VEDIC ARYANS IN WEST ASIA

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VEDIC ARYANS IN WEST ASIA

The Kassite and Mitannic peoples

 

 

An important anomaly in the AIT is the presence of the Mitanni kings

in northern Mesopotamia, with their Vedic cultural heritage and

language, as early as the 15th century BC, with absolutely no

indication that they Were ¡°the Aryans on the way to India¡±. In

fact, the Vedic memories appearing in the Mitanni texts were already

remote, with only four Vedic gods mentioned amid a long list of non-

Vedic gods. This does not in itself prove that the Mitanni dynasty

was post-Vedic, but it certainly confers the burden of proof on

those who want to declare it pre-Vedic.

 

 

Their language was mature Indo-Aryan, not proto-Indo-Iranian. Satya

Swarup Misra argues that the Mitannic languages already showed early

Middle-Indo-Aryan traits, e.g. the assimilation of dissimilar

plosives (sapta > satta), and the break-up of consonant clusters by

interpolation of vowels (anaptyxis, Indra > Indara).37 This would

imply that Middle-Indo-Aryan had developed a full millennium earlier

than hitherto assumed, which in turn has implications for the

chronology of the extant literature written in Middle-Indo-Aryan.

 

 

In the centuries before the Mitanni texts, there was a Kassite

dynasty in Mesopotamia, from the 18th to the 16th century BC.

Linguistically assimilated, they preserved some purely Vedic names:

Shuriash, Maruttash, Inda-Bugash, i.e. Surya, Marut, Indra-Bhaga

(Bhaga meaning effectively ¡°god¡±, cfr. Bhag-wAn, Slavic Bog).

 

 

The Kassite and Mitanni peoples were definitely considered as

foreign invaders. They are latecomers in the history of the IE

dispersal, appearing at a time when, leaving India out of the

argument, at least the area from Iran to France was already IE.

They have little bearing on the Urheimat question, but they have all

the more relevance for mapping the history of the Indo-Iranian

group.

 

 

Probably the Kassite and Mitannic tribes were part of the same

migration, with the latter settling in a peripheral area and thereby

retaining their identity a few centuries longer than the Kassites in

the metropolitan area of Babylon. According to Babylonian sources,

the Kassites came from the swampy area in what is now southern Iraq:

unlike the Iranians, who migrated from India through Afghanistan,

the Kassites must have come by sea from Sindh to southern

Mesopotamia. While the Iranians migrated slowly, taking generations

to take control gradually of the fertile areas to the south of the

Aral Lake and of the Caspian Sea, the Kassites seem to have been a

warrior group moving directly from India to Mesopotamia to carry out

a planned invasion which immediately gave them control of the delta

area, a bridgehead for further conquests of the Babylonian

heartland. They were a conquering aristocracy, and having to marry

native women, they lost their language within a few generations,

just like the Vikings after their conquest of Normandy.

 

 

If the earlier Kassite and the later Mitanni people were indeed part

of the same migration, their sudden appearance falls neatly into

place if we connect them with the migration wave caused by the

dessiccation of the Saraswati area in ca. 2000 BC.

 

 

Indian-Mesopotamian connections relevant to the Urheimat question

have to be sought in a much earlier period. Whether the country

Aratta of the Sumerian sources is really to be identified with a

part of the Harappan area, is uncertain; the Sumerian legend

Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (late 3rd millennium BC) mentions

that Aratta was the source of silver, gold and lapis lazuli, in

exchange for grain which was transported not by ship but over land

by donkeys; this would rather point to the mining centres in

mountainous Afghanistan, arguably Harappan colonies but not the

Harappan area itself. However, if this Aratta is the same as the

Indian AraTTa (in West Panjab) after all, it has far-reaching

implications. AraTTa is Prakrit for A-rASTra, ¡°without kingdom¡±.

The point here is not its meaning, but its almost Middle-Indo-Aryan

shape. Like sapta becoming satta in the Mitannic text, it suggest

that this stage of Indo-Aryan is much older than hitherto assumed,

viz. earlier than 2000 BC.

