguments, I only intend to list them here, taking the liberty to makemy layman’s comments, where I feel one is in order.

I have quoted English translations of a number of Rgvedic verses in this book.For all these I have used the 1896 translation of Rgveda by by Ralph T. H. Griffith,not because I found it to be particularly good, but mostly because it was readilyavailable. Besides, I found that most other available translations are quite similar.I will quote Griffith‘s own words on how he went about the task.

”My translation, which follows the text of Max Muller’s splendid six-volume edition, is partly based on the work of the great scholiast Sayanawho was Prime Minister at the court of the King of Vijaynagar - in whatis now the Madras District of Bellary - in the fourteenth century of ourera. Sayana’s Commentary has been consulted and carefully consideredfor the general sense of every verse and for the meaning of every word,and his interpretation has been followed whenever it seemed rational, andconsistent with the context, and with other passages in which the sameword or words occur.”

However, in spite of his great scholarship and commendable effort in undertakingsuch a difficult task, the translated verses often are disjointed, inconsistent andincoherent. This is in fact also true of other translations available to us today. Apartfrom the archaic nature of the language, this may be due to the multiple meaningsmany of the words and expressions used in these hymns can have. Choosing thecorrect meaning the composers intended for them is often impossible as we haveno way of knowing the context of the verses and hymns. Besides, these hymnsmay have used colourfully symbolic expressions extensively and seem to containmany metaphors, allegories and allusions. Without having access to the underlyingmaterials and circumstances, it may be impossible to make any clear sense of these.Thus, the translations I have quoted in this book should be treated as tentative or

possible and not as absolute.I would also like to make a note of the frequent tendency among those who par-

ticipate in the discussion on IE homeland and related issues to arrive at conclusionsbased on little or very little empirical data and unconvincing interpretation of theseoften flawed data, disregarding other equally valid scenarios. Regrettably, the sub-

ject has acquired ideological underpinnings, resulting in scholarly discussions often


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degenerating into personal attacks. This is now a serious impediment to honest

intellectual enquiry into the issues discussed below.It might seem that I have gone off course and discussed many unrelated issues at

different points in this book, thereby losing focus on my core theme. But I includedthese as I felt these are useful as background material, and will be helpful in lookingat the issues in the correct perspective. Before concluding, I must also admit thatsome of the arguments and points made by me might seem too speculative; but Iincluded those as I felt that they are rational, plausible and warranted; or in someother cases, as I thought the points may be interesting even as just a possibility. Inany case, these are not crucial to my main theses, which is that the data availableat present is insufficient to arrive at a firm conclusion regarding the origin andexpansion of Indo European languages, and the Indo Aryan branch of it and thus it

will be premature to attempt one. I also believe that all the present models, withoutexception, are all in need for further enquiries and confirmation.


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Chapter 1

Vedic Literature

1.1 Introduction

The term, Vedic literature is not very well defined as different authors treat differentclasses of texts as part of it. Assuming the term to mean only the four parts of Vedas and the six branches of Vedangas, it constitutes the largest and possibly theoldest body of literature inherited by mankind from pre-historic times. Many ancientHindu texts (Muktikopanishad 1.12-13 and Vishnu Purana 3.6.1-7) mentions thatthere were 1180 (21+109+1000+50=1180) Veda Sakhas or versions or recensions;Rgveda (21 versions), Yajus (109), Samam (1000) and Adharvaveda (50). Each of

these versions is in four parts; the Veda proper or Veda Samhita; Brahmana Texts(Texts about conduct of rituals); Aranyakams (continuation of Brahmana Texts, butoften philosophical) and Upanisads (end of Vedas that primarily deals with Brahman;the underlying, all pervading, ultimate reality that transcends everything). Besides,there were said to be six Vedanga texts (limbs of Vedas) for each of the versions;namely Kalpam (rituals), Niruktham (etymology), Siksha (phonetics), Chandas (me-ter), Vyakaran (grammar) and Jyothisham (astronomy/astrology). Each version of Kalpam again consisted of four texts; namely Sroutam (conduct of rituals), Gri-hyam (household religious practices), Dharmam (social, political, ethical laws) andSulbam (meaning is measuring threads. Calculations and procedure for construct-ing sacrificial altars etc or treatises of mathematics in Vedic Literature); making 13

texts (4+5+4) in all for each version of Veda. By this account total number of textsof Vedic literature would be 1180*13=15340. The number of texts available to ustoday, in more or less complete form, is less than 500. Many others are available inincomplete or corrupted form. It should be noted that many texts available todaypurportedly belonging to some of the above classifications could be later composi-tions. Further there are indications of existence of many others in the past as there

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are references to them in other extant texts.

The language of these texts is now usually known as Vedic, a sub branch of Porto Indo-European Language. Vedic is believed to be the form of the languagefrom which Sanskrit evolved later. It also might be another branch of Porto Indo-Aryan language as the syntax and semantics are often very different. Vedic itself had undergone considerable changes during the composition of these texts and isusually differentiated as Early Vedic, Middle Vedic and Late Vedic. Michael Witzel,Professor of Sanskrit, Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University hasanother scheme of dividing Vedic into five stages. My attempt here is a review of the evidences of origin of the verses, the language, as well as that of the people whospoke the original form of it and the chronology of their arrival in South Asia.


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Chapter 2

The Origin of the Concept of

Indo-European Language Family

2.1 The Indo-European Language Family

The discovery of the sea route from Europe to India towards the end of 15th centurybrought many European visitors to India in the subsequent years. Some of themlike Thomas Stephens; an English Jesuit missionary and Filippo Sassetti; an Ital-ian merchant noted and wrote about the similarities between Indian and Europeanlanguages and that between Sanskrit and Latin. Writing in 1585, Filippo Sassetti

noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian, like deva/dio for ‘God’,sarpa/serpe for ‘snake’, sapta/sette for ‘seven’, ashta/otto for ‘eight’. This observa-tion is believed to have resulted in the beginning of the idea of an ‘Indo-Europeanlanguage family’. Later, an Englishman named ‘James Parsons’ found that wordsfor numerals in Bengali, Hindi, Persian and 15 European languages are very similarand also that these are entirely different from those in Chinese, Hebrew and Turkish,again pointing to the possibility of a common origin of these 18 languages. But thiswork was largely neglected by the academic world at that time. It was probablySir William Jones, who rediscovered the striking similarities between some of theoldest languages known in his time (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Persian, Gothic andCeltic) and brought it to the notice of academic circles, about two decades after

the initial discovery by Parsons. The first use of the term Indo-European (IE) isattributed to Thomas Young in 1813. It became apparent from Indo-European (IE)language studies that hundreds of dead and living languages spoken in the vast areafrom Europe, Iran, South Asia and parts of Central Asia and west Asia had a com-mon origin. Franz Bopp‘s “Comparative Grammar” which appeared in the middleof 19th century is considered by most as the starting point of linguistics as well as

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12CHAPTER 2. THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE F

