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This is the INTERLUDE between

chapters 4 and 5 of:

The Crux of WORLD

HISTORY

by Francisco Gil-White © 2005

_

Volume 1.

The Book of Genesis

The Birth of the Jewish People

_

For the hyperlinked Table of Contents:

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/cruxcontents.htm

To read this INTERLUDE, scroll to the next

page, below È .

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INTERLUDE

Where did the Persians come from?

The ‘Aryan invasion theory’ • How the ‘Aryan invasion theory’

came to be • A short detour: whence the obsession with ‘race’?

• What the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ was built on • How the

‘Aryan invasion theory’ has been supported • What about the

genetic evidence? • So who were ‘the Aryans’ of the Rigveda,

then? • When did the Iranians arise? • Can partisans of the

‘Aryan invasion theory’ defend it? • Conclusion

We’ve seen in the previous chapter that the ancient Persians (or

Iranians) produced a leftist, world-saving, politico-religious

movement: Zoroastrianism. And we’ve seen how many

dramatic similarities there are between Zoroastrianism and

Judaism. Since, as I will show later, it was the ancient Persians

who sponsored Judaism as an even more radical egalitarian and

ethical mass-liberation movement, the point of understanding

where the Persians came from is to get a sense for the ultimate

provenance of Jewish ideas.

The evidence supports the view that the ancient Iranians

were a development of ancient Indian culture, emerging into

their own as a result of population movements out of the Indian

subcontinent, where civilization began. However, this is poorly

understood because for the last 150 years a remarkably

tenacious but unsupported theory of Indian history has been

taught in the West. It has also been taught in India, because the

dominant educational system there was set up by the British

colonialists and did not undergo significant changes after

independence. This mistaken picture of Indian history is a

direct product of nineteenth-century European politics—

especially German politics, combined with the colonial and

missionary interests of the British Empire. It has little to do

with India.

At this point you may be thinking that you can no

longer be shocked, because you have already seen, after all, the

radical manner in which Western historians have distorted

beyond recognition the history of both ancient Greeks and

Persians. This has been a matter of putting an absurd and

radical spin on things, with the result that all the important

political meanings—of words, of events, of ideology, etc.—are

represented precisely upside down. In the Indian case, believe

it or not, we have something that is arguably more extreme:

outright fabrication by scholars.

What this book does for Western historiography has

already been done for Indian historiography (or ‘Indology’ as

this field has been called in the West)—luckily for me. A

decade ago, Navaratna S. Rajaram and David Frawley refuted

the so-called ‘Aryan invasion theory’ of ancient India by

exhaustively pointing out what should have been obvious all

along: not one shred of evidence agrees with it. And yet quite a

few people are still defending the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ in

the year 2005, so I will here briefly review its refutation, there

to establish what the real origin of the Persians was.

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Since Rajaram and Frawley, and more recently

Koenraad Elst, have already done the hard work, and since this

is not the main topic of my book, I will be relying heavily on

them. Interested readers are welcome to consult their detailed

demonstrations if they wish to examine this issue further. That

said, I will devote some space, at the end, to examining how

defenders of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ have responded to

these recent challenges, the better to increase your confidence

that the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ cannot be defended.

The ‘Aryan invasion theory’

There was once an ancient people, the ‘Indo-Europeans,’ or

‘Aryans,’ who were nomadic herders and warriors somewhere

in Central Asia. They were a white-skinned, blond, and blueeyed

race. These Aryans suddenly burst forth from this place in

Central Asia, or perhaps it was somewhere in Eastern Europe

(anyway, but somewhere landlocked such that they didn’t even

know about the ocean). Wherever they went, they conquered,

and made everybody their servants, because they were great

warriors and also very smart (blondes, after all). Some Aryan

tribes traveled West, and became the ancestors of the modern

Europeans, and other Aryans traveled south to the Indus Valley

where, around 1500 BCE, they easily defeated the materially

advanced Harappan civilization, which had drainage and water

supply systems that even the Romans, much later, would not

quite match. And yet the Harappans somehow did not produce

any literature, perhaps because they were dark-skinned, and

hence, in the end, not very bright. Although the Aryans

completely destroyed the advanced Harappan civilization, these

victorious white nomads—as if by magic, and despite the fact

that they were illiterate when they arrived—almost

immediately produced a classic work of literature to celebrate

their victory over the Harappans, the Rigveda, in a language so

perfect that computer scientists are now turning to it for

insights. In Europe, the Germans are the purest descendants of

these ancient Aryans, but all the peoples of Europe whose

languages show similarities with Sanskrit are likewise

descendants of the Aryans, and this explains those similarities.

All of these languages together are called ‘Indo-European.’

Where do the Iranians fit in? They belong to the Indo-

European language family, so they are also descendants of the

Aryans. Or else of the Indo-Aryans—or Indo-Iranians. In other

words, there was an ancestral group, the Indo-Iranians, which

itself was descended from the Indo-Europeans (or Aryans), and

it split, and some of them went to Iran and became the Iranians,

and the others went to the Indus Valley and became the Indo-

Aryans.

That about sums it up. I think I got it right.

Please resist any urge to laugh at this theory. It is the

theory that helped unify Germany, and one reason it was

popular as a unifying myth was that it yielded a story of origins

where the wonderful ancestors of the German people were not

Jews, and therefore a welcome alternative, in an antisemitic

culture looking for a national myth, to the Christian story of

origins, which is Jewish. As is famously known, this ‘Aryan

invasion theory’ later became a favorite of the German Nazis,

which is why they talked incessantly of their ‘Aryan

superiority’ and moreover borrowed the swastika of the ancient

Vol. 1 The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People © Francisco Gil-White 2005 (all rights reserved)

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167

Indians as a symbol, though they did not borrow its meaning.

This is also the theory that has been taught in the West, until

now, as the history of India, and it is taught in India still today

as the mainstream theory. Not a shred of evidence agrees with

it.

This is serious.

How the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ came

to be

As the Catholic ex-priest James Carroll (2001) has detailed in

Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, European

Christians have, for a tragically long time, denigrated and

reduced the living Jews among them, oppressing them

alternatively with genocide, inquisition, forced conversion,

expulsion, genocide… The same history has inflicted, on

Christians, a profound intellectual awkwardness: the ancient

‘heroic age’ of Christianity is Jewish! It just doesn’t feel

comfortable, in an antisemitic civilization, that one’s story of

origins should be Jewish; or that this story should be so much

longer than the Christian ‘New Testament’; or that it should be

so much more interesting and fun to read. But it cannot be

avoided, because Christianity claims to have developed out of

ancient Judaism.

It is remarkable that this absurd state of affairs has

remained stable for so long, but signs that it would not remain

so forever began to appear in the eighteenth century. At this

time, many European intellectuals began looking for a way out,

and tried to give themselves an ancient ‘heroic age’ that would

not be Jewish. Navaratna S. Rajaram explains that,

The humanist movement now known as the

European Renaissance was followed by voyages of

discovery in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, leading to greatly increased trade and

colonizing activities. This had resulted in Europe

becoming aware of the richness, antiquity and the

complexities of Indian history and culture. As Jim

Shaffer notes:

“Many scholars such as Kant and Herder, began to

draw analogies between the myths and philosophies

of ancient India and the West. In their attempt to

separate Western European culture from its Judaic

heritage, many scholars were convinced that the

origin of Western culture was to be found in India

rather than in the ancient Near East.” (Shaffer

1984:80)

At the time, skin color in particular was also capturing

the European imagination, because colonialism brought close

contact with dark-skinned peoples whom the Europeans, with

their more effective weaponry, had subjugated. So the story

these conquering Europeans came up with became that, in

ancient times, mirroring the contemporary experience, the socalled

‘Aryan race’—blond, blue-eyed, and white-skinned—

had burst forth from Central Asia and invaded everything,

becoming the ruling class in India, Iran, and Europe, replacing

the dark-skinned natives just as the modern Europeans in

colonial times were subjugating the dark-skinned natives

everywhere else.

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Not exactly original.

It was German intellectuals with a nationalist bent who

became most interested in this alternative ‘heroic age’ story of

origins, the better to coalesce around it in pride. Why?

Because, for a long time, the Germans had been divided into

small principalities rather than unified into a single state, and in

consequence were pushed around by the other European

powers. The ‘Aryan race’ theory was a convenient and

unifying alternative myth of origins with which the German

nationalists were able to stir the imagination of the German

masses to mobilize together politically. The theory became

popular all over ‘Nordic’ Europe, but the German nationalists

claimed special ownership over this theory by saying that the

Germans were the ‘purest’ descendants of the original Aryans.

As a dominant European power, the British had zero

interest in fostering German unification—and yet they

accidentally did just that, by sponsoring the ‘Aryan race’

theory. Here is how it happened.

The British were looking for ways to undermine Indian

culture and pride in order more effectively to rule India. For

example, in 1831, Colonel Boden bequeathed to Oxford

University his entire fortune—worth £25,000—to create the

Boden Professorship of Sanskrit, the explicit purpose of which

was to promote knowledge of Sanskrit among Englishmen so

as “to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of

the natives of India to the Christian religion” (quoted in

Rajaram 1995:71). More significantly, “as chairman of the

Education Board,” Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800-1859)

“was instrumental in establishing a network of modern English

schools in India, the principal goal of which was the

conversion of Hindus to Christianity” (ibid. p.105). This is not

speculation: in a letter to his father in 1836, Macauley wrote,

It is my belief that if our plans of education are

followed up, there will not be a single idolater among

the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years

hence. And this will be effected without any efforts

to proselytize, without the smallest interference with

religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge

and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the project.—

quoted in Rajaram (1995:105)1

Macauley was obviously a narrow Christian chauvinist,

convinced of the superiority of Christian doctrine. And yet he

was not so self-assured that he felt comfortable with a level

playing field: to ensure that the Brahmins would become

Christians, he “wanted someone willing and able to interpret

Indian scriptures in such a way that the newly educated Indian

elite would see for itself the difference between their scriptures

and the New Testament and choose the latter” (ibid. p.106). It

was in Germany that Sanskrit studies were flourishing the

most, so Macauley eventually recruited a German scholar to

make a translation of the Vedic scriptures that would

undermine Indian religion. That he selected his man with care

may be inferred from the fact that it took him fifteen years to

find him: the ardent German nationalist and Sanskrit scholar

Max Müller.

Given that the rise of German Prussia as a European

power was then worrying the British, and given the fateful

1 Clive, J. 1975. Macauley: The shaping of a historian. New York:

Viking. (pp.412-13)

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consequences of Max Müller’s work for Prussian expansion, it

is ironic that it was the Prussian ambassador, Christian Karl

Hosias, who brought the 31-year-old Müller to meet Thomas

Babbington Macauley, the man who would become his British

sponsor. It was hardly fitting for a German nationalist to assist

the British in their efforts to turn themselves into an even more

formidable international power, but Max Müller was also a

devout Protestant Christian—and hard up. So, for the sake of

Christianity, and for the sake of his own economic stability, he

accepted payment from the British East India Company for the

work that Macauley commissioned (ibid. pp.106-107). A letter

that he wrote to his wife in 1866 shows that Max Müller took

his Christian mission seriously:

…this edition of mine and the translation of the

Veda, will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate

of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that

country. It [the Vedic scripture] is the root of their

religion and to show them what that root is, I feel

sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung

from it during the last three thousand years.

Rajaram quotes the above passage and comments that,

since Müller had no particular reason to misrepresent his

motives in a private letter to his wife, we may take the above as

a sincere expression of his intent (ibid. p.108). I think that’s

reasonable. Rajaram (ibid. p.114) also quotes a letter that

Müller wrote to N.K. Majumdar, an Indian social reformer, late

in his life:

The first thing you have to do is to settle how much

of your ancient religion you are willing to give up, if

not as utterly false, still as antiquated; …Tell me

some of the chief difficulties that prevent you and

your countrymen from openly following Christ, and

when I write to you I shall do my best to explain how

I and many who agree with me have met them, and

solved them… (In Devi Chand 1988:xxvi-xxvii)

This leaves little doubt that Müller’s purpose was to

undermine Indian belief, which is hardly a recommendation for

someone who is supposed to be a scholarly authority on Indian

beliefs, and the author of the Vedic translation that many

scholars still today are using.

In one sense Macauley’s effort was highly successful,

because the upper-class Indians whom Macauley targeted

responded very well to British-style education—except that

they didn’t convert to Christianity. But if Macauley failed to

undermine Indian religion, he did manage to create a new

religion in Europe, because Müller’s work was a huge log in

the fire of the ‘Aryan race’ theory.

Though he was not the only one or the first German

nationalist to do this, Müller interpreted the words ‘Arya’ and

‘Aryan,’ which appear repeatedly in the Rigveda, as referring

to a race—the ancestral ‘Aryan race’ to which the German

nationalists were learning to imagine themselves as the purest

descendants. Thus, for example, “in 1861 he gave a series of

lectures under the title ‘Science of Languages’ in which he

made extensive use of Vedic hymns to show that the Vedic

words Arya and Aryan were used to mean a race of people”

(ibid. p.109). This completely contradicts the way in which

these words are used in the original Sanskrit. For this distortion

Müller bears a special responsibility because, “Unlike most

other German romantics and nationalists, he as a Sanskrit

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scholar was fully aware that in Sanskrit, Arya does not refer to

any race” (ibid.; original emphasis). Not all Sanskrit scholars

followed Müller in this. For example, “Shlegel, no less a

romantic or German nationalist always used the word Aryan to

mean ‘honorable’ or ‘noble’ which is much closer to the

original Sanskrit in meaning” (ibid. p.110). But the

interpretation of the Aryans as a supposed race was more

influential by far. And it matters, because it was the claim that

the ancient Sanskrit texts speak of a supposed Aryan race—

when they don’t—that became the basis for the belief that there

had ever existed such a race or people.