 

4.5.2. The Sumerian connection

 

 

At the material high tide of the Harappan culture, Mesopotamia had

trade contacts with Magan, the Makran coast west of the Indus delta,

with Bad Imin, ¡°the seven cities¡±, and with Meluhha, the Indus

valley. The name Meluhha is probably of Dravidian origin: Asko

Parpola derives Meluhha, ¡°to be read in the early documents with

the alternative value as Me-lah-ha¡±, from Dravidian Met-akam,

¡°high abode/country¡± (with mel/melu, ¡°high¡±, being the etymon of

Sanskrit Meru, the cosmic mountain).38 Meluhha is the origin of

Sanskrit Mleccha, Pali Milakkhu, ¡°barbarian¡±39: because of the

unrefined sounds of their Prakrit and because of their cultural

impurity (whether by borrowing foreign elements or simply by an

indigenous decay of existing cultural standards), the people of

Sindh/Meluhha were considered barbarian by the elites of Madhyadesh

(the Ganga-Yamuna doab) during the Sutra period, which non-

invasionists date to the late 3rd millennium BC, precisely the

period when Mesopotamia had a flourishing trade with Meluhha.

 

 

The search is on for common cultural motifs between the Harappan

culture and Sumer. One element in literature which strikes the

observer as meaningful, is this: according to the account given by

the Babylonian priest Berosus, the Sumerians believed their

civilization (writing and astronomy) had been brought to the

Mesopotamian coast by s sages, the first of whom was one Uana-Adapa,

better known through his Greek name Oannes. He was a messenger of

Enki, god of the Abyss, who was worshipped at the oldest

Mesopotamian city of Eridu. Like the Vedic ¡°seven sages¡±, meaning

both the seven clans of Vedic seers as well as the seven major stars

of Ursa Maior, these seven sages are associated with the starry sky;

like the Matsya incarnation of Vishnu, Oannes¡¯s body is that of a

fish. The myth of the Flood, wherein divine guidance helps the

leader of mankind (Sumerian Ziusudra, Sanskrit Manu, Akkadian

Utnapishtim, Hebrew Noah) to survive, is another well-known common

cultural motif.

 

 

The antediluvian kings in Sumer are said by Berosus to have ruled

for 120 periods of 3,600 years, or 432,000 years; epochs of 3600

years were in use among Indian astronomers, and the mega-era of

432,000 is equally familiar in India as the scripturally estimated

(inexact) number of syllables in the Rg Veda, and as the ¡°high¡±

interpretation of the length of the Kali-Yuga .40 Rather than being

a late borrowing, this number 432,000 may well be part of the common

IE heritage. At least implicitly, it was present in Germanic

mythology, which developed separately from Hindu mythology for

several millennia before Berosus (ca. 300 BC): 800 men at each of

the 540 gates of Wodan¡¯s palace makes for a total of 432,000. This

does not prove any far-fetched claim that ¡°the gods were

cosmonauts¡± or so, but it does show that early Indo-European had a

world view involving advanced arithmetic (Sanskrit being the first

and for many centuries the only language with terms for

¡°astronomical¡± numbers), and that they shared some of it with

neighbouring cultures.

 

 

We may be confident that a deeper search, more alert to specifically

Indian contributions than is now common among sumerologists, will

reveal more connections. Through the Hittites, Philistines (i.e.

the ¡°Sea Peoples¡± originating on the Aegean coasts and settling on

the Egyptian and Gaza coasts in ca. 1200 BC), Mitannians and

Kassites, elements of IE culture were known throughout West Asia.

Even ancient Israelite culture was culturally much more Indo-

European than certain race theorists would like to believe.

 

 

Footnotes:

 

 

37S.S. Misra: The Aryan Problem, p.10. Of course, the data are to be

handled with care, for the foreign script in which the Indo-Aryan

words were rendered, may not have been phonologically accurate.

 

 

38Asko Parpola: ¡°Interpreting the Indus Script¡±, in A.H. Dani:

Indus Civilisation: New Perspectives, p.117-132, specifically p.121.

 

 

39V.S. Pathak (¡°Semantics of Arya¡±, in S.B. Deo & S. Kamath: The

Aryan Problem, p.93) derives the modem ethnic term Baluch from Bloch

(< Blukh < Mlukh) < Meluhha. This is very unlikely, if only because

the Baluchis have immigrated into this area from Western Iran during

the early Muslim period. Before that, in most of the areas where

Pashtu and Baluchi are now spoken, the language was Indo-Aryan

Prakrit.

 

 

40Discussed in Ivan Verheyden: ¡°Het begon met Oannes¡±, Bres

(Antwerp), May 1976. Strictly, Kali-Yuga is to last for 1,200

years, but since ¡°a year among men is but a day among the gods¡±,

scribes have magnified the number to 360 x 1,200 = 432,000.

 

http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ait/ch45.htm