Indo-European language studies as an academic discipline. In this work he tries to

analyse and describe the original grammatical structure of the languages, trace theirphonetic laws, and investigate the origin of their grammatical forms. Since thennumerous paths breaking studies has lifted the status of linguistics to one of a social‘science’ as its predictive power has been demonstrated on a number of instances.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were speculations that Indiancaste system was on account of a major invasion/migration from Egypt in pre-historictimes and Egyptian priests became Brahmins and elites became Kshatriyas in India.The scholarly consensus that the Vedic language, Vedas and its composers were notnatives of India, but were outsiders who came to India as immigrants or invaders wasa consequence of the emergence of Indo-European Language studies as an academicdiscipline in the nineteenth century. The evolution of this model may be briefly

stated as follows.When the West encountered Sanskrit and became aware of its unusual richness in

the 18th century, the discovery brought about a fundamental change in its outlook.Sanskrit was instrumental in the development of the ‘Indo–European’ world-view andits associated fields like philology, linguistics and comparative studies. It promptedthe re-imagining of Europe’s history, the origin of its peoples and languages inde-pendent of the Bible. The term used to denote the European languages evolvedfrom ‘Japhetic’ signifying Christian / European-ness of white people, to ‘Aryan’ re-ferring to the distinct race and language spoken by Caucasian people thought tohave migrated to Europe in pre-historic times, to the present one of Indo-European.Until the IE world-view gave them an alternative non-religious vision, the history of

Europe was thought of as the history of Christianity and their origin as given in theBible.

Thus by eighteenth century, European scholars came to conclude that their lan-guages belonged to a large family with Sanskrit as the mother language. On February2, 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, and a noted Orientalist of thetime and a co-founder of Royal Asiatic society in 1784, delivered a lecture in Cal-cutta regarding the similarities he found between Sanskrit and classical Europeanlanguages.

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful struc-ture; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more

exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a strongeraffinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, thatcould not possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed,that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing themto have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer ex-ists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing


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2.1. THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY 13

that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different

idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian mightbe added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing anyquestion concerning the antiquities of Persia”, he said

.

His Discourse and other writings ignited an academic interest in the evolutionaryhistory of languages and Indo-European Languages in particular. Many well knownscholars of the time such as Voltaire, Immanuel Kant and Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel were firmly of the opinion that Sanskrit was the mother of all IE Languages.

But for various reasons this conclusion was modified and a consensus emergedthat some time in the prehistoric past there was a Porto Indo-European (PIE) lan-

guage, a people who spoke the language and an area where it was originally in useor an Urheimat (home land) of Indo-European (IE) Languages, from where the IEpeople spread to distant lands. The term “Porto” implies that the language is notonly dead with no written record or is unattested, but also that it has left no directtrace whatsoever. By the second half of nineteenth century most European linguisticscholars were of the view that the Urheimat of IE must have been somewhere in EastEurope, north of Black sea and Caspian Sea.

By this time linguists also began to refer to the original IE speakers as ‘Aryans’.Origin of this term is uncertain. It often appears in the ancient texts of Hinduismand Zoroastrianism, the Rig-Veda and the Avesta respectively. It was a term used inthese texts for the elites of the society, mistaken by early Indologists for a separate

race of Porto-IE language speakers. In Iran, variants of the original can still befound in the name of Iran itself. But the term did not seem to refer to a particularrace either in Iran or India. It appears that in Vedic literature only members of “Puru” tribe or more particularly the ‘Bharatas’, were addressed as “Arya” andnot the various other “Aryan” tribes related to “Purus”. According to Max Muller,etymologically the word Arya was derived from ar-, “plough, to cultivate”. Therefore,Arya means “cultivator” farmer, landlord (civilized, sedentary?). In the 1830s, theterm “Aryan” was adopted for speakers of Indo-European languages in general, inthe unsubstantiated belief that this was an ethnic self-identifier used by the Porto-Indo-Europeans, i.e., the prehistoric speakers of Porto-Indo-European dialect. MaxMuller is often identified as the first writer to speak of an Aryan “race” though

later he himself emphatically stated that the term has nothing to do with race.However the idea stuck and continued to be treated as the race of early IE speakers.This development in subsequent years led to the development of the concept of asuperior, heroic, warlike, tall, white skinned, blue eyed, handsome “Aryan race” whoconquered most of Eurasia and imposed their culture and language in these landsin a very short time through superior physical and technological abilities. Some


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authors went further and claimed that advance of human civilisation, from second

millennium BCE, was mostly the result of inherent superiority of “Aryan race”. Bythe early 20th century this idea became closely linked to Nordicism and later Nazism,which posited Northern European racial purity and superiority over all other peoples.This also led to a racialist reinterpretation of Indian society, texts and history byBritish colonialists in late19th century as a people who were always subjugated andruled by superior races, in a way that justified their colonial rule. Also it couldbe said that the arrival of the Europeans was nothing more than a reunion of longseparated relations. It also afforded an opportunity to the elite of India to identifythemselves as racially related to the rulers. Following the end of World War II andthe discovery of the barbaric genocide that the self-styled “Pure, Superior Aryans,destined to rule the world” had caused, the word ‘Aryan’ ceased to have a positive

meaning in general Western understanding. Thus the concept of Aryans as a race ismostly the product of European politics of ninetieth and early twentieth centuriesand has little factual basis. Scholarly consensus now is that the anthropological orgenetic basis of the concept of race itself is doubtful. Thus, at present, the expressionIE (Indo European) is used instead of Aryan as few now believes that there ever wasa distinct racial or ethnic group that could be identified as Aryan. Similarly, theterm ‘Indic Languages’ is preferred to that of ‘Indo-Aryan’ Languages for Vedic,Sanskrit and their daughter languages in South Asia.

Porto Indo-European Language or PIE and it‘s Immediate Porto Daugh-

ter Languages

The expression ‘Porto’ implies that there now exist no textual or physical evidence of the existence of PIE or its immediate daughter languages. These are assumed to haveexisted on the basis of conclusions reached by use of tools of ‘Historical linguistics’and is reconstructed on the basis of cognate words in the present daughter languagesor extinct, but attested daughter languages. At least ten proto daughter languagesof PIE are now recognized. These are

1. Celtic, with languages most commonly spoken on the north-western edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man. Most of these languages are facing extinction except the Welsh Language.During the 1st millennium BC, they were spoken widely across Europe, inthe Iberian Peninsula, from the Atlantic and North Sea coastlines, up theRhine valley and down the Danube valley to the Black Sea, the Upper BalkanPeninsula, and in parts of Anatolia.

2. Germanic, with languages spoken in England, throughout Scandinavia andcentral Europe to Crimea;


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3. Italic, with languages spoken throughout the Roman Empire and, later in

modern-day Italy , Portugal, Spain, France, and Romania;

4. Balto-Slavic, with Baltic languages spoken in Latvia and Lithuania, and Slavicthroughout eastern Europe, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia;

5. Balkan, with languages spoken mostly in the Balkans and far western Turkey;

6. Hellenic, spoken in Greece and the Aegean Islands and, later, in other areasconquered by Alexander (but mostly around the Mediterranean);

7. Anatolian, a family of languages spoken in Anatolia or modern Turkey inancient times.

8. Armenian, spoken in Armenia and nearby areas including eastern Turkey;

9. Indo-Iranian, with languages spoken from India through Pakistan and Afghanistanto Iran and Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey;

10. Tocharian, a group of languages spoken in Western China till about the firstmillennium BCE.

Then there are “language isolates”1 which have no apparent relationship to anyother known language or branches of a larger family with only one surviving daugh-ter language. For instance, Albanian, Armenian and Greek are commonly called

‘Indo-European isolates’. While these are part of the Indo-European family, they donot belong to any established major branches like the Italian, Celtic, Indo-Iranian,Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Slavic or Germanic branches, but instead form independentbranches of their own.