As it turned out, Max Müller was very successful with

this ‘Aryan race’ stuff, and the emerging ideology was

instrumental to Otto von Bismarck’s push to create a unified

German empire by extending the borders of his native Prussia.

Ever since the 1700s, when Frederick I of Prussia had

“raised the army to 80,000, effectively making the whole state

a military machine,”1 Prussia had been, as in the case of the

ancient Greeks, though not quite as extreme, society as army.

Though Prussia had lost—like everybody else—to Napoleon

Bonaparte, by the time it provoked a war with France in 1870-

71 (after provoking wars with Denmark and Austria), it was

again a redoubtable fighting machine. The outcome of the

Franco-Prussian war was a resounding victory for Prussia,

1 "Prussia." Britannica Student Encyclopedia from Encyclopædia Britannica

Online.

http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8409/ebi/article?tocId=9276562

[Accessed April 20, 2005].

which then allowed its leader, Bismarck, to annex the south

German principalities, creating Germany. In order to expand

Prussia’s borders to create the German Empire or ‘Reich,’

Bismarck appealed to the German speaking peoples of Europe

in a way that shows the importance of the ‘Aryan race’ theory

of German origins:

Bismarck’s famous exhortation to the German

people, over the heads of their particular political

leaders, to ‘think with your blood’ was a[n]…attempt

to activate a mass psychological vibration

predicated upon an intuitive sense of consanguinity.

An unstated presumption of a Chinese (or German)

nation is that there existed in some hazy, prerecorded

era a Chinese (or German) Adam and

Eve, and that the couple’s progeny has evolved in

essentially unadulterated form down to the

present.—Connor (1994[1978]:93-94)

The Germans were learning to think of themselves as

the exalted pure descendants of an Aryan—not Jewish—Adam

and Eve: the ‘Aryan race.’ This worked so well that even in

Austria, which was then a major power in Europe, a movement

grew among the German-speakers to join ‘Germany.’ For

example, “a large part of the membership [of the student

fraternity Deutsche Lesehalle in Vienna] insisted on Austria’s

subservience to Germany…and supported Austria’s eventual

union with Bismarck’s militant empire” (Elon 1975:52). This

view was widespread. As is well known, the mood of

nineteenth century pan-German nationalism continued into the

twentieth century, making Adolf Hitler’s bloodless annexation

of his native Austria—under the banner of a now truly assertive

‘Aryan race’ ideology—relatively easy.

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German nationalism produced a tragic irony: “Many, if

not most, Jewish students in Austria were ardent German

patriots” (Elon 1975:53). In fact, hardly anybody was more

infatuated with German culture than the German-speaking

Jews: “many Jewish intellectuals were dazzled by the rise of

German power under Bismarck” (ibid.). It took these Jews a

long time to recognize the dangers to them inherent in German

power, something that can be dramatically appreciated by the

fact that one of the Austrian Jews who most firmly believed

himself to be ‘German,’ and who was initially most in love

with the rise of Germany, was Theodore Herzl, the very man

who in time would create the Zionist movement to protect the

European Jewish population from the antisemitic violence that

he finally realized would engulf his people. And yet German

nationalism was clearly antisemitic, based on the ‘Aryan race’

theory that exalted white skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair, and

explicitly desired to exclude Jews: “‘Nowadays one must be

blond,’ Herzl wrote in a revealing note found among his papers

from that time” (ibid. p.54). Herzl’s own pro-German

fraternity, Albia, soon became a nest of antisemites, and in

March of 1883 he resigned in anger (ibid. pp.60-61)—but it

was a while still before he became seriously worried for the

fate of the Jews, and despite the eventual success of his

belatedly feverish and heroic efforts to create a Jewish

homeland, his dire predictions would find themselves

confirmed in the twentieth-century German assault against the

Jewish people.

The Western Jewish naïveté before the growing

German threat appears to many, in hindsight, remarkable; but

proper—i.e., historically informed—hindsight produces an

exactly opposite assessment: this was normal. Herzl’s

biographer, Amos Elon, writes that “Never was an attachment

by a minority [German-speaking Jews] to a majority [Germans]

so strong” (1975:53), and yet the modern Jewish attachment to

and infatuation with the United States is arguably stronger,

despite the fact that US foreign policy towards Israel in the

twentieth-century, and into the twenty-first, has been a series of

stunningly vicious attacks, something the Jews appear entirely

blind to, but of which I have now given a book-length

demonstration.1 Anybody who has read historian Christopher

Simpson’s 1988 work, which documents, with material

obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that US

Intelligence was created after the World War by absorbing in

secret tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, cannot be

surprised that US foreign policy has prepared the impending

destruction of the Jewish state.2 But most Jews have not read

1 “Is the US an ally of Israel?: A chronological look at the evidence”;

Historical and Investigative Research; by Francisco Gil-White

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/ihrally.htm

2 Simpson, C. 1988. Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis and its

effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

To read an analysis of how the recruitment of these Nazis affected the

conduct of the US government, read:

”Did the National Security Act of 1947 destroy freedom of the press?: The

red pill...”; Historical and Investigative Research; 3 January 2006; by

Francisco Gil-White

http://www.hirhome.com/national-security.htm

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Simpson’s book, and so they are fulfilling George Santayana’s

dire prediction that “those who cannot remember the past are

condemned to repeat it.” Indeed, just as many Western Jews in

the nineteenth century decided, absurdly, to embrace

antisemitism rather than abandon their German patriotism,

tragically destroying themselves, today many Jews inside and

outside of Israel have turned themselves into enemies of the

Jewish state by supporting the foreign policy of the United

States, or else (or simultaneously) by supporting the PLO,

whose controlling core (Al Fatah) was created by Hajj Amin al

Husseini, mentor to Yasser Arafat, and earlier one of the top

leaders of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.1 These Jews represent

their historically ignorant and politically absurd behaviors to

themselves, in honest delusion, as ‘peace-seeking,’ not

realizing that antisemitism has to be fought (for it will not be

appeased)2; but they are once again assisting their own

1 “How did the ‘Palestinian movement’ emerge? The British sponsored it.

Then the German Nazis, and the US”; from UNDERSTANDING THE

PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT; Historical and Investigative Research; 13

June 2006; by Francisco Gil-White

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

4

2 As the Jewish author Kenneth Levin has tried to explain in The Oslo

Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege (2005), such behaviors are

instances of the famous Jewish ‘self-hatred,’ a tragic phenomenon that

destruction, and that of their more patriotic brethren. The

predictable result will be another Catastrophe.

Returning to our main thread, I note that if Max Müller

was dramatically successful promoting the theory of the ‘Aryan

race,’ he also spat into the wind. Something funny happened as

a result of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. I don’t mean

the war itself, and certainly not the barbaric behavior of the

Germans in occupied France, but rather its effects on British

perceptions and in turn on poor Max Müller.

About the impact of Sanskrit studies on German

nationalism, “Sir Henry Maine, an influential Anglo-Indian

scholar and former Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University

pronounced a view that many Englishmen shared about the

unification of Germany: ‘…a nation has been born out of

Sanskrit’ (Sathe 1991:13)” (Rajaram & Frawley 1997:29-30).

The British had so far been amused by the romantic German

attachment to Sanskrit, but after the ‘unification of Germany’

they took a different view:

German unification was followed in England by an

outburst of British patriotism in which the hapless

Max Müller found himself having to walk a political

tightrope. As already noted, ideas about the Aryan

race and culture were being seen by the British as

having played a significant part in German

nationalism that led to unification; the two ideas—

the Aryan nation and German unification—were

afflicts all systematically oppressed populations (e.g. blacks in the US have

their ‘uncle Tom’s’).

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inseparable in the public mind.—Rajaram

(1995:111)

In other words, the vigorous British waving of the

Union Jack in reaction to Bismarck’s success, plus the

reasonable British perception that the ‘Aryan race’ theory of

Sanskritists had helped produce this competing and fearsome

military power, was the sort of thing to make the most

important German Sanskritist, then in the employ of the British

government, and permanently installed in Britain, less

comfortable. So, to play it safe in his British environment, it

was advisable for Max Müller to backpedal from his earlier

claims about an ‘Aryan race.’ Thus, following the conclusion

of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, in a big rush, Max Müller

put together what became the linguistic as opposed to the racial

theory of Aryan origins.

He placed the original Aryan ancestors in

Samarkand in the Trans-Oxus region in Central Asia

north of Kashmir. According to this new theory,

actually a linguistic reincarnation of the old race

theory, one branch migrated southeast into Iran,

Afghanistan and India to become the Indo-Iranians,

while a second branch migrated southwest and went

on to become the Greeks and the Europeans. As

support he claimed that the original Aryans were

landlocked and immobile and therefore had no

notion of the sea or any word for fish. But he

overlooked the elementary fact that both Iran and

Afghanistan lie not to the southeast of Samarkand

but to the southwest. Further, Afghanistan has

always been culturally and linguistically an

extension of India. Compounding the absurdity, Max

Müller failed to note that several species of fish

including such staple varieties as katala and loch

are found in Samarkand.

Looking at it today, the extraordinary shoddiness

with which his new theory was put together is

astounding. In his rush to dissociate himself from

the Aryan race theory, Max Müller had succeeded in

creating the most absurd contradiction imaginable:

The Aryans of Central Asia were so immobile that

they were ignorant of the ocean only a few hundred

miles away, and fish found even closer. And yet

they were so fleet of foot (or horse) that they

managed to spread over a vast stretch from Ireland

to the east coast of India. As one of his recent critics

put it: “Max Müller has made as many mistakes as is

possible to make in one argument.”1 Nothing but

extreme haste can account for so preposterous a

theory from a scholar of his standing.—Rajaram

(1995:116)

From this point onwards, Max Müller never wavered:

“Just as he had been using the word Aryan in the racial sense

for twenty years until 1871, for the next thirty years he was

insistent that Aryan could only refer to a language family or

culture, but to little or no avail” (ibid. p.110). To little or no

avail… There is a reason for that. Max Müller’s

contemporaries were obsessed with the idea of ‘race,’ and this

is precisely why such an idea had proved instrumental in

‘unifying Germany’ in the first place. To help you understand

1 Waradapande, N. R. 1989. Aryan invasion: A myth. Nagpur: Babasaheb

Apte Smarak Samiti.

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the ideological climate that produced an obsession with race,

allow me a short detour.

A short detour: whence the obsession

with ‘race’?

The Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes the eighteenth and

nineteenth century theorizing about ‘race’ as follows:

Major proponents of the ideology of race inequality

were the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the

French philosopher Voltaire, the Scottish

philosopher and historian David Hume, and the

influential American political philosopher Thomas

Jefferson. These writers expressed negative

opinions about Africans and other “primitives” based

on purely subjective impressions or materials gained

from secondary sources, such as travelers,

missionaries, and explorers…

During the same period, influenced by taxonomic

activities of botanists and biologists that had begun

in the 17th century, other European scholars

…[went about] classifying all peoples into “natural”

groupings, as had been done with other flora and

fauna. …it was the classifications developed by the

Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and the German

physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that

provided the models for modern racial

classifications.1

1 "race." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

Linnaeus was involved in systematizing all of the

world’s species. Applying this method to humans, both he and

Blumenbach thought they could see natural divisions within the

human species, and tried to derive a systematic classification of

different human ‘types.’ Unsurprisingly, given that at this time

Europeans were subjugating and enslaving dark-skinned people

all over the world, these classifications assigned to the

‘European type’—or ‘whites’—the most exalted place in the

classification of humanity. By this means a pseudo-moral

argument was produced that justified the oppression of non-

‘whites.’

From the scientific point of view all this ‘race science’

was a monumental waste of time. Rajaram & Frawley

(1997:27) quote the geneticist S.K. Mahajan, who says that “In

spite of the great labors of the race scientists, their work has

mostly been forgotten. The emergence of Molecular Biology of

genes has proved it to be false.” Following that, they comment:

A modern researcher today can scarcely have an

idea of the enormous output of these race scientists,

output that in sheer quantity (and value) can only be

compared to that of medieval theologians who

produced volume upon massive volume on such

important topics as the number of angels that could

dance on the head of a pin. The home of this

crackpot discipline was Germany, with French

savants like Comte Joseph de Gobineau not far

behind. It was such men as these that gave

http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8409/eb/article?tocId=234671

[Accessed April 20, 2005].

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currency to the concept of the Aryan race. It was

Max Müller’s friend E. Rénan who popularized the

term ‘Aryan’ in France. This was the climate in

which Sanskrit studies became highly popular in

nineteenth century Europe, especially Germany, the

home of Indology for over a century.