Of these, all known branches of Porto-Anatolian and Porto-Tocharian are extinct.Linguists believe that Anatolian or more particularly Hittite was the first to breakoff from PIE. Some linguists also talk about a distinct dialect of PIE less Hittite.The next to break away was Tocharian, which moved east to the Tarim Basin inWestern China. The accepted chronology of the breaking off of the remaining proto

1‘Isolates’ are those languages which have no demonstrable genetic relationship to any otherknown language. Commonly cited examples include Sumerian, Basque, Korean, Ainu and Bu-rushaski, though in each case there are authors who claim to have demonstrated a relationshipwith other languages. Another example is ‘Elamite Language’. Elamite was an extinct languagespoken in the ancient Elam region in present-day South West Iran from 2800 to 550 BCE. It hasno demonstrable relatives and is usually considered a language isolate, though some authors believethat Proto-Dravidian descented from Elamite or in some way related to it. The Kassite and Hurrianwere also probably Language Isolates. Harappan also could well be one such isolate. The absenceof an established relatives make interpretation of the language very difficult.


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languages was more or less in the order of Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic,

Hellenic, Armenian and the last Indo-Iranian, which also finally split into Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan. As should be expected, there are differing opinions aboutthis model.

The oldest attestation of an Indo-European language is of Hittite, a branch of Porto-Anatolian, in the ‘Kultepe’ Cuneiform texts. These clay tablets were recov-ered from Kultepe in north eastern Turkey or ancient Anatolia. The ancient cityof Kanes or Kanish was near modern village of Kultepe and was inhabited contin-uously from the Chalcolithic period to Roman times flourishing as an importantHattic/Hittite/Hurrian city. These tablets created some time around 20th centuryBCE are written in ‘Old Assyrian’, which is not an Indo-European language. Hittiteloanwords and names in these texts constitute the oldest record of any Indo-European

language. Oldest known written record in an IE language is again in Hittite in the16th century BCE ‘Anitta text’ in a cuneiform script, although Hittite itself hasbecome extinct since. Anitta was a king of Kussara, a city somewhere in Anatoliathat is yet to be identified. He was the earliest known ruler to compose and record atext in the Hittite or an IE language. This text seems to be a inscription that recordsome of Anitta’s heroics.

Thus there is a gap of about two millennia or less between the time of emergenceof Porto-Indo-European language as per the currently popular model, and its firstattestation. By this time we find that Indo-European languages came to have vastgeographical spread from Atlantic coast of Europe to South Asia. There is littleactual evidence for the mechanics or dynamics of this astounding spread.


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Chapter 3

Theories Regarding Origin of

Indo–European Languages

3.1 Linguistic Evidence

Historical linguistics has produced a mountain of literature in the last 200 yearsand is full of hypotheses, supporting arguments and disagreements. Some of themore important linguistic theories which have influenced the debate on IE originand expansion, and by extension that of the Vedic Language, are discussed below.

All living languages evolve over time, adding and losing vocabulary, morpho-

logical behaviour and syntactic structures and changing in the ways they are pro-nounced by their speakers. For example, these evolutions account for the differencesbetween American and British English, and for the fact that neither Americans northe English can understand old English texts, including the writings of Shakespeare,without first being familiar with the basics of the older forms of the language. Sim-ilarly PIEs descendant dialects underwent natural sound change, absorbed otherlanguage’s vocabulary and assumed unique characteristics. Over time, in the ab-sence of close interaction, they became mutually incomprehensible and over manycenturies they evolved into hundreds of modern Indo-European languages. PIE itself could not have been an original language. It must have evolved from some earlierforms over many centuries and millennia. As it is an unattested language one can

only say that a dialect must have been in use at some time in the past from whichall IE languages evolved. Scholarly work of the past 200 years is beginning to throwlight on this process.

The tree of hundreds of living and dead Indo European (IE) languages has beenreconstructed indicating the language families which had branched off from PortoIndo European (PIE) dialect and its various pre historic daughter languages and

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18CHAPTER 3. THEORIES REGARDING ORIGIN OF INDO–EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

the chronology of their branching off. This is done by identifying and analysing

common word forms, grammatical and phonetic features of genetic origin and thosethat are known as ‘Shared innovations’ (acquired by borrowings as against genetic)among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from a commonmother language. Thus Porto-Indo-Iranian was determined to be a later branch of PIE from which Porto Iranian and Porto Indo Aryan evolved. Avestan, Old Persian,Middle Persian and still later various present day languages of Iran, Afghanistan andareas neighbouring these are daughter languages of Porto Iranian. Vedic, Sanskrit,Pali and various Prakrit dialects spoken in the Gangetic Plains in the first millenniumBC, like Ardha Magadhi and Sauraseni, were daughter languages of IA. Apabhramsadialects (Middle Indo-Aryan languages) in use in the first millennium CE evolvedfrom these, and most North Indian languages of the day are daughter languages of

Middle Indo-Aryan languages. Concurrently Paninnian or Classical Sanskrit contin-ued to be a live language as a preferred medium of scholarly and literary compositionamong Sanskrit scholars from the time of Panini till recently. It was also continuedto be used for oral communication till Muslim rule was established firmly in manyparts of India and even after that among Sanskrit literate people from different partsof the country.

Linguists have reconstructed the basics of the PIE and various cultural, life styleaspects of its pre-historic speakers. For example the presence of root words in thereconstructed PIE for ice and for flora and fauna found in cold regions is assumed tolimit the area of the Urheimat to such regions. For similar reasons they were believedto be nomadic pastoralists, who were fond of singing and who buried their dead in

individual pits. It is believed to have been an early Bronze Age culture centered onanimal husbandry and domesticated horse.

The Centum-Satem isogloss was usually thought of an important hypothesis inrespect of the process of evolution of the Indo-European language family, at leastin the beginning. An isogloss is the geographical boundary of certain linguisticfeatures, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. It was devised by von Bradke in the late 19th century andrelates to the different evolution of the dorsal consonants1 of Porto-Indo-European(PIE). In some branches, the palatals fell together with the velars (articulated atthe back of the mouth). These branches are known as ‘Centum’ branches, named

1Dorsal consonants are articulated with the middle part of the tongue or the dorsum. Theyinclude the palatal, velar, alveolo-palatal and uvular consonants. These, particularly the velarconsonant, is the most common consonant in human languages, though there are some exceptions.In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where anobstruction of wind flow occurs in the vocal tract. It can be an active articulator, like some part of the tongue or a passive location, like some part of the roof of the mouth. Along with the manner of articulation, this gives the consonant its distinctive sound.


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3.1. LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 19

after the Latin pronunciation for hundred. In some other branches the labiovelars

fell together with the velars (articulated in the front of the mouth). These branchesare known as ‘Satem’ branches, named after the Avestan pronunciation for hundredor Sanskrit ‘Satam’. The centum group includes Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenicand Tocharian. Tocharian, a now dead language spoken till the first millenniumAD in parts of western China, appears to be a special case where all three PIEdorsal series have merged into a single sound. This has led some writers to suggestthat Tocharian does not fit the Centum–Satem model. The satem languages includeBaltic, Slavic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian. Palatalization is believed to be a one-wayprocess transforming velars into palatals but never the reverse; so that the velar or‘centum’ forms had to be the original and the palatal or ‘satem’ forms the evolvedvariants. Vedic, which is a satem language, had to be a later branch of IE if this

model is correct and it must have come to India from outside since it is believedthat the origin of PIE was outside India. Another linguistic argument was that thevowel differentiation in Latin and Greek was original, and that in Sanskrit was asubsequent development.

Yet another somewhat controversial philological theory is “the linguistic centreof gravity principle” which states that a language family’s most likely point of originmust be in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of the ten major subbranches of Porto Indo-European is found in India, whereas the remaining eight (alsoexcluding Tocharian) branches of Indo-European are all found in Central-EasternEurope and areas proximate to these. Because it requires a greater number of longmigrations from the centre to the area of each sub family, an Indian Urheimat of

IE or origin of the language family, is far less likely than one closer to the centre of Indo-European linguistic diversity, which is East Europe. But there are a number of scholars who are sceptical of this theory and its universal applicability.

One of the main reasons for 19th-century philologists to exclude India as a can-didate for Urheimat status, apart from Centum-Satem isogloss hypothesis, was thefindings of a fledgling new method called linguistic palaeontology. The idea was thatfrom the reconstructed vocabulary of PIE, one could deduce which flora, fauna andartefacts were familiar to the speakers of the proto-language, hence also their geo-graphical area of habitation. Thus, speakers of a language that has words for snow,sleigh, reindeer, and seal must live in a very different place from those of a languagewith words for palm, coconut, rice, and elephant. Based on the consensus reconstruc-

tions of PIE, its speakers must have lived in a temperate environment, where snow,birch trees, beech trees, and wolves were common features, but salt-water bodieswere not. Reconstructions of words for rye, barley, sickle, and to plough tell us thatPIE speakers had agriculture, while words for sheep, goat, pig, and cattle mean thatthey raised animals. The reconstructed PIE also has the roots like ‘ekwos’ for ‘horse’and ‘kwekwlo’ for ‘wheel’. The presence in the common vocabulary of words denot-


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ing northern animals like the bear, wolf, elk, otter and beaver seemed to indicate a

northern Urheimat; likewise, the absence of terms for the lion or elephant seemed toexclude tropical countries like India. But this kind of conclusions seem to be ratherspeculative.

Based on these linguistic theories most scholars came to accept the hypothesesthat Vedic language had entered India from the North-West. The date first suggestedby Max Mller Muller was 1200 BCE, mostly based on the then accepted chronologyof Biblical events. Max Mller Muller‘s proposal was primarily based on his firmbelief in the Biblical date of the creation of the world on October 23, 4004 BC. Thepresently accepted date of the arrival of the language in South Asia is slightly earlier(1500-1700 BCE). As Indo-Aryan was a later branch of IE and Urheimat of PIE wasassumed to be somewhere in Eastern Europe, the obvious conclusion was that the

language entered India form that area in the time frame indicated above.There are a number of other conjectures, hypothesizes and theories which point

to the origin of Vedic language outside India, though some of these have lost main-stream academic support. Even with regard to the Satem-Centum and vowel dif-ferentiation, there are differing views among scholars. For example the proposedSatem–Centum split was undermined by the discoveries of Hittite and Tocharian,which were centum languages located within the hypothetical satem geographicalrange. Tocharian presented particularly serious difficulties as it is isolated in theFar East, separated from centum language areas in Europe by thousands of miles of rugged terrain and hostile people. The finding that, Tocharian, the most eastwardIndo-European language, was a “centum” language, has put the concept of centum-

satem division untenable and the division is thus no longer considered a real isogloss,though the term remain useful and thus is used widely. Most authors now believethat each branch became centum or satem independently. This division based ona single isogloss was further weakened by continued research into additional Indo-European isoglosses, many of which seemed of equal or greater importance in thedevelopment of daughter languages. Philip Baldi explains:

“...an early dialect split of the type indicated by the centum-satem con-trast should be expected to be reflected in other high-order dialect dis-tinctions as well, a pattern which is not evident from an analysis of sharedfeatures among eastern and western languages.”

The division of the Indo-European languages into Satem/Centum groups is heldby many scholars now to be outdated as it is based on just one phonological fea-ture. Thus it is doubtful if it or the current interpretation of the various linguisticfeatures discussed above can be treated as the primary source of evidence in thespread of Indo-European languages in its present form. Colin Renfrew notes that


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the satem–centum distinction “is not in itself accorded much significance today” as

it is considered “too simplistic”. Besides, many other isoglosses identified since areinconsistent with the interpretation of centum-satem contrast.

An isogloss is an indicator of geographical proximity, rather than of genetic re-lationship, in respect of dialects and languages sharing that isogloss. Thus when, insome cases, some of the dialects or languages sharing the isogloss move geograph-ically away from each other into non-contiguous areas, and continue to retain thelinguistic feature, that linguistic feature is a testimony to their geographical prox-imity at some time in the past. An examination of the different extant or attestedbranches of the Indo- European language family shows different linguistic featuresfound as isoglosses linking different branches to each other. The branches sharingany particular isogloss are not necessarily spoken in contiguous areas at present, and

many are not on record as having been spoken in contiguous areas even in historicaltimes. Thus the only conclusion that can be drawn is that these branches, in theform of some stage of the respective ancestral dialects of Porto-Indo-European, werespoken in contiguous areas in the original Indo-European homeland or close to it,before they separated from each other or at various points and stages during theprocess of their separation.

The immediate daughter dialects of Porto-Indo-European dialect, can be dividedinto three groups on the basis of their break from the main body, the Early Dialects,the European dialects, and the Last Dialects.

1. The Early Dialects: Anatolian (Hittite), Tocharian.

2. The European dialects: Italic (south-west of Europe), Celtic(central west),Germanic (north west), Baltic (north east), Slavic (east).

3. The Last Dialects: Albanian, Greek, Armenian/Phrygian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan.

It is significant that, while there are isoglosses shared between Early and Euro-pean Dialects and those between European and late dialects, the Early Dialectsand the Last Dialects, and, more particularly, the Early Dialects and Indo-Iranian,do not share any isoglosses with each other. One of these isoglosse, identified be-tween Iranian, Armenian/Phrygian and Greek is difficult to explain in terms of the

currently popular ‘Kurgan’ model, as this linguistic feature is not present in Indiclanguages. Therefore this could have evolved only when the three dialects were inclose and contiguous areas; and yet separated from Indo-Aryan branch. The ‘Kur-gan’ model cannot accommodate such a situation as the split between Indo-Iranianand Indo-Aryan is believed to have happened long after the common dialect splitfrom Armenian/Phrygian and Greek.


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According to Victor H. Mair (MAIR 1998:847-853), for example, the Indo-Iranians

were already separated from the speakers of the Anatolian and Tocharian Dialects by3700 BCE, from the speakers of the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Al-banian Dialects by 3200 BCE, from the speakers of the Greek Dialect by 2500 BCE,and from the speakers of the Armenian Dialect by 2000 BCE. Other authors haveslightly different chronology with minor differences; but the comparative order is thesame. Thus, there could not have been a stage when Iranian, Armenian/Phrygianand Greek were in contiguous areas and yet seperated from Indo-Aryan.