Neither Rajaram nor Frawley were trained by a Western

social-science department; in consequence, they can be

excused for their spectacular naïveté on this point, because in

fact many modern ‘researchers’—still today—are energetically

involved in ‘race science,’ contrary to what Rajaram and

Frawley appear to think, and they continue to produce an

“enormous output.” This sham discipline never died, though of

course Rajaram and Frawley are correct that modern genetics

has thoroughly refuted the claim that the human species can be

divided into biological races.

The most important modern incarnation of ‘race

science’ is IQ testing, of which I have given a book-length

refutation in Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on

Black People Using Phony Science (the same book explains the

genetic data that refutes the idea of human ‘races’).1 IQ testing

as it is still practiced today was invented by the leaders of the

American eugenics movement in the early twentieth century,

whose goal was to develop a measure that would make the

Western upper classes look smart, and members of the lower

classes look stupid, the better to give apparent support to the

1 Gil-White, F. J. 2004. Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black

People Using Phony Science. Historical and Investigative Research.

http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm

argument that whole categories of people needed to be

exterminated in order (supposedly) to protect the human

species from bad ‘germ plasm.’ The point of this argument was

to hold a sword over the working classes, which in the second

half of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the first,

were becoming politically quite assertive. Not coincidentally,

as historian Edwin Black (2003) has documented in War

against the weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create

a master race, the eugenicists were organized and financed by

the wealthiest families in the Western world (the Carnegies, the

Rockefellers, the Harrimans…) in collusion with the US

government. It is significant that some of this money was going

to the German Nazis, whose extermination ideology had been

borrowed from the same American eugenicists, as Black also

documents. Again not coincidentally, the eugenicists developed

so-called IQ measures designed to test the culture of the

Western upper-classes, whose money was backing this effort.

This naturally guaranteed that these upper classes would come

out looking as though they were naturally superior, mentally,

and with the claim that the tests were supposedly measuring

‘innate intelligence,’ they got to forcibly sterilize or incarcerate

hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans whom these tests

supposedly identified as ‘feeble-minded,’ and hence a genetic

danger to the species. And yet despite the fundamental fraud

involved in the structure of the tests themselves, the IQ testers

have obviously been somewhat insecure, because they have

resorted to faking their data, fudging their math, and even

inventing non-existent researchers under whose phantom

names studies that were never carried out were nevertheless

published, as I document in Resurrecting Racism.

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As the above would suggest, the leaders of the eugenics

movement, in tandem with the anti-worker ideology that

produced IQ testing, partook also of a form of racism in which

the favorite category was not ‘white’ but Nordic, as in

Germans, Scandinavians, Britons, and French, in opposition to

the Irish, Mediterraneans, and Slavs. ‘Nordic,’ of course, is just

another word for ‘Aryan’ in this ideology: eugenics and IQ

testing were an early twentieth-century extension of the

nineteenth-century ‘race science.’ German Nazi ideology in the

twentieth century, which was one version of the international

eugenics movement, was also, in particular, an outgrowth of

the nineteenth century ‘Aryan race’ theory, which was now

used to mobilize the Germans—the purest ‘Nordics’ according

to this ideology—against the very Jews whom the theory had

been designed to extirpate from the German cosmological

firmament in the first place.

Though it is no longer politically correct to defend

eugenics, due to the revulsion that the German Nazi genocide

of the Jewish people produced, in its IQ-testing form the

eugenics movement has endured and enjoyed great success.

The SAT, a descendant of the ‘Army Alpha’ IQ test that had

been designed by some of the most extreme racists among the

American eugenicists, and administered to vast multitudes of

US soldiers in order to assign their ranks, has become a nearuniversal

requirement for application to a college education in

the United States, with predictable consequences for the lower

classes whom these tests were designed to disadvantage. And

IQ testing continues to be rampant all over US society. People

routinely speak of their supposed ‘intelligence’ in terms of

wholly meaningless IQ scores and pretend they understand

what they are talking about.

So, coming back to Rajaram and Frawley, if these

authors were aware that an entire branch of widely

institutionalized twentieth-century ‘psychology’ is nothing

more than racist snake oil, they would be much less surprised

that the entire field of ‘Indology’ has survived into the twentyfirst

century despite being little more than a nineteenth-century

racist—and, not insignificantly, antisemitic—fraud.

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that the eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century obsession with the concept of ‘race’—the

belief that the culture and language of a people are a product of

their unchangeably racial (i.e. biological) nature, together with

a distinctive physique supposedly discontinuous with that of

other populations—is not a radical idiosyncrasy of the

Europeans. I have taken pains in my own work to show that

people everywhere easily imagine, erroneously, that cultural

differences are supposedly biological, due to perceptual and

cognitive biases that distort our perception of human variation.1

1 Gil-White, F. J. 1999. How thick is blood? The plot thickens...: If ethnic

actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist

controversy? Ethnic and Racial Studies 22:789-820.

http://www.hirhome.com/academic/blood.pdf

—. 2001. Are ethnic groups biological 'species' to the human brain?:

Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current

anthropology 42:515-554.

http://www.hirhome.com/academic/species.pdf

Vol. 1 The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People © Francisco Gil-White 2005 (all rights reserved)

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177

This is a bit like the way our perspective makes the Earth

appear flat when it isn’t. What happened in eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century Europe is that these cognitive and

perceptual biases, which have always been there, were reified

as if ‘science’—then fast becoming popular—had established

their justice. But this was a sham science.

Once the extremely ‘race’-conscious pseudo-scientific

climate of the European eighteenth and nineteenth century, still

with us, is understood, it is clear why the search for a heroic

age that would not be Jewish—especially in the case of the

German nationalists—produced an explicitly racist account:

the ‘Aryan race’ theory.

What the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ was

built on

Indian historical tradition has zero memory of an ‘Aryan

invasion.’ This was pointed out a long time ago by F.E.

Pargiter, an authority on the Puranas, a class of ancient Indian

—. 2001. Sorting is not categorization: A critique of the claim that

Brazilians have fuzzy racial categories. Journal of cognition and culture

1:219-249.

http://www.hirhome.com/academic/emic.pdf

—. 2002. The cognition of ethnicity: Native category systems under the

field-experimental microscope. Field methods 14:170-198.

http://www.hirhome.com/academic/methods.pdf

works chronicling the ruling dynasties of India: “Vedic

literature says, I believe, nothing about the entrance of the

Aryans from the north-west into India” (quoted in Rajaram

1995:153). Since the Puranas say nothing about this, the only

‘support’ for this supposed invasion came from Max Müller’s

interpretation of the most ancient Vedic work: the Rigveda.

According to Max Müller, the Rigveda’s account of a battle

between the forces of light and darkness was describing a

conflict between invading light-skinned people and the darkskinned

natives whom they defeated. And this invasion, he

said, happened around the year 1500 BCE.

How did he come up with this date?

Max Müller believed firmly in the Biblical

interpretation that the world was created on October 23, 4004

BCE. “[A]s late as 1875, Max Müller himself wrote to the Duke

of Argyll: ‘I look upon the account of creation given in the

Genesis as simply historical’” (ibid. pp.95, 98). This naturally

had a constraining effect on the chronology that he produced,

and which assigned the Rigveda, the earliest of the ancient

Indian scriptures, to the period 1200 to 1000 BCE. For you see,

the date of The Flood, by the Biblical reckoning, was 2448

BCE. As Rajaram explains, “Allowing another 1000 years for

the waters to subside and for the ground to get dry enough for

the mounted Aryan tribes to begin their invasion of India,

brings us inside of 1500 BCE for the invasion” (ibid. p.95).

Max Müller then went looking for something—

anything—in the old Indian works that would support his

chronology. He found it in a collection of fairy tales written by

Somadeva of Kashmir around 1060 CE, which is to say more

than 2000 years after the supposed invasion that Müller was

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attempting to date. In addition, I point out that “[somadeva]

himself records that his stories were written to entertain

Survayati, the wife of King Ananta of Kashmir” (ibid. p.93)—

so even the author did not claim they had any historical value.

But never mind that, because the way Müller used

Somadeva’s fairy tales is quite preposterous enough all by

itself. In one of Somadeva’s stories, there is a one-eyed ghost

who claims that one Vararuchi, who in the story is the minister

of the Magadhan ruler Nanda, was a reincarnation of a certain

Katyayana. Max Müller somehow decided that this was the

same Katyayana as a Vedic commentator from the Sutra period

of the same name, and therefore that this Vedic commentator

was a contemporary of Nanda. “Since Nanda is thought to have

lived in the 4th century BCE, Max Müller assigned the Sutra

literature to the period around Nanda. His own imagination did

the rest” (ibid. p.92).

I will clarify. Somadeva’s story does not say that

Katyayana was a contemporary of Nanda, but only that

Katyayana’s reincarnation, Vararuchi, was. So Max Müller, in

contradiction to what the story stated, decided that Vararuchi

was not really the reincarnation of Katyayana, but Katyayana

himself, and moreover that this was not just any Katyayana, but

specifically the Vedic commentator from the Sutra period of

the same name, an identification that the story nowhere makes.

And yet things can get crazier still: Max Müller himself noted

that his reckoning was a bit uncertain because the Southern

Buddhists substituted Chandragupta for Nanda (ibid. p.93), so

he did not even have a stable fairy tale to misinterpret!

But there is more. Having thus ‘fixed’ the Sutra

literature to the period 600 to 200 BCE, which captures the

fourth century Nanda, Müller worked his way backwards,

producing the following chronology (ibid. p.91):

Work Time of Composition

Rigveda 1200 to 1000 BCE

Mantras 1000 to 800 BCE

Brahmanas 800 to 600 BCE

Sutras 600 to 200 BCE

It’s all very neat, every time a period of 200 years (except for

the last one), and always perfectly consecutive. How did

Müller come up with the other dates? He didn’t bother to

misinterpret a one-eyed ghost story from the eleventh century

for those—he just made them up.

As you might expect, Müller’s chronology did not

escape criticism in his time, to which he replied with a radical

disclaimer:

I need hardly say that I agree with every one of my

critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely

hypothetical character of the dates which I venture

to assign to the first three periods of the Vedic

literature. All I have claimed for them is that they are

minimum dates. If now we ask how we can fix the

date of these three periods, it is quite clear that we

cannot fix a terminus a quo. Whether the Vedic

hymns were composed 1000, 1500 or 2000 or 3000

BC, no power on earth will ever determine.—quoted

in Rajaram (1995:94)

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179

In fact, powers on earth can determine it, but it is noteworthy

that in the above Max Müller completely repudiated his own

“entirely hypothetical” chronology.

But there is still room for astonishment. In the year

1954, historian of India A.L. Basham was writing as follows:

The earliest Indian literary source we possess is the

Rigveda, most of which was composed in the

second half of the 2nd millennium [i.e. 1500 BCE to

1000 BCE]. It is evidently the work of an invading

people, who have not yet fully subjugated the

original inhabitants of N.-W. India. …The invaders of

India called themselves Aryas, a word generally

Anglicized into Aryans… …[Here is the theory]

which seems to us most reasonable, and which, we

believe, would be accepted by a majority of those

who specialize in the subject. About 2000 BCE the

great steppeland which stretches from Poland to

Central Asia was inhabited by semi-nomadic

barbarians, who were tall, comparatively fair, and

mostly long-headed. …They migrated in bands

westwards, southwards and eastwards, conquering

local populations, and intermarrying with them to

form a ruling class.—Basham (1954:28-29)

None of this was being defended in 1954; it was stated

in passing that the “most reasonable” scenario, and the one

“accepted by the majority of those who specialize on the

subject,” was still Max Müller’s nonsense.

But add another half century and still nothing changes.

Romila Thapar, another prominent historian, also of Indian

nationality, wrote the following in 1992:

The generally accepted chronology is that the Rig

Vedic hymns were composed over a period from

about 1500 BCE to 1000 BCE…—quoted in Rajaram

(1995:91)

In other words, at the turn of the twenty-first century,

the “generally accepted chronology”—even by historians who

happened to be Indian nationals—was still the nonsense used

to support the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ and which, over one

hundred years ago, even the original Max Müller had decided

not to defend. Scholars who endorse this chronology such as

Basham and Thapar nowhere demonstrate the validity of this

dating, which they have inherited from Max Müller—they just

state it. They can get away with this because it is the “generally

accepted chronology,” and what is generally accepted hardly

needs to be defended.

In the year 2005, Washington State University has a

website called World Civilizations: An Internet Classroom and

Anthology.1 In here one can find a page dedicated to Ancient

India, and within it, a page on the “Ancient Aryans.”2 The

Aryans, this page confidently explains,

…were a tribal and nomadic peoples living in the far

reaches of Euro-Asia in hostile steppe lands barely

scratching out a living. … They swept over Persia

with lightening speed, and spread across the

northern river plains of India. Their nature as a

warlike, conquering people are [sic] still preserved in

1 http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/

2 http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCINDIA/ANCINDIA.HTM

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Vedic religion [i.e. supposedly in the Rigveda], the

foundation of Hinduism.

And here is what the Encyclopedia Britannica writes,

also in the year 2005, concerning the origins of Hinduism:

Around 1500 BCE the Indus Valley was invaded by

an Indo-European people called Aryans. They

almost totally transformed Indian civilization, and in

so doing they imposed new forms of religion.1

Aside from the other absurdities, can you think of

anything more embarrassing than to find the Encyclopedia

Britannica sticking to Max Müller’s date of 1500 BCE, which

Müller himself disowned?