Many isoglosses identified so far are quite complex, baffling and difficult to ex-plain within any of the proposed models of ‘Original homeland’ and chronology andsequence of IE expansion. One such particularly difficult isoglosse is the one thatincludes Hittite and Phrygian (in Anatolia) in the centre south, Tocharian in the far

east, Celtic in the far west and Italic in the south-west of the purported IE home-land. Hittite, Tocharian and Italic are the dialects which are thought to be the first,second and third respectively, to migrate from the original purported homeland inthe Steppes and they share a few isoglosses almost exclusively with each other. Afundamental attribute of isoglosses is that “every single isogloss can be mapped outshowing all the dialects which share that isogloss lying in a contiguous area, now orat some time in the past, without any intrusions of any dialect which does not sharethat particular isogloss”. These need not be in contiguous area at present, but theymust have been so at some time in the past for a substantial period of time of at leasta couple of centuries or more. It would have been impossible under the ‘steppe homeland model’ for the speakers of Tocharian, Hittite, Italic and Celtic to have coexisted

in close contiguity and yet apart from all other IE dialects at any time, somewhere inthe steppes, so as to have developed these features. If these four dilects had movedtogether in any direction away from the others, at least two of these groups wouldneed to retrace their steps and move in the opposite direction later, through almostcertainly hostile territory, as the first attested geographical area of these languagesare west of the steppes in case of Celtic, south-west in case of Italic, south in case of Hittites and, most problematically, far east in case of Tocharian. A long migrationthrough areas of total strangers , for thousands of miles, during a period lastingmany decades or centuries would have been devilishly difficult; if not impossible, inancient times. No one would have allowed complete strangers speaking unknownlanguages and with unfamiliar lifestyles moving among them. Besides the strangers

also would try to satisfy their basic material needs from the often constrained localsources; a sure recipe for conflict. They would have been annihilated or absorbedby the people in the areas through which they might have tried to pass. Such amovement of large groups of strangers would be unthinkable even in today‘s liberaland globalised societies. On the basis of the currently popular model, it is impossiblethat these dialects could have been in contiguous areas, but separated from all other


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IE dialects, at any time in the past.

Tools of Historical Linguistics

In the course of the 19th century Indo-European studies evolved as a science in itsown right. As part of this, various techniques and methods were developed whichhelp the linguists to arrive at conclusions about previous stages of a language. Someof such techniques are

1 COMPARATIVE METHOD or CM. This refers to the practice of comparingforms in two or more languages with a view of discovering regularities of corre-spondence. It is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparinglanguages to establish their historical relatedness. comparative linguistics aims to

construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changesthat have resulted in the documented languages. A number of methods for carryingout language classification have been developed, ranging from simple inspection tocomputerised hypothesis testing. Such methods have gone through a long process of development.

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonologicalsystems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languagesusing techniques such as the comparative method. From them, regular sound corre-spondences between the languages are established, and a sequence of regular soundchanges can then be postulated, which allows the proto-language to be reconstructed.A simple instance from English and German concerns the consonants /t/ and /s/.

Where English has /t/ German has /s/: water : Wasser, better : besser, foot : Fuss.It is obvious here that English /t/ corresponds to German /s/ in non-initial position.Other Germanic languages like Swedish also has retained ‘t’ in vatten, betra and fotfor water, better and foot. This would imply that it is German which has changedthe original /t/ to its present /s/.

A major concern of the comparative method is validating a postulated originalform, which is not attested. By looking at a several genetically related languageslinguists can attempt to reconstruct the ancestor language from which the modernrelated languages are derived. Since linguists do not have, in most cases, actualaccess to written records of the proto-language, they work backwards from modernlanguages or older languages for which records are avilable, to reconstruct the proto-

language. This is done by identifying ‘cognate’ forms in these languages. But thereal test is that the reconstruction should match reality.

In linguistics, ‘cognates’ are words that have a common etymological origin orhaving the same linguistic derivation as another (e.g. English father, German Vater,Latin pater). The word ‘cognate’ derives from the Latin ‘cognatus’ or ‘blood rela-tive’. In linguistic research, it is generally excluds doublets and loan words, although


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broader definitions are sometimes used.

After several millennia of gradual evolusion, cognates often acquire very differentphonetic shapes. For example, English hundred, French cent, and Polish sto are alldescendants of Porto-Indo-European parent. Thus cognates often become unidenti-fiable as such. They also do not need to have the same meaning, which may havechanged as the languages developed separately. Cognates also do not need to havesimilar forms. The semantic change can be quite dramatic. For example, English‘guest’ and Latin ‘host’ (enemy) are cognates, even though their meanings are dia-metrically different. Similarly, the Hebrew word for ‘impudence’, and its ClassicalArabic cognate have opposite meaning. On the other hand, phonetic similarity of semantically equivalent words can also be a matter of chance resemblance, as inEnglish ‘day’ and Latin ‘die’. False cognates are words that are commonly thought

to be related or thought to have a common origin, but which linguistic examinationreveals to be unrelated.

linguists have developed many tools to verify if words in different languages arecognats, some of them using highly complex algorithms. These are mostly based onsound law and uses knowledge of systematic sound correspondences or phonologicalchanges that they have undergone. Cognates may often be easily recognised, but inmany cases authorities often differ in their interpretations of the evidence. Basically,the proceedure is as follows. Words that exhibit some phonological similarity areanalyzed in order to find systematic correspondences of sounds and in turn these areused to distinguish between genuine cognates and borrowings or chance resemblances.It is standard to look for cognates among basic vocabulary items, e.g. body parts,

close kinship terms, low numbers, basic geographical terms, since these are morelikely to be words which are preserved from the proto-language, rather than borrowedat a later time. The standared for such lists is ‘The Swadesh list’.2. It is a list of basic concepts for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistics. Translationsof the Swadesh list into a set of words of selected languages allow researchers toquantify the interrelatedness of those languages.

Comparative method uses ‘cognates’ in different languages with a common originto arrive at conclusions. But correct identification of cognates is often problematic.The fundamental assumption in recognising cognates is that “sound laws have noexceptions”. When it was initially proposed, critics proposed an alternate position,summarized by the maxim “each word has its own history”. Several types of changedo in fact alter words in non-regular ways. Unless identified, they may hide ordistort laws and cause false perceptions of relationship. Sporadic changes, suchas irregular inflections, compounding, and abbreviation, do not follow any laws.

2The Swadesh list is named after the U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh, who created the first suchlists. After many alterations and corrections, he published his final 100-word list in 1971.