For anybody to be defending the ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ today, it would have to be true that Max Müller, despite

having simply invented the Aryan invasion story in a vacuum,

nevertheless, and quite spectacularly, got it right. But he didn’t.

Once Indian archaeology really hit the ground running as a

discipline (which it hadn’t in Müller’s time), all sorts of

absurdities were discovered when attempting to interpret the

new evidence in light of the ‘Aryan invasion theory.’

When the [Aryan invasion] theory was formed in the

nineteenth century there was no evidence of any

significant urban civilization in ancient India before

1 "Hinduism." Britannica Student Encyclopedia from Encyclopædia

Britannica Online.

http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8409/ebi/article?tocId=202038

[Accessed April 21, 2005].

1000 BCE. The Aryan invasion theory was thus first

devised in terms of the Aryans overrunning of an

aboriginal culture, which had small settlements. On

the invasion assumption, the Vedic battle between

the powers of light and darkness was interpreted as

indicating the Aryan invasion with more advanced

light-skinned people overwhelming the dark-skinned

aborigines who were regarded as crude and

uncivilized.

However, in the early twentieth century evidence of

a large urban civilization was found in Western

India—the so-called Indus civilization of Harappa

and Mohenjo-daro (c. 3000-1800 BCE). The Aryan

invasion theory was recast in light of these ruins. It

was suggested that the Aryans plundered and

destroyed this culture and were responsible for the

sudden and possibly violent ending to it. This was

the initial view of researchers like Wheeler, who

were trained to accept the Aryan invasion theory,

particularly since the end of the Harappan era

appeared to occur about the time proposed for the

so-called invasion (c. 1500 BCE)—Rajaram &

Frawley (1997:53)

This was a big change. The original Aryan invasion

theory was that the blonde super-warrior nomads from the

north were much smarter than the primitive darkies, who were

therefore easily conquered. When it turned out that the

supposedly primitive darkies had in fact constructed

spectacularly advanced cities in the Indus Valley (Harappa and

Mohenjo Daro), the Aryan invasion theory was hardly

abandoned; it was simply modified to say that the blond

nomads had easily conquered this highly urban civilization of

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the Indus Valley, because apparently dark-skinned people are

always stupider than blondes, whether or not dark-skinned

people have built advanced cities. Turning once again to the

Rigveda, defenders of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ now claimed

they saw in it descriptions of how the invading Aryans had

destroyed the cities of the Harappans. But they had not noticed

these descriptions when they maintained that the Aryans had

destroyed primitive villagers.

I do not mean to suggest that nomadic invaders cannot

defeat a materially more advanced civilization. This has

happened more than once, most famously with the spectacular

Mongolian conquests that have in fact served as an inspiration

for this new version of the ‘Aryan invasion theory.’ The

problem with using the Mongols as a model, however, as

Koenraad Elst points out in Update on the Aryan Invasion

Debate, is the following:

…the outcome of such episodes [nomadic invasions

of more advanced civilizations] is [that]…the

invaders were usually assimilated into the sedentary

civilization which they had overpowered in battle, if

they were not driven back out. The Mongols

became Chinese in China, Muslim in Iran, and of the

enormous territory they conquered, there is (with the

exception of Kalmykia) not one square mile where a

native language was permanently replaced with

Mongolian.—(Elst 1999:4.1.2)

The ‘Aryan invasion theory’ maintains, on the contrary,

that the invading Aryan culture completely displaced what was

there. This is not in principle impossible but in that case we

would expect to see signs of the violent destruction. Koenraad

Elst explains that in Europe some linguistic evidence is

consistent with the view that the Hellenes, Illyrians, and

Thracians invaded and displaced a materially advanced native

civilization in the Balkans, but that here we do find

archaeological evidence of destruction, which we don’t in the

Indian case.

These [balkan] natives had used an as yet

undeciphered writing system reportedly going back

to 5300 BC, and disappearing along with the Old

European culture in about 3500 BC. So there it

really was an advanced civilization being overrun by

barbarian invaders who largely destroyed it.

That model is being projected onto the Vedic-

Harappan history: a literate urban and agricultural

civilization being overrun by semi-nomadic

horsemen. But the crucial difference is that in the

Balkans, this violent scenario is attested by

archaeological findings…The same thing happened

when, according to most specialists, the Greeks

entered mainland Greece in 1,900 BC, driving the

last remains of Old European culture to their last

refuge on Crete… This [archeological] testimony of

many settlements having been burnt down is absent

at the [indus Valley] Harappan sites.—Elst

(1999:4.7.1; emphasis mine)

As Rajaram & Frawley put it, “[t]here is no real archaeological

evidence of any violent demise for the Harappan civilization”

(1997:54). But such negative findings failed to put a dent in the

enthusiasm for the Aryan invasion ‘theory,’ because

…by this time the invasion theory was so impressed

upon the minds of researchers that they continued

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trying to remold it. Some assumed the Aryan

invasion occurred when the cities were in decline or

had already been abandoned—that it was only the

degenerate remains of Harappans the Aryans

conquered. That this refuted their previous

assumptions that Vedic literature portrayed the

destruction of cities in battle did not seem to cause

any problems for such scholars. It is clear by such

shifts of view that Vedic literature was never taken

seriously by these scholars and one wonders if they

feel any need to account for it at all.—Rajaram &

Frawley (1997:54)

In other words, the ‘Aryan invasion theory,’ whose only

support had been a particular interpretation of the Rigveda, has

kept going strong even though the archaeological evidence has

roundly contradicted this interpretation of the Rigveda. This is

remarkable, because what it means is that the ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ no longer explains anything. In a sense this is what

makes it so stable, because evidence cannot refute a dogmatic

religious faith.

How the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ has

been supported

It is a bit of an exaggeration, however, to say that the ‘Aryan

invasion theory’ is based entirely on nothing. The discovery by

European scholars of a number of interesting similarities

between Sanskrit words and European and Iranian language

cognates led to the speculation that all of these languages had a

common ancestor. The ‘Aryan invasion theory,’ which has the

mythical blond and blue-eyed Aryans spreading out in remote

times from Central Asia and invading both Europe and India,

was offered as an explanation for the puzzle of the similarities

between all these languages. In the absence of archaeological

data agreeing with the invasion scenario, it was the

comparative linguists, so-called, who would provide the lasting

‘support’ for this historical hypothesis. But comparative

linguistics—or philology, as the discipline was once called—is

more a branch of superstition than a science, and in this section

I will explain why.

The 1968 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (vol.

14, p.76) stated that

Special linguistic methods, elaborated mostly for the

study of the Indo-European languages, enable one

to determine the genetic relationships between the

languages by a comparison of their forms. These

relations permit the supposition that there once

existed a parent language.

Since the “study of the Indo-European languages” is

practically synonymous with the defense of the ‘Aryan

invasion’ scenario, what we learn above is that “special

linguistic methods” were created to defend the theory that Max

Müller designed to give German nationalists a ‘heroic age’

purged of the Jews. That does not bode well for these “special

linguistic methods.”

Already in 1933 the linguist Leonard Bloomfield had

pointed out the rather extreme assumptions that were required:

The comparative [linguistic] method assumes that

each branch or language bears independent

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183

witness of the forms of the parent language, and

that identities or correspondences among the

related languages reveal features of the parent

speech. This is the same thing as assuming, firstly

that the parent community was uniform as to

language, and secondly, that the parent community

split suddenly and sharply into two or more daughter

communities, which lost all contact with each

other.—Bloomfield (1933:310)

Why did philologists or ‘comparative linguists’ assume

that linguistic communities split neatly, suddenly, and sharply,

and thereafter lost all contact with each other? Naturally,

because they were thinking of linguistic communities as if they

were biological species. When a biological population splits

into two reproductively isolated lineages these will begin to

evolve independently, because the information relevant to

organismal design—carried by genes—cannot be ‘exchanged’

between two populations unless they mate with each other. The

manner in which cultural populations evolve, however, hardly

corresponds to this model.

The evolution of cultural populations cannot be

understood except by reference to the psychological and other

laws governing the social acquisition of what are now called

‘memes’: socially transmissible bits of information such as

ideas, beliefs, norms, habits, laws, traditions, etc. The

evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins (1976) coined the term

‘meme’ to rhyme with ‘gene’ so as to emphasize that memes,

too, are subject to Darwinian forces of mutation, inheritance,

and selection, because some memes will perforce be more

‘popular,’ becoming more common at the expense of other

memes. But apart from its sound, Dawkins deliberately coined

this term to suggest morphemic linkages with mimesis,

memory, and the French word même (which means ‘the same’).

Why? Because memes are transmitted through social learning

(as opposed to biological reproduction), they are stored in

memory (as opposed to in the cell’s nucleus), and they must

show some non-trivial degree of similarity between parent and

copy for Darwinian analyses to apply.

Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, in 1985, launched

what is arguably the most productive approach to elucidating

the laws governing the transmission of memes in Culture and

the Evolutionary Process. For an update of their ideas and a

summary of twenty years of research, consult Richerson &

Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed the

Evolutionary Process, published in 2005 (full disclosure: I got

my Ph.D. in cultural and biological anthropology at UCLA,

with Robert Boyd as my thesis advisor). One of the purposes of

the research agenda of these two pioneers is to determine the

relative importance of various forms of cultural transmission in

producing historical change. It is certainly true that parents will

transmit many memes to their biological children, and here the

direction of transmission is identical to what happens in genetic

transmission. However, humans also learn from their peers,

from adults who are not their ancestors, from those who are

younger, and even from foreigners, and these directions of

transmission are radically different from what happens in the

genetic case. In addition, a population boundary defined by

ethnic identity and/or the preservation of certain traditions will

by no means always correspond neatly to the boundary of a

speech community; as any anthropologist will tell you, humans

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display maddening complexity in their social boundary

overlaps.

For example, different classes in the same society

always speak different dialects and sometimes entirely

different languages. Bits of a language can travel horizontally

in piecemeal fashion and be adopted by foreigners without

more substantial cultural contact or influence—and certainly

without implying an ancestor-descendant relationship between

the donor and borrower populations. In fact, a population can

acquire an entirely new language, whole, without being

descended from the population that originally spoke it (e.g. the

Irish). Therefore, imagining that one can look at similarities

between different speech communities to reconstruct a neat

splitting and branching historical pattern of cultures conceived

of as indivisible wholes, in the manner of the phylogeny of

biological species, is an obvious non-starter. But if any doubts

remain, anthropologist Richard McElreath (1997), who

likewise studied with Robert Boyd, has given a definitive

mathematical demonstration that one cannot construct cultural

phylogenies the way biologists do for species. He concludes

(p.38):

Current work in this area…still tackles the problem

[of reconstructing cultural phylogenies] as if cultures

had a single “real” phylogeny. This may certainly be

true for some classes of traits, but we do not know

yet which traits these are. We cannot presuppose

that the traits we are interested in share a phylogeny

with language.

In other words, the various forms of social transmission

of information, and the fact that different bits of information

are transmitted through different channels and in different

ways, make it impossible to reconstruct branching trees of

ancestor-descendant relations as if cultures branched whole,

with all their traits traveling together, in the manner of

biological species. So the so-called comparative linguists

presuppose something that “we cannot presuppose,” and this is

the method that has been recruited to support the ‘Aryan

invasion theory.’

The linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933:311) explained

some time ago what the consequence of this was:

…studies of Indo-European did not realize that the

family tree diagram was merely a statement of their

method: they accepted the uniform parent

languages, and their sudden clear cut splitting, as

historical realities.

That’s the polite way of saying that the comparative linguists

ended up believing their own nonsense.

But what did the comparative linguists do, exactly?

They invented a fictional language: ‘Indo-European.’ This was

supposedly the ancestor language to all so-called Indo-

European languages. Another name for ‘Indo-European,’ of

course, is Aryan. The claim by comparative linguists to have

demonstrated that there had been a Indo-European or Aryan

language, parent to Sanskrit, Iranian languages, and German,

among other European languages, was simply their entirely

incorrect assumption—as pointed out above—concerning what

the similarities between languages will imply about ancestordescendant

relations. Therefore, the existence of ancestral

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‘Indo-European’ or ‘Aryan’ has never been supported, let alone

demonstrated; this language was just conjured out of thin air.

Naturally, in order to defend the ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ it is important to privilege the so-called ‘evidence’ of

comparative linguists over all other, because otherwise the

archaeological evidence will lead people to the obvious

hypothesis: that the ‘Indo-European’ languages are similar

because they are all descendants of Sanskrit. This would make

a whole lot of sense.

With its extensive and fertile river systems of the

Indus, Saraswati and Ganga, India was the best

place on earth for food production, for demographic

growth, for cultural life and for scientific progress.

…it is perfectly plausible that large groups of Indians

went to other countries as traders and colonists,

precisely like the Europeans did when it was their

turn to have a demographical as well as a

technological edge over their neighbors. And just

like a dominant Spanish minority managed to make

its own language the mother-tongue of much larger

populations which are genetically predominantly

Native American, so also the slightly darker

emigrants from India may have passed on their

language to the white people of Russia and

Europe.—Elst (1999:4.1.1)

What about the genetic evidence?

The genetic evidence likewise does not support the ‘Aryan

invasion theory.’ On 10 January 2006 National Geographic

News reported on the results of a genetic study by “Vijendra

Kashyap, director of India’s National Institute of Biologicals in

Noida.”1 According to National Geographic, “the data reveal

that the large majority of modern Indians descended from

South Asian ancestors.”