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For example, the Spanish words palabra (‘word’), peligro (‘danger’) and milagro

(‘miracle’) should have been parabla, periglo, miraglo by regular sound changesfrom the Latin parabola, periculum and miraculum, but the r and l changed placesby sporadic metathesis. All languages borrow words from other languages in variouscontexts. They are likely to have followed the laws of the languages from which theywere borrowed rather than the laws of the borrowing language. These uncertaintiesmake the Comparative method as well as the identification of ‘cognates’ in differentlanguages a hard task and error prone. Some scholars observe that even a systematicsound change is at first applied in an unsystematic fashion, with the percentageof its occurrence in a person’s speech dependent on various social factors. Thesound change gradually spreads, a process known as lexical diffusion. Thus they donot always apply to all lexical items at the same time. Such exceptions leave the

neogrammarian’s axiom that “sound laws have no exceptions” often doubtful.2 INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION This is the second major technique in re-

constructing previous stages of languages. The basic principle is that one uses ev-idence from within a single language to gain knowledge of an earlier stage. Suchevidence is usually available as unproductive or unused forms, which are taken asremnants of those which were formerly active.

These techniques are based on a number of assumptions and principles. Perhapsthe most important of these is ‘The Uniformitarian Principle or UP’, sometimes alsoreferred to as the ‘Principle of Uniformity’. It very simply claims that the processeswhich we observe in the present can help us to gain knowledge about processes inthe past. The reasoning behind this is that we must assume that whatever happens

today, must also have been possible in the past; whatever is impossible today, musthave been impossible in the past. If we observe today that water boils at around100 degrees Celsius, we can logically assume that it also did so at any given pointin the past. This principle, which originated in the natural sciences, has also beenapplied in the humanities and in linguistics, when looking at historical developments.In linguistics, however, the Uniformitarian Principle may have to be taken with apinch of salt, since there is no clear and simple correlate to the laws of nature. The‘Uniformity’ we observe in nature is on account of ‘The laws of nature’. But it isuncertain if there are any equivalent ‘laws of human phonetics’. From what we canobserve, phonetic changes appear to be random.

General knowledge of linguistic processes often helps to formulate useful laws of linguistics. One such is the assumption that palatalisation is a process that alwaysresult in a forward movement, from the velum to the palate. The shifting of anarticulation from a velar position to a palatal one is a very common phenomenon. 3

3Velars are produced by raising the back part of the tongue to the soft palate or the velum,whereas palatals are produced by raising the front part of the tongue to the palate.


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Examples of velar consonants in English are ‘k’ and ‘g’ and for palatals is ‘t’. Again,

an instance of a knowledge about some aspect of the nature, that is of a generalnature, leading to validation of an individual case would be with morphology. If alanguage has fewer inflections than another, then it is probably right to assume thatthe latter is older or at least more conservative, as inherited inflections tend to belost by phonetic attrition. Applying general knowledge in particular cases assumesthat linguists have an accurate conception of what constitutes a typical and whatan unusual change, but it is difficult to quantify typical and unusual. This is hardlyever self evident and thus there is often disagreement among scholars on this point. Besides it is a sort of inductive reasoning, where a few specific instances are usedto formulate a general rule. Such logic can be valid in many cases, but is apt to bewidely off the mark in others. Thus the validity of this type of conclusions may be

probable and not definite. Another fundamental assumption is that rate of retentionof items is relatively constant for all languages throughout time: about 80% of thebasic vocabulary of 200 items (86% of the 100 item list) is retained over 1000 yearsand 20% (14% for 100 item list) lost/shifted during this time. But the validity of such an assumption should be considered suspect. During times of hugely destructiveinvasions and wars, large migrations, climate changes etc., the pace of evolution of dialects also can change. In ancient/medieval times instances of such disturbanceswere probably common. The assumption of uniformity in a proto-language, implicitin the comparative method, is also problematic. Even in small language communitiesthere are always dialect differences, whether based on area, gender, class, or otherfactors.

Reconstruction of proto languages and and the language ‘trees’ with its nodes,using such assumptions and principles can be a distinct possibility, but cannot beconsidered unassailable. However many linguists appear to have unshakable faithin such models. Quoted below is what David W. Anthony and Don Ringe haveto say in their article titled ‘The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic andArchaeological Perspectives’ that appeared in Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2015.linguis-tics.annualreviews.org.

“It is true that we can recover only part of any prehistoric language: alarger or smaller portion of its lexicon and a larger or smaller fragmentof its grammar, depending on how much inherited material is preserved

by the actually attested daughter languages. Some details may remainunrecoverable, and our reconstructions are sometimes temporally out of focus, including slightly older and slightly less old details in the samereconstruction. However, each protolanguage that we reconstruct mustbe an approximation of some real language spoken by a real community,for two different reasons. One basis of our confidence is the nature of the


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comparative method by which we reconstruct protolanguages: It exploits

the observed regularity of sound change by means of simple mathematics,yielding categorical results that can be replicated by other researchersand checked both for internal consistency and against information fromother sources.

The other reason for our confidence is the Uniformitarian Principle (UP),familiar from other historical sciences such as paleontology. As usuallyapplied in linguistics, the UP holds that unless external conditions canbe shown to have changed in some way that can be proved to have animpact on human language, we must assume that the structures of pastlanguages, the way they were acquired by children, the changes theyunderwent, the distribution of linguistic variation in their speech com-

munities, and so on fell within the same ranges as those of languages thatcan still be observed and studied. Thus, the UP is usually invoked toflesh out the impoverished language data that survive from the past andour necessarily limited reconstructions of protolanguages. But it can alsobe used to make a different argument: If straightforward mathematicalreconstruction yields a grammar fragment that falls within the observedrange for modern native languages, we can reasonably infer that it cor-responds to some real language of the past spoken by some real speechcommunity, because experience shows that living languages do not existapart from native speech communities. Because the grammar fragment,phonological system, and lexemes that are reconstructible for PIE reveala coherent, unremarkable human language, the UP suggests that thePIE-speaking community might, given the correct integrative methods,be correlated with the reality recovered by archaeology”

In spite of the confident assertion of such reputed scholars, one will have to notethe many uncertainties inherent in practices and processes of historical linguistics.Conclusions reached by such methods can only be probable and not certain.

All attempts to identify an actual pre historic people with an unattested languagedepend on sound reconstruction of that language for reliable identification of culturalaspects and environmental factors which may be associated with a particular timeand culture (such as the use of metals, agriculture vs. pastoralism, geographically

distinctive plants and animals, etc). A powerful tool that linguists make use of forthe purpose is the so called Linguistic Archaeology or Linguistic Palaeontology whichattempts to put a firm date to the linguistic record using archaeological data. Onesuch tool is known as ‘lexical periodisation’ or ‘lexical self-dating’. According to thismethod, names of datable notions (i.e. tools, techniques, social institutions and thelike) can be assumed to have been created at the moment of the given innovation. In


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other words, the lexicalisation of datable referents can be assumed to have the same

date as that of the referent. As a consequence, ‘lexical self-dating’, applied with thedue care, is a useful tool to produce a ‘lexical periodisation’ system. For exampleagriculture related words could only have entered the lexicon at roughly the periodwhen agriculture was first invented. Similarly words related to horse riding andchariots might be assumed to have been created when these innovations came intouse or words related to metals like copper and bronze might be from the beginningof Bronze Age or Chalcolithic (copper) Age.

But such lexical periodisation can be error prone. Linguistic reconstructionmakes it possible to identify particular words which are taken to have formed part of the vocabulary of the Porto-Indo-European language. But these are reconstructedon the basis of sound laws, which are not properly supported in many instances by

parallel ‘meaning laws’. Thus one cannot be certain exactly what these terms mayhave referred to at the PIE stage. It is possible words might have been adaptedfor new uses when they came into use. For example the Porto IE sound for ‘toshine or glow’ was later used to denote gold. The technique of inferring culture fromsuch reconstructions is therefore open to criticism, and the same word is open todifferent interpretations. This is what Paul Heggarty of Max Planck Institute forEvolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig has to say about such methods

“ ‘Cultural reconstruction’ is no hard science. It is open to a great deal of subjective interpretation and interminable arguments, and not probative

at all. For while linguists can reconstruct sounds reliably, by near excep-tionless ‘sound laws’, we have no equivalent ‘meaning laws’ to be able toreconstruct *exact* meanings, especially not where referents themselvesare necessarily changing, in processes of domestication or technologicaldevelopment. The supposed wheel words actually go back to more gen-eral words for turn, rotate and walk, formed into words that look literallylike turn-turn (thing), for example.”

Another uncertain element is that some of these similar words in different languagesmay be loan words, although linguists use widely accepted procedures to differentiate

genetically inherited words and loan words.Linguistic reconstruction is fraught with significant uncertainties and offer room

for subjective speculation. Often other scenarios could also account for the data.The reconstruction of unknown proto-languages is inherently subjective. Thus allcurrent models of Indo-European origin or expansion are open to possible substantialmodification in future.


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3.2. KURGAN HYPOTHESIS 29

Origin of Porto Indo-European Language

There are many theories regarding the location of the Urheimat of PIE and themodel of its expansion. Some of the hypotheses regarding the origin of PIE are

1. 4th millennium BC in Armenia, according to the Armenian hypothesis

2. 4th or 5th millennium BC to the east of the Caspian Sea, in the area of an-cient Bactria-Sogdiana known as Sogdiana hypothesis. Johanna Nichols (1997)“holds that the dispersal of the Indo-European languages commenced from aregion somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana”. She revived theforgotten 18 century model with some new linguistic arguments.

3. 5th millennium BC in the Ponting-Caspian steppe, according to the Kurganhypothesis.

4. 6th millennium BC in India, according to Out of India model

5. The 7th millennium BCE in Anatolia.

6. Before 10th millennium BC according to the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory.

Other such suggestions like North-Western Europe and the ‘Arctic Circle’ havelittle following now. All these models are still based on theories that cannot claimfinality as there is no direct evidence of the nature of Porto-Indo-European languageor ‘society’. All interpretations of whatever aspects this society or the language

might have had are therefore only inferences. Interpretations based on archaeologymakes the assumption that one particular homeland hypotheses is in fact correct asthere is nothing that really connects the archaeological finds to the language exceptinferences based on various artefacts unearthed by archaeology. Linguistics by itself cannot determine the actual chronology of the evolution of a language, but at mostonly a comparative order. It can date the events only with the help of some otherbranch of knowledge. Thus IE linguistics will remain a dependent variable, unlesssome kind of writing of an IE language from third millennium BC is unearthed.

Among the above models Kurgan hypothesis has emerged as the front runner atpresent. Anatolian Hypothesis by Colin Renfrew, Palaeolithic Continuity Theory byMario Alinei and Out of India model are the other serious contenders, but have only

limited academic support. Essentials of these models is stated briefly as follws.

3.2 Kurgan Hypothesis

A ‘Kurgan’ is a circular burial mound constructed over a pit grave, which is acommon feature all over the Pontic Steppes. The term is now widely used for such


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structures of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology and is a Turkic loan

word in Russian. The distribution of such tumuli in Eastern Europe correspondsclosely to the area of the Pit Grave and The Yamna cultures dating to the 36th-23rd centuries BC which are identified with the late Porto-Indo-Europeans (PIE).Geographically the area in Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea and the CaspianSea coincide with the land of the ancient Scythians. Characteristic of the Kurganculture include inhumations in pit graves with a kurgan structure over the pits andthe dead body placed in a supine position with bent knees. The bodies were coveredin red ochre. Multiple graves have been found in successive layers in these kurgansas later insertions. Significantly, animal grave offerings were made (cattle, sheep,goats and horse), a feature associated with Porto-Indo-Europeans. These Kurgansare mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave, with features like the presence

of an entryway into the chamber, into the tomb, into the fence, or into the kurgan,funeral chambers, the presence of an altar in the chamber and a wooden roof overor under the kurgan, at the top of the kurgan, or around the kurgan. Dependingon a combination of elements, each historical and cultural nomadic zone had itsarchitectural peculiarities.

Some of these Kurgans are complex and large structures like Ipatovo kurgan lo-cated near Ipatovo, some 120 km north-east of Stavropol, Russia. This is particularlyspecial not only because of its sheer size with a height of 7 meters, but also because of the complexity of the architectural evidence which covers at least thirteen phases of construction and use, from the 4th millennium BC to the 18th century AD. The firstgrave may have been a burial of the Maykop culture, which was destroyed by later

graves. The earliest extant grave contained two young people, buried in a sittingposition, dating to the late 4th millennium. On top was a Sarmatian grave of the3rd century BC. A woman had been buried here in extended position on the back,together with an exceptionally rich treasure of grave-goods like gold ornaments. Inthe final phase, more than 100 simple graves were dug into the slope of the barrow,probably 18th century burials of the Turkic Islamic nomads who later moved intothe area. The early phases include a wagon burial, with the skeleton deposited inan extended position; the complete wagon had been deposited next to the body, andwooden parts such as the wheels were substantially preserved. The latter gave aradio carbon date of 2615-2337 BC. In addition, the grave had a large number of bronze artefacts, including a hook, a knife and a medallion.

In 1956 Lithuanian-born American archaeologist “Marina Gimbals” first pro-posed her “Kurgan hypothesis” combining archaeology with linguistics to locatethe origins of the Porto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking people in the Pontic Steppetowards the end of Neolithic during the “Chalcolithic period” or “copper age” orearly Bronze Age. Her technique of thus combining archaeology with linguisticswas considered by many as quite revolutionary at the time. The concept of “Cul-


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tural horizon” proposed by by Marina Gimbals, included several cultures in what

she termed as “Kurgan Culture” that coexisted in the steppes during the period,including the Samara culture and the Yamna culture. The Yamna culture (36thto 23rd centuries BCE), also called “Pit Grave Culture”, may have been the “nu-cleus” of the proto-Indo-European language. By the 1970s consensus had emergedamong Indo-Europeanists in favour of this model and it had a significant impact onIndo-European research.

According to this theory early Bronze Age Ponting-Caspian steppe people spreadwestward as well as eastward on horseback and chariots carrying Porto Indo-Europeanlanguage with them. The presence of Indo-European languages everywhere fromEngland to India was assumed to have been a product of the invention of horse-chariot technology shortly before 2000 BC and their original speakers were assumed

as particularly powerful and ruthless warlords. The original Indo-Europeans wereimagined as a horde of aristocratic Bronze Age warriors who came hurtling out of the steppes, overwhelming the simple peasant cultures of Europe and even topplingthe civilization of the Indus Valley which was far ahead of the nomads in many othertechnologies. The history of Indo-European was seen as the key to a remote romanticera, a time of great migrations and heroic conquests. It was taken for granted thatthe prehistoric past could best be understood in terms of warfare and colonization.This point of view had a sort of romantic appeal and came to have wide acceptance.This model thus is more or less a modern variation on the traditional invasion theory.