It is by now perhaps needless to say that this has not

shaken the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ in the least, and in fact the

National Geographic article takes pains to explain this.

The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large

invasion of central Asians, traveling through a

northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language,

culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians

within the past 10,000 years.

That theory is bolstered by the presence of Indo-

European languages in India, the archaeological

record, and historic sources such as the Rig Veda,

an early Indian religious text.

… Peter Underhill, a research scientist at the

Stanford University School of Medicine's department

of genetics, says he harbors no doubts that Indo-

European speakers [i.e. the supposed ‘Aryans’] did

move into India. But he agrees with Kashyap that

their genetic contribution appears small.

"It doesn't look like there was a massive flow of

genes that came in a few thousand years ago," he

1 “India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says”; by Brian

Handwerk for National Geographic News; January 10, 2006.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0110_060110_india_genes.html

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said. "Clearly people came in to India and brought

their culture, language, and some genes."

Clearly? This is remarkable. Who can doubt that if the

genetic data supported the view of a population movement

from the Northwest into India, mainstream scholars would be

telling us that, naturally, this is because the ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ is correct? And yet, if the genetic data go the other way

the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ is still “clearly” the right one. As

before, we see that it matters little which way the evidence

goes: the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ will simply be asserted, with

confidence.

The title of the National Geographic article is in perfect

agreement with Peter Underhill, for it reads: “India Acquired

Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says.” In other

words, if the data says that Indians are genetically descended

from South Asians, well then the invading Aryans—because

there must be invading Aryans—bequeathed their culture to

Indians but few genes.

The problem is not that Underhill’s theory of a deep

cultural but shallow genetic impact of invading Aryans from

the Northwest has to be incorrect in principle—the problem is

that there is simply no evidence to support it, and the genetic

evidence is just the latest blow. Regurgitating the mainstream

view matter-of-factly, National Geographic tells its readers

that the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ “is bolstered by the presence

of Indo-European languages in India, the archaeological

record, and historic sources such as the Rig Veda, an early

Indian religious text.” But we have already seen that the

archaeological evidence refutes this theory, and that the

linguistic ‘evidence’ is no evidence at all. I shall now turn to

the supposed evidence from the Rigveda in order to show that

there is simply nothing—nothing at all—that will support this

theory. This exercise will finally take us where we ultimately

wanted to go: towards an elucidation of the origins of the

ancient Persians.

So who were ‘the Aryans’ of the

Rigveda, then?

The original scholarly impetus for the entire ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ was a misinterpretation of the word ‘Aryan’ as used in

the Rigveda. At first, as we saw, Max Müller along with others

said that the Aryans were a ‘race.’ Then, when the political

winds made his position delicate he changed his tune and said

that the Aryans were a linguistic group. The notion of the

Aryans as a ‘race’ persisted despite Müller’s flip, but was made

disreputable when the Nazis put it to their infamous uses. So in

the academic community what has flourished since has been

the theory of the ‘Indo-European language family,’ developing

Müller’s second theme. But the ‘race’ idea was never quite

abandoned: “An original Aryan race that spoke proto-Indo-

European [i.e. Aryan, the language from which all the ‘Indo-

European’ languages are supposedly descended] was proposed,

which then migrated and transmitted its language, but not

necessarily its racial type to other people” (Rajaram & Frawley

1997:61). Actually this is the same old Nazi idea, isn’t it? It

suggests that only some of the modern Europeans will be ‘pure

Aryans.’

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But the point here is the evidence: the term ‘Arya’ in

the ancient Sanskrit literature is a concept having zero

similarity either to a ‘race’ or to a ‘language group,’ which

guarantees that the notion of the ‘Aryan people,’ in either

version, will be nonsensical in principle. Here is an example of

how the term ‘Aryan’ is used in the Rigveda:

The Gods generated the Divine Word (Brahman),

the cow, the horse, the plants, the trees, the Earth,

the mountains and the Waters. Raising the Sun in

Heaven, the bountiful Gods released the Aryan laws

over the world. RV.x.65.11—translation, Rajaram &

Frawley (1997:63)

Now, with nothing but the above for context, ask

yourself, if we were to rewrite the last phrase, which of the

following three possibilities would make more sense:

1) “…the bountiful Gods released the laws of the

Aryan race over the world”; or

2) “…the bountiful Gods released the laws of the

Aryan-speaking people over the world”; or

3) “…the bountiful Gods released the good laws over

the world”?

What in the text forces the first or second choices? The

text is obviously exalting the gods—they have done everything

well. And these gods, who are so “bountiful” and have thus

created everything, blessed us also with laws. Therefore, to me

it seems as though “the Aryan laws” has to mean ‘the perfect

laws’ of the gods or something like that. I can find no good

reason to suppose that this is a reference to the laws of an

‘Aryan race’ or speech community.

Another reason for preferring the third option is that a

Sanskrit dictionary which is one-thousand five-hundred years

old agrees with it.

The most authoritative source for classical Sanskrit

words is Amarakosa, a lexicon from about 500 CE.

According to this authority an Arya is: mhakulakulinarya-

sabhya-sajjanasadhavah. This is

unambiguous and means: an Arya is one who hails

from a good family, of gentle behavior and

demeanor, good natured and of righteous

conduct.—Rajaram (1995:151).

The Aryan laws = the righteous laws; nothing to do

with ‘race’ or language.

The definition of ‘Arya’ in Amarakosa reminds me of

the way Mexican aristocrats speak, and on the basis of the

Mexican comparison I would submit the following hypothesis:

the ancient Sanskrit word ‘Arya’ is an aristocratic marker for a

class distinction. But is it legitimate for me to use modern

Mexico as a model to interpret the ancient Indus Valley

civilization? It is, so long as, regardless of time and location,

humans will tend to feel compassion unless an ideological

structure intervenes. If this is true, then the only stable

aristocracies will be those which reliably equip young

aristocrats, every generation, with a belief in their own

superiority, there to preempt the compassion that would

otherwise make them band together with the lower classes and

institute some form of progressive politics. And what could be

more effective, for the stability of an aristocratic class, than to

define words in such a way that compassion will be effortlessly

and automatically trumped in the daily act of speaking? So, if it

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is true that stable aristocratic classes in different times and

places will code certain meanings in similar ways, then the

Mexican comparison may well prove useful. Let’s see how far

it takes us.

I grew up as a member of a prominent aristocratic

family in Mexico, a country with sharp class divisions. Since I

was always of an anthropological bent (and thus became an

anthropologist) my experience in my own native society was to

a certain extent that of a participant-observer. In other words, I

was always, in a sense, a foreigner, never quite in my own skin,

and more than one person made the observation. Less

charitably, I was weird, because nothing about my society

seemed natural—it all demanded an explanation. My atypical

mental and social experience has equipped me with reflections

about the Mexican aristocracy that I think will prove useful

here. (Note: I am using the word ‘aristocracy’ loosely because

there are no titles of nobility in Mexico; but this is a distinction

without much of a difference: the very upper classes in Mexico

are a relatively stable group of people who inherit their position

to their children, and whose physical appearance is mostly

European. They are certainly a hereditary ruling class in effect

if not formally).

The people around me (the Mexican aristocrats) were

always cutting up the Mexican universe into two types of

people: ‘gente decente’ (or ‘gente bien,’ a synonym) in

opposition to ‘nacos.’ The word ‘gente’ means ‘people,’ and

although the word ‘nacos’ appears all by itself, it is also

referring to a group of people, which is why I have it in the

plural. So the opposition ‘gente decente’ vs. ‘nacos’ is an

opposition between two different categories of people. I shall

now try to give you a sense for the meanings of these words,

and I will be careful to specify the relevant context, each time,

because usage and precise meaning vary by context.

First, let us imagine a situation without a class-relevant

dimension but a clear moral one. Thus, imagine that you are a

Mexican aristocrat and that somebody—another aristocrat—

did not keep a promise, or cheated in a transaction, or tried to

bribe you. This person, in consequence, is not ‘decente’; he is

‘naco.’ Or suppose that this fellow aristocrat threw trash out of

the window of his car, or spat on the ground, or didn’t wash his

hands after going to the restroom. Once again, this person is

not ‘decente’; he is ‘naco.’ Or suppose that this fellow

aristocrat called you names, or took some liberties when

speaking to you even though you had not been quite

introduced. Once again, he is not ‘decente’; he is ‘naco.’ So on

a first pass it appears that ‘decente’ is not that different from

‘Arya’ as defined in the ancient Sanskrit dictionary

Amarakosa, as it easily covers the meanings of being “of gentle

behavior and demeanor, good natured and of righteous

conduct.”

Now take a look at the remaining meaning for Arya in

Amarakosa: “hailing from a good family.” For the Mexican

aristocrats, “hailing from a good family” is a euphemism for

being a member of the aristocracy—and when finer distinctions

apply, for being a member of the old aristocracy as opposed to

the nouveau riches. So this makes me wonder whether the

Sanskrit dictionary means the same thing when it says that

“Arya is one who hails from a good family.” If so, this would

agree perfectly with the Mexican model, because when a class

context is involved, Mexican aristocrats will use ‘gente

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decente’ (lit. ‘decent people’) to refer to themselves, the

aristocrats, who come from ‘good families’—they are not

qualifying anybody’s behavior (though there is always an

implication that the behavior of aristocrats is morally

superior).1 By symmetry, in a class context, Mexican

aristocrats will use the contrast term ‘nacos’ to refer to the

lower classes.

Does Sanskrit have a term to contrast with ‘Arya’ that

will be the equivalent of ‘naco’? It does: Dasa or Dasyu.

Navaratna S. Rajaram and David Frawley explain that the

dasas are “[those] opposed to the Vedic way of life. …Literally

it means servant…” (1997:272; emphasis mine). Interesting.

The slang term ‘gato’ (lit. ‘cat’) is used by Mexican aristocrats,

with derogation, to refer to their servants, and it is often used

interchangeably with ‘naco’ when referring to the lower classes

at large, or when criticizing ‘improper’ forms of behavior

(according to aristocratic standards).

Elsewhere, Rajaram & Frawley write (ibid. p.72):

Dasyus, Dasas, and Panis as people are opposite to

Aryans. They are unspiritual people. They do not

sacrifice, do not offer gifts, do not honor the Gods.

In other contexts they are not even people but

demons… Dasyu means destroyer and often simply

means a robber, a criminal or an uncivilized person,

or a low class person (such as we find its usage in

the Manu Samhita).

1 It is also precisely when a class context is involved that ‘gente bien’ (lit.

‘good people’) becomes a perfect synonym of ‘gente decente.’

Just as with ‘naco,’ Dasa or Dasyu, depending on

context, means someone who breaks the norms, or else a low

class person (or both simultaneously). The opposition between

Arya and Dasyu does indeed appear to follow rather closely the

Mexican opposition between ‘gente decente’ and ‘nacos,’

allowing for the fact that the authors of the Vedic texts were

hyper-religious and so added a religious dimension to the

distinction (an Aryan does the sacrifices properly, etc., and a

Dasyu does not).

Additional support for the usefulness of the Mexican

model is the following:

…the most common use of the word Arya in

classical Sanskrit is as an honorific—as in

addressing people. ‘Arya Chanakya’ simply is

equivalent to Mr. Chanakya. Addressing a man as

Arya is equivalent to calling him ‘Sir’ in English or

‘Monsieur’ in French.—Rajaram (1995:152)

If the word Arya was used by the ancient Indus Valley

aristocrats, in a class context, to refer to themselves, then by

the Mexican model it is not in the least surprising that the same

word should have functioned also as an honorific, because

honorifics are also used to mark class distinctions in the daily

intercourse between two people. In Mexico, when two people

of the same class are speaking to each other, they may address

each other honorifically as Don this or that. But when members

of the upper and lower classes speak to each other, it is

traditional (and still common) for the upper-class person to be

addressed as Don something (with honorific grammar) and for

the lower-class person to be addressed by their first name (with

familiar grammar).

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English speakers unfamiliar with the class discourse of

Mexican society can nevertheless plumb their own intuitions

by reflecting on English usage. For example, the observations

above also apply to the use of the Spanish term ‘Señor,’ which

is a good translation for the French ‘Monsieur’ and the English

‘Sir.’ But the specifically British ‘Sir’ also has affinities with

‘Don,’ because it is sometimes employed as an aristocratic

title. Since I am arguing that aristocrats everywhere will make

a linkage between membership in the aristocracy and

supposedly superior manners and moral values, it is telling that

a member of the lower classes can become Sir in Britain

through meritorious behavior in the eyes of the aristocracy,

which aristocracy then condescends to confer the title on the

‘worthy’ commoner.

But the most productive English-language intuition here

comes from reflecting on the use of the word ‘noble,’ which in

a class context means “of high birth or exalted rank:

ARISTOCRATIC,” as Merriam Webster Online puts it; outside a

class context, according to the same dictionary, ‘noble’ means

all of the following: “possessing outstanding qualities,”

“possessing very high or excellent qualities or properties,”

“very good or excellent,” “grand or impressive especially in

appearance,” and “possessing, characterized by, or arising from

superiority of mind or character or of ideals or morals.”

On first pass it might seem as if a contradiction to my

interpretation appears in the great epic Ramayana, where the

following description of Rama is given: “Arya—who cared for

the equality of all and was dear to everyone” (Rajaram

1995:153). But even interpreting this passage to mean that

Rama frowns on class divisions, this is not a contradiction.

Caring for the equality of all, here, is not part of the definition

of Arya. Rather, ‘Arya’ in my view is simply being used here

as an adjective to qualify the general worthiness of Rama,

which would agree with the most common use of ‘Arya’ in the

Rigveda: “The Rigveda uses the word [Arya] mainly as an

adjective, invariably as a term implying finer qualities”

(Rajaram 1995:153). So Rama is a noble divinity (nice guy),

who therefore cares for the equality of all. This is also how the

word ‘decente’ is mostly used in Mexico, as an adjective, for

this is its primary and default meaning. Hence, “la gente

decente lucha por la igualdad de todos” (“the gente decente

fight for everybody’s equality”) will be a perfectly reasonable

phrase in many a Mexican context, just as “the fight for

equality is a noble pursuit” is a perfectly good English phrase,

despite the fact that ‘noble’ in some contexts means aristocrat.

In further support of this interpretation I note that “The Buddha

called his religion Aryan (Arya Dharma)…[and] Cyrus, the

first emperor of Persia also called himself an Aryan, or a noble

person” (Rajaram & Frawley 1997:63). Both the Buddha and

Cyrus the Great were interested in justice for all, as in the case

of Rama, so ‘Arya’ cannot have been used by them in its

aristocratic sense, but simply as an adjective of moral

worthiness.

By the way, the interpretation that the Arya/Dasyu

opposition marks a class distinction is one that Navaratna

Rajaram, my source on the meanings of these words, does not

like, and which he derogatorily labels ‘Marxist’ (Rajaram

1995:152). So if one can build this case even with Rajaram’s

translations, then perhaps there is something to it.

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Now, I find it quite interesting that, although Dasyu

was a term of derogation in the Vedic works, “[t]he Iranians

and some Central Asiatics…seem to have described themselves

as Dasyu after they broke away from the Vedic fold” (ibid.

p.272). What could explain this? Well, we know from the

modern experience that it is not uncommon for discriminated

groups, when politicized, to adopt—in proud defiance of the

symbol system they mean to oppose—the insults heaped on

them by their oppressors. Famously, within the African-

American community, ‘nigger’ may be used in certain contexts

as a comradely term of endearment, and some politicized gays

have adopted as an identity symbol the pink triangle that the

Nazis designed to brand them with. Since the Iranians, as we

have seen, eventually developed a successfully egalitarian,

justice-seeking, world-saving religion, Zoroastrianism, the fact

that they adopted for themselves the term Dasyu suggests that

perhaps they emerged out of a major class struggle in ancient

Vedic civilization.

This hypothesis has going for it that it avoids the

absurdities that otherwise emerge when you try to interpret the

battles between Aryas and Dasyus in the Rigveda as wars

between blue-eyed-blond and dark-skinned ‘races’ or ethnies.

The Rigveda describes a battle between the forces

of light and the forces of darkness. This is the battle

between the Gods (Devas) and the demons (called

variously Panis, Dasyus, Dasas…) The Vedas

proclaim the victory of the light and the destruction

of the forces of darkness.—Rajaram & Frawley

(1997:64)

If the Rigveda uses the term Dasa or Dasyu to denote

the demons or ‘bad guys,’ and the same classical Sanskrit term

is used to denote the lower classes, this is further support for

the view that the Rigveda depicts a class conflict. What does

not appear well supported is the interpretation that the battle

between ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ represents a racial or ethnic

conflict between groups of people of contrasting complexion.

As Rajaram and Frawley note, the battle between ‘forces of

light’ and ‘forces of darkness’ occurs in many other cultures,

and nowhere does it have a racial interpretation of whiteskinned,

blond, blue-eyed people fighting with dark-skinned

people. For example, nobody gives this interpretation to The

War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness,

one of the documents found in the famous Dead Sea Scrolls

uncovered at Qumran, in present-day Israel. Why give a

‘racial’ or ethnic interpretation, then, to the Vedic scriptures?

Aryans vs. Dasyus is a representation of the ‘good guys’ versus

the ‘bad guys’ from the point of view of those who won (as

usual); no racial or ethnic interpretation is called for.

Those who would interpret the Rigveda’s battle

between the forces of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ as a story written

by the invading and supposedly white-skinned Aryans to

celebrate their victory over the supposedly native and

supposedly dark-skinned Dasyus, run into obvious problems.

Consider, for example, the so-called Battle of the Ten Kings,

which is one of the most prominent stories in the Rigveda. Its

hero is King Sudas, who was aided by miraculous floods called

forth by the god Indra.

The floods extended for Sudas. Indra you made

them shallow and easy to cross. The host of the

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Simyus who are unworthy of praise, Indra, who is to

be lauded by speech, gave the curse of the rivers.

Turvasa was the leader, seeking gain, like hungry

fish with an appetite for gain. The Bhrgus and the

Druhyus followed his advice. Friend to friend

crossed over from opposite regions. The Pakthas,

Bhalanas, Alinas, Visaninas, and Sivas came. Yet

Indra came and led the side of the Aryans.

Of evil mind, trying to drain the Earth (Aditi), the

unwise parted the Parusni river. The ruler of the

Earth, Indra with his might scattered them. The herd

and their leader lay still piled up (in their defeat).

They went to their goal, their defeat on the Parusni.

Even the swift did not return. Indra for Sudas, for

man, defeated the strong, unfriendly people of false

speech. RV. VII.18.5-9—translation, Rajaram &

Frawley (1997:76)

Above we are told that the god “Indra came and led the

side of the Aryans.” But this has to mean ‘the good guys,’ in

this passage, because elsewhere we are told that,

Indra and Varuna, aid Sudas with grace and destroy

his opponents both Dasa and Arya… Both sides call

upon you in battle, Indra and Varuna, for victory.

RV.VII.18.12-14—translation, Rajaram & Frawley

(1997:77)

If both sides call upon the same gods, it is obvious that

both sides are members of the same culture, which contradicts

the idea that nomads from Central Asia called ‘Aryans’ were

invading non-Aryan people already in the Indus Valley. And if

there are both Aryans and Dasyus opposing King Sudas, then it

is impossible to interpret this conflict neatly as one between

Aryans against Dasyus, with the Aryans as the white-skinned

race who defeated the dark-skinned race—that would make

zero sense. And yet this is how the ‘Aryan invasion theory’

interprets the text!

By contrast, accepting my defense of the idea that the

Arya/Dasyu distinction is labeling a class division from the

aristocratic point of view, then perhaps the Indus Valley was

witness to some rather extended political conflicts which, as in

the first century Mediterranean, will benefit from a ‘modern’

interpretation in terms of a sophisticated ideological contest

between an ancient right-wing and an ancient left-wing. Why

not? After all, it is already quite clear that the ancient Indians

were terribly sophisticated, and in some ways more advanced

than modern Europeans. Consider for example Panini and

Patañjali (of Yogasutra fame):

Panini [was an] ancient Sanskrit grammarian whose

Astadhyayi is generally regarded as the greatest

work on descriptive linguistics ever written. …

Computer scientists are only now beginning to

discover the linguistic treasures of Panini’s

Astadhyayi and Patañjali’s Mahabhasya. The value

of Indian linguistics in modern computer science is

well established, by researchers in artificial

intelligence and computer languages.—Rajaram &

Frawley (1997:285, 14).

Panini and Patañjali belong to the Sutra period, which

in the corrected, scientific chronology—as opposed to in Max

Müller’s superstitious nonsense—is contemporaneous with the

Harappans and Sumeria (as we shall see). This means that the

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traditional Indian dating of these authors, which places them

around 3000 BCE, cannot be far off. If that bygone civilization

could produce better linguistics than we have today, why

should we imagine that their political awareness was less

sophisticated than ours? So I find the possibility intriguing that

if the most important political conflict depicted in the Rigveda

represents the opponents of King Sudas as including both

Aryans and Dasyus, perhaps an ideological movement not

unlike the leftist movements that produced ancient Judaism, the

French revolution, or modern socialism, all of which involved

alliances of aristocrats and commoners, may have also taken

place in the ancient Indus Valley.

King Sudas won, says the Rigveda, which is consistent

with the fact that progressive politics was dealt a severe blow

in India, but nevertheless flourished among the Vedic offshoot

that became the Iranians, who not only turned the deity Indra,

patron of the Vedic warriors, into an evil spirit (as we saw in

the previous chapter), but also defiantly adopted for themselves

the designation Dasyu (as we saw above). Consistent with

these speculations is the fact that the ancient Vedic works lump

the Panis with the Dasas and Dasyus as enemies of the Aryans.

The Panis are traders and merchants—businesspeople. This is

consistent with social conflicts in other times and places, where

the lower classes have found allies among the traders and

merchants against the aristocrats and their mercenaries.

On the basis of this interpretation, I will now turn to the

question of when the Iranians came into their own.

When did the Iranians arise?

Archaeologists have shown that the heartland of the so-called

‘Indus Valley’ civilization was actually by the Sarasvati river,

which was enormous when this civilization was at its height.

This is consistent with the contents of the Rigveda, where the

Sarasvati is assigned a prominent place.

The Rigveda lauds [the Sarasvati] as the greatest of

rivers and the holy mother. Satellite photography,

archaeology, as well as hydrological surveys all

show that the Sarasvati was once a mighty river,

over five miles wide in places. This is entirely in

accord with the Vedic accounts that make that

Sarasvati the first of rivers.” (Rajaram & Frawley

1997:110).

As if the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ didn’t already have

enough problems, it turns out that “The Sarasvati river, it is

now known, changed its course several times, finally drying up

completely around 1900 BCE” (ibid. p.111). Why is this a

problem? Because the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ claims that the

invading Aryans arrived around 1500 BCE, and wrote the

Rigveda to celebrate their supposed invasion around 1200 BCE.

Why would these arriving nomads celebrate a mighty river

which no longer existed at the time of their supposed conquest,

and around which they had not built a great civilization? Seems

hard to explain. However, if the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ is

abandoned, there is no special problem: the Rigveda was

composed by those who lived around the Sarasvati river, and

who in their latest stage correspond to the populations of

Harappa and Mohenjo Daro.

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But when was the Rigveda written, then? Rajaram &

Frawley marshal several independent lines of converging

evidence to derive a new chronology. For example,

astronomical observations made in the ancient Vedic works are

useful because the features of the sky have been changing, and

some things that could be observed a long time ago could not

be observed later, which is of invaluable help in dating the

composition of texts which mention certain—now outdated—

astronomical phenomena.

There is also the evidence of comparative mathematics.

The historian of mathematics A. Seidenberg, in The Ritual

Origin of Geometry (1962) and The Origin of Mathematics

(1978) had already shown that the mathematics of the Indian

Sulbasutras are ancestral to the mathematics of Babylonia,

Egypt, and Greece (see discussion in Rajaram & Frawley

1997:136-173). However, Seidenberg encountered among

historians of India the doctrine of the ‘Aryan invasion theory,’

the general agreement about which he took to mean that solid

science was behind it. Since these historians, following Max

Müller, told him that the Sutras had been composed between

600 and 200 BCE, he was led to posit a mathematics ancestral

to both the Sulbasutras and the mathematics of these other

civilizations. Now, for this ancestral mathematics there is zero

evidence, just as there is zero evidence for the ancestral ‘Indo-

European’ language. Thus, with a refutation of the ‘Aryan

invasion theory’ in hand, the natural solution is obviously that

the Indian mathematics expressed in the Sulbasutras are

ancestral to the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek mathematics,

just as Sanskrit is ancestral to the Iranian and European

languages. This requires pushing back the date of composition

of the Sutras to around the year 3000 BCE.

These pieces of the puzzle agree nicely with the

archaeological evidence and also the geographic/ecological

evidence about the drying up of the Sarasvati river, which in

turn agrees with traditional Indian history (the same traditional

history that has no memory of an ‘Aryan invasion’ from the

north). For example,

Several ancient [indian] works like the Pancavimsa,

Brahmana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas state

that the Sarasvati disappeared into the desert well

before reaching the ocean. This represents a later

state in the life of the great river. The Sarasvati that

[in the Rigveda] flowed “from the mountain to the

sea” must therefore correspond [to] a much much

earlier age, at least a few centuries before 3000

BCE. So the Rigveda must belong to a period before

that date.—Rajaram (1995:23)

These and other considerations produce a new

chronology that, needless to say, is more convincing than Max

Müller’s. According to this new chronology—which moreover

agrees, more or less, with the dates offered by the tradition of

Indian history dating to ancient times—the composition of the

latest portions of the Rigveda should be placed around 3700

BCE (ibid. p.204). A long time ago indeed. On this reckoning, it

is also around this time that King Sudas fought it out against a

coalition of Aryans and Dasyus, with victory going to King

Sudas and his mercenaries. This means that the Iranians, who

called themselves Dasyus, emerged into their own after this

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battle and not before. When exactly is a difficult question to

answer, but here is an exciting clue:

There are tantalizing references to Zarathustra and

his schism in the Indian literature also. An Indian

historian, Madalasa Devi Agarawala cites the

following passage from the Bhavisya Purana (139,

13-15):

“…contrary to the Vedic practices, your son will

become famous by the name of Mag. His name will

be Jarathustra Mag and he will bring fame to the

dynasty. His descendants will worship fire and will

be known by the name Mag (Shaka) and being

worshippers of ‘Soma’ (magadha-shakadvipi) will be

Mag Brahmins.” (Agarawala, 1979)

From this one is led to conclude that Mag was

sometimes used in India to refer to that Sakas or

their land. The Sakas are not necessarily the

Scythians; eastern Iranians were also so called.