The model proposes that the proto-Indo-Europeans gradually split into severaldialect groups, which eventually evolved into the proto Indo-European daughter

languages. One of the groups moved eastward and established the the Sintashtaculture (2100-1800 BCE), from which developed the Andronovo and Yaz cultures(1800-1400 BCE). This culture interacted with the Bactria-Margiana Culture (2300-1700 BCE). Earlier it was thought that Bactria-Margiana Culture was created bythe incoming proto Indo-Aryans. But few hold that view now and the consensusis that Bactria-Margiana Culture was not Indo-European. Out of this interactiondeveloped the Indo-Iranians, which split in around 1800 BCE into the Indo-Aryansand the Iranians. One group of Indo-Aryans migrated to the Levant and became theMitannians. A second wave moved towards northern India and became Vedic Aryans.The Andronovo, Bactria-Margiana and Yaz cultures have been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations, with separation of Indo-Aryans proper from Porto-Indo-Iranians

dated to roughly 2000-1800 BC. The Gandhara Grave, Cemetery H, Copper Hoardand Painted Grey Ware cultures are thought to be archaeological attestations of Indo-Aryan movements; their arrival in the Indian subcontinent being dated to theLate Harappan period.

This theory is based on a combination of linguistic theories and archaeologicaldata. The evidence for this model comes from linguistic palaeontology: in particular,


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certain words to do with the technology of wheeled vehicles are present across all

the branches of the Indo-European family, though not everyone agrees with this. SoPorto Indo-European itself could not have fragmented into those daughter languagesbefore the invention of chariots and wagons. Further we have archaeological evidenceof wheeled vehicles by 4000 BCE in the steppes. Most estimates based on thismodel date PIE between 4500 and 2500 BC, with the most probable date fallingaround 3700 BC. Many scholars are of the opinion that early PIE could not pre-date4500 BC, because the reconstructed vocabulary strongly suggests a culture of theterminal phase of the Neolithic bordering the early Bronze Age. The main strengthsof the model are the archaeological evidence of an early Bronze Age culture withremains of chariots and horses from third millennium BC in the steppes combinedwith linguistic evidence for root words in the reconstructed Porto IE language for

technologies mastered by the steppe people like domestication of horses and chariots.When the Kurgan burial sites, with the horse and chariot remains found there, weresecurely dated to a period close enough to the assumed time of Porto IE language,it was natural to connect these two. “I see the wheeled-vehicle evidence as a trumpcard over any evolutionary tree,” says David W Anthony, well known archaeologistin his scholarly work “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language,” though he disapprovesthe use of the term Kurgan Hypothesis as he believes that there never was a singlehomogeneous culture that could be identified as ‘Kurgan Culture’. What the PonticSteppes had were many essentially heterogeneous social groups with differing racialbackgrounds and cultural traits.

But the model has been challenged on account of a number of weaknesses. These

include.

• In the last three decades, archaeological research has made quite a few rev-olutionary advances, among which the most well-known is the much higherchronologies of European prehistory, obtained by radiocarbon and other in-novative dating techniques. These studies have indisputably established thatthere is absolutely no trace of any large scale invasion and that a languagesubstitution of the imagined scale would be quite unlikely. There is probablysome indication of a migration event from the steppes towards Easten Europeand the Balkans some time in the third millennium BCE. But this evidence isnot apparent in other parts of Europe. The evidence collected by archaeology

in the last thirty years points to the uninterrupted continuity of most Cop-per and Bronze Age cultures of Southern, Western and Northern Europe fromNeolithic. This is also true of the areas south of Oxus River; Iran and SouthAsia.

• Reconstructed Porto IE language also has many words related to agriculture inits core vocabulary. Thus it could also be argued that Porto-Indo-Europeans


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were agriculturalists whereas the Kurgan people were not. Many terms found

in the reconstructed proto Indo-European language are not compatible withthe cultural level of the Kurgans. Kathrin Krell (1998) holds that the Indo-Europeans were primarily agriculturalists whereas the Kurgan people were“just at a pastoral stage” and hence might not have had sedentary agriculturalterms in their language. Krell has compiled lists of items of flora and fauna;economy and technology that archaeology has unearthed from the Kurgan sitesand compared these with lists of the corresponding words in the reconstructedproto IE vocabulary. Krell found major discrepancies between the two.

• IE language spread was mainly in areas where agriculture flourished. Thus ei-ther Porto Indo-European Language and people spread with agriculture before

6000 BCE, or it later spread into regions already agricultural. The later sce-nario will need to explain the reason for the selective spread of IE people, intoregions already agricultural, 2000 to 3000 years after the event. Why wouldnomadic pastoralists migrate in many separate waves almost exclusively intoagricultural land?

• Kurgan hypothesis places the proto-Indo-European language in the 4th mil-lennium BCE, the process of transformation from Porto-IE to separate Portolanguage groups in the 3rd and evolution of the separate language groups intothe major attested languages in the II and first millennium BCE in the Bronzeand Iron Age. Many scholars are uncomfortable with the unprecedented pace

of these transformations. Evolution of most other language groups such asAustralian, American Indian, African, Chinese and Uralic happened from pre-history over many millennia. The earliest known Indo-European languages likeMycenaean Greek, Hittite and Sanskrit were already far more divergent in thesecond millennium BC than the languages derived from Latin such as Frenchand Italian are today. Divergence between Latin as spoken in the Roman Em-pire on one hand and modern French and Italian happened over two millenniaduring a period of far more cultural exchanges, migrations and invasions unlikethe times of divergence of IE languages. This suggests that the common ances-tor of IE Languages must have been spoken not around 3000 BC, as assumed,but well back in time. Evolution of languages must have been far slower in pre-

historic times compared to historic times because of the constraints of meansand technology and rarer cultural contacts with outsiders.

Bronze Age is sometimes divided into early Bronze Age, middle Bronze Age andlate Bronze Age. The technology during early Bronze Age was probably crudeand so chariot and spoked wheel making techniques might have been perfectedonly in the second half of third millennium BCE, when most estimates of middle


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Bronze Age place it‘s development in the area. Spoked and hence light, yet

sturdy, wheels for chariots and wagons might not have been possible withoutmiddle Bronze Age technology and without sturdy chariots and wagons theunprecedented IE expansion would not have been possible. Thus separatePorto language groups might have evolved only after this time as linguisticstells us that words related to these technologies evolved at the stage of PIE.We have first attestation of an IE language (Hittite) by around 20 centuryBC. Thus we are faced with the improbable conclusion that PIE evolved intoseparate Porto language groups and further into attested languages like Hittitewithin a couple of centuries.

• If the Pontic Steppes is the Urheimat of IE, one would expect some early branch

of IE Languages still to be in use in the area. No such language now survivesin the area of ancient Yamna culture, the heartland of ‘Kurgan Culture’. Thearea is dominated by some very old language families unrelated to IE likeKartvelian, Northwest Caucasian, North-east Caucasian and Turkic. Theselanguages, except Turkic, appear to have been spoken in the area for a very longtime. Russian and Ukraine spoken in the areas to the North-West belong toBalto-Slavic branch of IE which appears to have originated in Central Europeand spread into the area in historic times. No linguist has ever claimed thatthese two IE

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