Their land was known as Sakasthana—the modern

Seistan. Ms. Agarawala further explains that the

word ‘Mag’ was used in ancient India to describe

heretical people who were opposed to Vedic

practices. Could the words ‘Magus’ and ‘Magi’ used

by Herodotus for Median and Persian priests have

been related to the Indian Mag—the magadha

shakadvipi?—Rajaram & Frawley (1997:126)

The following points bear emphasis. The name

Jarathustra needs only the substitution of a ‘Z’ for a ‘J’ and we

get ‘Zarathustra.’ Eastern Iranians are close to Afghanistan,

and many scholars believe that’s where Zarathustra was from.

Zarathustra indeed preached “contrary to the Vedic practices.”

Moreover, as Rajaram points out, Herodotus referred to what

were almost certainly Zoroastrian priests as Magi, and these

could easily be the Mag Brahmins. Since the Iranians adopted

the derogatory term Dasyu in apparent defiance of the Vedic

symbol system, it would fit if their priests adopted the term

Mag, used by the Vedic aristocratic priests to derogate

‘heretics.’ There is no question but that fire played a central

symbolic role in Zoroastrianism. And the Zoroastrians had a

ritual that involved what the Avestan texts call ‘haoma’ (above,

‘Soma’), a psychoactive drug (Boyce 1992:58, 111), and one of

their divinities was the Mainyu of the plant, or Haoma (Boyce

1992:109, 116).1

I do not believe ancient texts can prophecy such minute

details into the future, even when they pretend to be doing so.

Therefore, the Bhavisva Purana, despite writing in the future

tense, since it refers to the coming descendants of Zarathustra,

had to be written when descendants of Zarathustra already

existed and Zarathustra himself was already “famous” and

worth writing about for having created a successful ethical

mass movement. The Puranas represent the traditional Indian

historical tradition, and they are supposed to belong to Vedic

times, the closing of which Rajaram & Frawley’s new

chronology places around 1900 BCE, when the Sarasvati river

finally dried up. So Zarathustra, by this reckoning, had to make

his appearance no later than 1900 BCE, and almost certainly

somewhat earlier (there is convergence with Xanthos of Lydia

here, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, placed Zoroaster

around 1800 BCE). Presumably the Iranians predate Zarathustra

1 This drug was perhaps ephedra, cannabis, or both.

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himself, in which case they emerged into their own before this

date.

When?

Rajaram (1995:164) notes that “The famous Battle of

Ten Kings resulted in the expulsion from India of several tribes

of Indian Aryans who settled in Persia, Parthia, and as far west

as Anatolia [Turkey],” something that had already been noted

long before by students of the Puranas such as F.E. Pargiter

(ibid. p.165). Of course, there is no particular reason to call

these emigrants ‘Indian Aryans’ if the term is a marker of class

rather than ethnicity, and especially if some of these would

eventually call themselves Dasyus. If the Battle of Ten Kings,

as I argued above, was a conflict between a right-wing,

represented by Sudas and his mercenaries, and a left-wing, then

perhaps the origins of the Iranians may be found in these

migrations, and if not perhaps in a later population movement

out of India.

I must clarify that most of those who left India

continued to worship in the Vedic religion much as before.

Consider for example that in 1907 a tablet dating to about 1400

BCE was discovered in Anatolia [Turkey] recording a treaty

between the Hittite and the Mittani in which the Vedic deities

Indra, Mitra, and Varuna were invoked as guarantors (Rajaram

& Frawley 1997:122-123). It is those who moved into

Afghanistan and Central Asia, it appears, that developed a

more egalitarian culture where Indra was not worshipped but

demonized, and from which Zoroastrianism eventually arose.

These would be the Iranians. Other links between the Iranians

and their Vedic ancestors can also be seen in Mary Boyce’s

reconstruction of the religion that Zarathustra modified, as we

saw earlier, and in the fact that the language of the Zoroastrian

scriptures, Avestan, is very close indeed to Sanskrit.

Rajaram & Frawley (1997:125) favor placing the

arrival of Zoroaster around the time of the final drying up of

the Sarasvati river in 1900 BCE because it agrees rather exactly

with Xanthos of Lydia. They also like this date because “The

Kassites, who…worshipped Indian deities” appeared in

Mesopotamia around that time, suggesting a population

movement out of India contemporaneous with the drying up of

the Sarasvati. However, the major drought that ultimately

spelled the end of the Sarasvati began in 2200 BCE (ibid.

p.204), so there may have been significant population

movements out of India as early as that, and these may well

have resulted from sharpened class conflicts in the wake of the

strains produced by the drought. Other scholars whose main

concern is Zoroastrianism will have to pin this down with

greater accuracy. My concern here was to establish, in a broad

sense, where the Iranians came from, and more or less when, so

that the ultimate provenance of Judaism—which the Persian

Iranians influenced and sponsored—can be understood.

Can partisans of the ‘Aryan invasion

theory’ defend it?

Defenders of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ exist in large

numbers because the theory has been institutionalized, so those

whose careers have been built on it naturally will not give up

without a fight. But the details of this fight suggest they cannot

win.

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For example, against the avalanche of evidence

presented by Navaratna S. Rajaram and David Frawley, much

has been made by the pro-Aryan resistance of the question of

horses. The Rigveda mentions horses and chariots repeatedly

but, according to invasionists, there is no evidence of horse

domestication among the ruins of the Indus Valley civilization

(Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, etc.); therefore, they say, the

Rigveda had to be written by a horse-riding culture from

Central Asia and which invaded India—the Aryans.

Unfortunately for this argument, there is evidence of

horse domestication in the Indus Valley, which removes any

obstacle to saying, on such grounds, that the Vedas were

composed by the Sarasvati river civilization (of which the

Harappan or Indus Valley portion is the latest stage).

…in several Harappan sites remains of horses have

been found. Even supporters of the AIT [Aryan

Invasion Theory] have admitted that the horse was

known in Mohenjo Daro, near the coast of the

Arabian Sea (let alone in more northerly areas), in

2500 BCE at the latest. But the presence of horses

and even domesticated horses has already been

traced further back: horse teeth at Amri, on the

Indus near Mohenjo Daro, and at Rana Ghundai on

the Panjab-Baluchistan border have been dated to

about 3,600 BCE. The latter has been interpreted as

indicating “horse-riding invaders”, but that is merely

an application of invasionist preconceptions. More

bones of the true and domesticated horse have

been found in Harappa, Surkotada (all layers

including the earliest), Kalibangan, Malvan and

Ropar. Recently, bones which were first taken to

belong to onager specimens, have been identified

as belonging to the, domesticated horse (Kuntasi,

near the Gujarat coast, dated to 2300 BCE).

Superintending archaeologist Dr. A.M. Chitalwala

comments: “We may have to ask whether the

Aryans (…) could have been Harappans

themselves. (…) We don’t have to believe in the

imports theory anymore.”

… any finds of horses are good enough to make the

point that horses were known in India, and that they

were available to a substantially greater extent than

a simple count of the excavated bones would

suggest. The cave paintings in Bhimbetka near

Bhopal, perhaps 30,000 years old (but the datings

of cave paintings are highly controversial), showing

a horse being caught by humans, confirm that

horses existed in India in spite of the paucity of

skeletal remains. There is, however, room for

debate on whether the animals depicted are really

horses and not onagers. Other cave paintings, so

far undated, show a number of warriors wielding

sticks in their right hands and actually riding horses

without saddles or bridles.—Elst (1999:4.4.3)

Supporters of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ have pointed

to “the apparent absence of horse motifs on the famous

Harappan seals (except one)” (ibid.). This is a weak argument,

considering the confirmed presence of horse remains! But even

without that, as Elst remarks, all one need do in reply is point

out

…the equally remarkable absence of the female

cow among the numerous animal depictions on the

seals, even though the cow must have been very

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familiar to the Harappans considering the frequent

depiction of the bull. A taboo on depictions of the

two most sacred animals may well explain the

absence of both the cow and the horse.—ibid.

The Harappan seals have been the locus of a far louder

debate, however, and I shall now turn to this.

Ever since Navaratna S. Rajaram and David Frawley

refuted the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ lots of accusations have

flown that Rajaram has the wrong ideology: Hindutva, which is

a form of Hindu nationalism. So Rajaram is trying to say that

there was no Aryan invasion, goes the argument, because this

injures his Hindu pride. This sort of thing is what philosophers

call an argument ad hominem: one tries to defeat the

opponent’s claim not by pointing to any flaws in his argument,

but by trying to impugn the character of the opponent.

Whoever resorts to arguments ad hominem betrays the

weakness of his position—after all, if the facts support you,

then you hardly need to sling mud.

Let us be charitable to Rajaram’s detractors, however,

and suppose that this accusation against him is fair, and that he

is indeed a Hindutva nationalist. What then? In this case, we

have a choice between a theory espoused by a Hindutva

nationalist on the one hand, and a theory produced by

nineteenth-century antisemitic German nationalist ideology—

and which inspired twentieth-century antisemitic German

National Socialist (Nazi) ideology—on the other. Is the latter

choice obviously to be preferred?

Of course we will agree, in any case, that what matters

is which theory accounts best for the known facts. As we have

seen, it is quite hard to find a single fact that will agree with

Max Müller’s ‘Aryan invasion theory,’ but that has not

deterred a few ‘patadas de ahogado’ (‘drowning man’s final

kicks,’ as they say in Mexico), from the theory’s defenders. For

example, defenders of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ have seized

on an admittedly weird move by Navaratna Rajaram, to which

I now turn.

Ever since Max Müller, the mainstream argument has

been that the Aryans, supposedly nomadic foreigners, invaded

and destroyed the Indus Valley civilization which included the

cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, thereafter composing the

Rigveda, supposedly, to celebrate this victory. Rajaram’s

contrary argument is that the literate classes in the extremely

advanced Indus Valley—or more properly, Sarasvati river—

civilization wrote the Vedic texts. To bolster his argument

beyond the refutations of the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ that I

have reviewed above (and I focused only on the main

demonstrations), Rajaram has recently attempted to show that

the so-called Indus-Valley script of the famous Harappan seals

was a true language. I find this puzzling, because, even if

Rajaram could succeed, it is obvious at a glance that he would

not thereby be demonstrating the Harappan seals to contain

Sanskrit. Rajaram’s critics have replied that the Harappan seals

are not ‘written’ in a true language—let alone Sanskrit—and

that therefore (!) no Harappans were literate. A madhouse. I

will first take the trouble to show that Rajaram’s critics are

right that this particular argument of his is incorrect: the

Harappan seals are certainly not linguistic. Then I will show

that this does not affect one bit Rajaram’s general thesis

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concerning who wrote the Vedic texts. The entire debate

around the Harappan seals is a red herring.

In a 2004 article devoted to this issue, Steve Farmer, a

comparative historian, Richard Sproat, at the University of

Illinois Department of Linguistics and Electrical and Computer

Engineering, and Michael Witzel, a Harvard University

Indologist, make a devastating presentation in the face of

which it is impossible to defend the thesis that the Harappan

seals are linguistic. Their article is an exercise in overkill, so I

will present only what strike me as the decisive pieces of

evidence.

First, let us get acquainted with the types of objects on

which the Indus Valley symbol-script appears:

Some 4-5000 objects are known today on well over

a dozen media—including steatite, faience, and

metal seals, clay seal impressions, pots, potsherds,

copper plates, molded terracotta and copper tablets,

incised shells, ivory cones and rods, stone and

metal bangles [ornamental bracelet], metal

weapons, tools, rocks, and a miscellany of other

objects including a famous three-meter wide

‘signboard’ discovered in the urban ruins of

Dholavira (Bisht 1991, 1998-89)—Farmer, Sproat, &

Witzel (2004:22)

There are two main categories of objects with Indus

symbols. In the first category are seals (for making

impressions) and tablets (for making impressions on); in the

second category are all sorts of private-property objects with

Indus symbols on them, made either with seals or incised some

other way. Needless to say, these are not ideal media for

writing language on and, as you might expect, the sequences of

symbols found on these objects are extremely brief.

The longest on one surface [catalogued as M-314 a]

has 17 symbols [i.e. exactly half as many as the

phrase to the left of this bracket, not counting the

spaces]; less than 1/100 carry as many as 10. Many

Indus inscriptions—if ‘inscription’ is really an

appropriate term—contain only one or two symbols;

the average length of the 2,905 objects carrying

Indus symbols catalogued in Mahavedan’s standard

concordance is 4.6 signs long.—ibid.

[ To the left is a picture of M-

314 a. It is shown larger than

its actual size. ]

The authors add that,

Like most objects carrying Indus symbols, M-314 a

is surprisingly small, according to its excavators (in

the 1920s) measuring a scant 1×.95 inches

(2.54×2.41 cm.) in size.—ibid.(p.30, fig.3)

In addition, it is quite significant that the symbols are

hardly ever repeated.

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Whatever the total counts of signs, all major studies

agree that a small number of symbols dominate in

Indus inscriptions. Just four of 417 signs account for

21% of the 13,372 sign occurrences in

Mahadevan’s concordance; eight signs make up

31%; and twenty signs over 50%.—ibid. (p.26)

Even more telling is the fact that symbols are rarely

repeated in the same inscription. If you look at the previous

sentence and count, you will find that it contains 12 repetitions

of the symbol ‘e’; moreover, each symbol in that sentence

appears more than once except for ‘b,’ ‘d,’ ‘g,’ ‘f,’ and ‘v.’

Repeated symbols in the same inscription will be a feature of

any type of language, be it alphabetic, syllabic, pictographic, or

some combination. By contrast, the longest Indus inscription

found on a single surface, M-314 a, which contains only 17

symbols (as noted above), is as follows:

10 of the 18 highest frequency signs in

Mahadevan’s concordance show up in the

inscription…but not one of them shows up twice.

Findings like this are not limited to the famous seals,

but extend to all inscription types and to the corpus

as a whole.—ibid. (p.29)

When a symbol does appear repeated in the same

inscription, the overwhelming majority of the time it is

repeated in a row.

…it should be noted that none of the relatively small

percentage of Indus inscriptions that do repeat signs

contain any suggestions of sound encoding. The

most common types…involve duplications of the

same sign up to four (and occasionally more) times

in a row…that at times imply some type of

quantification.—ibid. (pp.34-35)

Finally, there is a staggering number of signs that

appear only once in the entire corpus of archaeological

findings. That would be somewhat like saying that you found

an ‘x’ in this sentence, which you did (there it is in quotes), but

could find it nowhere else in my entire manuscript, or in any

other manuscript in my civilization. If this keeps happening

over and over again—i.e. that you find symbols, called

‘singletons,’ which appear on only one inscription and never

again—it is a sure sign that you are not looking at linguistic

writing.

Even odder than their absolute numbers is the way

that new singletons and other rare signs keep

cropping up with each new batch of discoveries. If

Indus symbols were part of a genuine script, we

would expect the percentages of singletons and

other rare signs to drop as new examples of those

signs showed up in new inscriptions. Paradoxically,

those percentages appear to be rising instead over

time, suggesting that at least some Indus symbols

were invented ‘on the fly’ only to be abandoned after

being used once or a handful of times.—ibid. (pp.36-

37)

Taking all this evidence together, I agree strongly with

Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel that the Indus Valley symbol

system is not a language. These authors think, however, that

demonstrating this amounts also to showing a corollary: that no

Harappans were literate. The authors in fact splash this alleged

implication all over the title of their article, which reads: “The

Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate

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Harappan Civilization.” Why the rush to conclude the general

illiteracy of the Harappans from the fact that the Indus symbols

are non-linguistic? Well, if no Harappans could read and write,

then they could not have written the Rigveda, and we are back

to the ‘Aryan Invasion theory.’ That will certainly make a

traditional Indologist at Harvard University, such as Michael

Witzel, feel much better than if he is forced to admit that the

theory of Indian history that he and others have been defending

for a century and a half is a lot of antisemitic nonsense. But

unfortunately for him, the general illiteracy of the Harappans

has hardly been demonstrated.

Let us first provide ourselves with a running hypothesis

about what the Indus Valley symbol system was for; with this

in hand, we can better place in its proper context the question

of whether it makes sense to say that no Harappans could read

and write just because the Indus symbol system found on the

Harappan seals, in particular, is not linguistic.

The most important clues, of course, will come from

the actual objects on which inscriptions were made, and from

the ways in which such objects were used and treated. Here is

Geoffrey Cook (1994) making an observation of what the seals

and tablets were for:

While many people focus on the aesthetic qualities

of these inscribed objects, we must remember that

these were also functional objects. The seals

appear to have been used extensively in both

internal and external trade.

Numerous impressions of seals have been found on

ceramics…as well as on "tags" or bullae used to

seal bundles of trade goods… Traces of rope

impressions on the back of many "tags" indicates

that they were applied to bundles of goods, possibly

to denote ownership or for security purposes. The

sealing or the seal itself could possibly carry the

symbol of power or authority of office. The motif on

the seal and/or impression may have functioned as

an amulet as well.

If the tablets appear to have functioned as ID tags for

trade goods, then practically everything about them can easily

be explained.

The fact that we find so many “singletons” created

apparently “on the fly” corresponds well with the idea that such

singletons marked the ‘name’ of the individual manufacturer or

the trader sending the goods. The same can be said for

‘singletons’ appearing on private-property objects, which may

have been marked to denote the names of the individual owners

or else a family ‘coat of arms.’

The apparently extremely short currency of the tablets

and seals is also consistent with this view, as they would mark

the name of the manufacturer or trader (plus a description of

the bundle’s contents) in specific trading events, thereafter

becoming useless. Of course, one expects that there would

have been some standardization in shipments, in which case we

should find certain tablets repeated, identical, as they would be

useful for more than one such standardized shipment, though

useless beyond the life of an individual manufacturer or trader.

There is indeed evidence consistent with this. For example,

Steve Farmer points to a symbol that shows up repeatedly but

that he insists should nevertheless be counted as a ‘singleton.’

His reasoning is instructive.

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This sign shows up 38 times in the Corpus of Indus

Seals and Inscriptions (H-252 – H-277 and H-859 –

H-870). This is accordingly listed as a highfrequency

sign by Wells 1999 (the 42nd most

common). All 38 inscriptions, however, were made

in a single mold. As a result, we could just as easily

count the sign as another ‘singleton.’1

This is precisely what we would expect if the symbol in

question were, for example, identifying a particular

manufacturer or trader. And since the entire inscription was

made at least 38 times from a single mold, this inscription

could be identifying the goods in a standardized type of bundle

that was sent repeatedly by the same merchant. The above is

not, by any means, an isolated case. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

and Richard H. Meadow give another example of “A group of

16 three-sided incised baked steatite tablets, all with the same

inscriptions, [that] were uncovered in mid- to late Period 3B

debris outside of the curtain wall [of Harappa].”2 There are

other such cases.

The fact that when symbols are repeated in the same

inscription they typically appear in a row, “imply[ing] some

type of quantification” (see above) is again consistent with this

1 “Five cases of ‘Dubious Writing’ in Indus Inscriptions: Parallels with

Vinca Symbols and Cretan Hieroglyphic seals: The emblematic and magical

nature of Indus symbols”; Notes/Handout for the Fifth Harvard Indology

Roundtable; May 10, 2003

http://www.safarmer.com/indusnotes.pdf

2 http://www.harappa.com/indus5/page_438.html

view, because for some kinds of goods it would be useful to

specify quantity on the identification tag. Other symbols might

convey such meanings as ‘fragile’ and ‘this way up,’ which in

our modern world are internationally rendered, respectively,

with an outline representation of a wineglass and an upward

arrow—both non-linguistic symbols. One of the most common

symbols on these Harappan seals and tablets is, in fact, an

upward-pointing arrow, exactly like the one we use (see the

top-left symbol in m-314a).

Farmer, Sprout, & Witzel (2004:45) note that

In a giant multilinguistic society, a relatively simple

system of religious-political signs that could be

reinterpreted in any language may have provided

greater opportunities for cultural cohesion than any

language-based ‘script’—as suggested in a different

way in our own global age of highway and airport

symbols.

Why do these authors say, “in a different way”? Given

that the Harappan tablets apparently functioned as ID tags for

trade goods, and that they have been found in great quantities

in neighboring civilizations, the analogy to modern highway

and airport symbols is closer to the Harappan case than they

appear to realize, especially considering that one of our finds

includes the “famous three-meter wide ‘signboard’ discovered

in the urban ruins of Dholavira,” mentioned earlier, which is

apparently an exact parallel to our modern highway and airport

signs.

Non-linguistic symbols on modern highways and in

airports do not serve the purpose of unifying politically or

religiously the disparate populations that easily interpret them,

Vol. 1 The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People © Francisco Gil-White 2005 (all rights reserved)

Historical and Investigative Research

www.hirhome.com

203

so the first hypothesis should be that the non-linguistic Indus

script—which we find on tags attached to trade bundles—

solved the problem of communicating simple messages about

trade goods locally and internationally. The signboard, by this

hypothesis, would probably indicate the location of a Dholavira

marketplace where certain goods could be bought and sold.

The Indus Valley peoples may well have spoken several

different languages, as the authors suggest, and so the nonlinguistic

Indus symbols had the function of helping all those

who handled the trade bundles to communicate such things as a

bundle’s contents, handling requirements, provenance, and

destination.

Not-coincidentally, in my view, three symbols that look

a lot like fish are among the most high-frequency symbols,

which is to be expected given that fish would obviously have

functioned as a trade good for a civilization erected by the sea,

as is the case for the Indus Valley, and moreover given that fish

can be dried and function as a long-distance trade good with

inland societies. In addition, as these authors themselves point

out, “many Indus symbols…appear to depict seeds, sprouts,

plants, and agricultural instruments” (Farmer, Sprout, & Witzel

2004:31). Agricultural products have of course always figured

prominently in trade, and in the ancient world they constituted

by far the bulk of all traded goods. This is not to deny that the

same symbols may have been used in addition for certain

religious or political meanings, but merely to point out their

primary uses. After all, if we assume that the meaning of these

symbols was primarily “religious-political” rather than

quotidian and prosaic, then it is surprising that the tablets that

bore them were so unceremoniously discarded.1

Now we can return to our question: Can we go from the

demonstration that the Indus symbol system found in the seals

and tablets is not linguistic to the conclusion that there were no

literate Harappans? That would be a bit like going from the

1 This is made clear in Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and Richard H. Meadow’s

online presentation at Harappa.com (http://www.harappa.com/indus5/)

called Harappa Excavations 1995-2001:

Quoting from R.H. Meadow and J.M. Kenoyer’s article in South

Asian Archaeology 1997 (Rome, 2001): “It is tempting to think

that the evident loss of utility and subsequent discard of the tablets

is related to the “death” of the seal. Seals are almost always found

in trash or street deposits (and never yet in a grave) indicating that

they were either lost or intentionally discarded, the latter seeming

the more likely in most instances. The end of the utility of a seal

must relate to some life event of its owner, whether change of

status, or death, or the passing of an amount of time during which

the seal was considered current. A related consideration is that

apparently neither seals nor tablets could be used by just anyone or

for any length of time because otherwise they would not have

fallen out of circulation. Thus the use of seals—and of tablets—

was possible only if they were known to be current. Once they

were no longer current, they were discarded…”

http://www.harappa.com/indus5/page_439.html

Vol. 1 The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People © Francisco Gil-White 2005 (all rights reserved)

Historical and Investigative Research

www.hirhome.com

204

observation of stick figures representing men’s and women’s

lavatories in airports around the world to the conclusion that

there are no literate humans in the twenty-first century. Of

course, in the twenty-first century no extraterrestrial student of

planet Earth would make this mistake because there is plenty of

evidence everywhere to demonstrate that many of us are

literate. In the case of the Indus Valley civilization, however,

this mistake can be made because we have not found examples

of media with linguistic writing on them.

Is it possible that some Harappans were writing even

though we can find no examples of this writing? Certainly.

Suppose the following were true: 1) Only a small minority

could write, and 2) the few who wrote always did so on

perishable media. If the above two obtain, then it is hardly

surprising that we have not found original examples of writing

on perishable media from a civilization that collapsed as long

ago as the second millennium BCE. Therefore, one cannot say

that the general illiteracy of the Harappans has been

demonstrated with the finding that the Indus symbol system is

non-linguistic—especially considering that, just as with stick

figures to mark restrooms in the modern world, the Indus

symbols would have been the ideal solution for trade across

language barriers even if some people could read and write. If

our modern restroom symbols in airports do not demonstrate

that we are all illiterate, neither does the non-linguistic and

obviously trade-functional Indus symbol system demonstrate

that no Harappans could read and write.

The Rigveda is a series of religious hymns. It was

written by priests, obviously. In every society, priests are a

minority, and sometimes a very small minority. Therefore,

nothing stands in the way of postulating that the aristocratic

priests of the Sarasvati river civilization (of which the Indus

Valley—i.e. Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, etc.—portion is the last

stage) were the people who wrote the Rigveda, which work has

been preserved through an uninterrupted chain of copying to

our day, but of which no original copies—very few to begin

with—have survived. And since Navaratna S. Rajaram has

shown that almost every analysis possible argues for the

Sarasvati river civilization as the author of the Rigveda,

concluding anything else requires a prejudice—the same

prejudice that led Max Müller and others to postulate the

‘Aryan invasion theory’ in the first place.

Conclusion

The best current evidence agrees with the view that the Iranians

are a development out of the Vedic-Indian civilization of the

Sarasvati river (later, the Indus Valley), and it appears that

they emerged into their own at least in part as a result of

ideological movements produced by class conflict, with the

proto-Iranians representing the ancient left, and in turn

producing a world-saving leftist movement: Zoroastrianism. In

time, as we shall see, the Zoroastrians would sponsor a more

radical leftist movement: Judaism.

Up next, I return to the Greco-Persian conflict.

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/crux04a.pdf

Was Dr. Francisco Gil-White fired from the University of Pennsylvania for political reasons? Find out here.

http://www.hirhome.com/bio.htm

 

 

 

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