Dassow (2008) on the supposed Mittani Indo-Aryan aristocracy

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Dassow has dealt a devastating blow to perhaps the most cherished

assumption of Indo-European linguistics; that there was an

identifiable group of people, the so called Mittani Indo-Aryans who

specialized in horse –drawn chariotry, spoke the Mittani Indo-Aryan

language, and founded or dominated the Mittani kingdom before

making an appearance on the Indian subcontinent where their language

evolved into Vedic Sanskrit. Dassow (2008, scroll down for extracts)

makes it abundantly clear that NO SUCH ETHNICALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY

DISTINCT GROUP CAN BE IDENTIFIED IN THE VAST LITERARY AND

ARCHAEOOLGICAL MATERIALS AT ALALAH. The evidence of a few numerals

and a few " Indo-Aryan " sounding names in a list of thousands of other

non-Indo-Aryan ones is too sparse, late and isolated to warrant such

a grand conclusion. Eva Von Dassow's work vindicates Prof S. S.

Misra (1992) who demonstrated that the supposedly " Indo-Aryan " words

in the Kikkuli text as few as they are, can and should be derived

from Vedic Sanskrit in contrast to the currently acceptable Indo-

European linguistic theory.

 

" The invaders supposedly transmitted the technology and techniques of

chariotry to the lands and peoples they conquered or contracted, while

their noble blood and warlike vigor were soon diluted through

admixture with Hurrians and Semites. In a variation on this myth of

Indo-Aryan supremacy, the scope of the invasion is reduced in favor of

portraying the new ethno-linguistic element as a kind of vitamin, the

injection of which infused the Hurrian population with the capacity to

form a coherent state (Mittani) possessing military potency and

imperial ambition (Dassow 2008, p. 79). "

 

" Writing in 1967, Cornelieus described Aryans entering the Near East

in too small numbers to become autonomous people, " but they offered

themselves to the native races as princes, " …whereas in India the

Aryans, invading in greater numbers, found the dark-skinned natives so

physically alien that mixed marriage was virtually unthinkable (p.

12), so that " the blood of the subjects trickled only slowly into the

ruling stratum " (p. 178), (Dassow 2008, p. 79, fn 191). "

" The advent of Indo-Aryans in the Near East, whether construed

principally as an invasion or as blood transfusion, has been made to

serve as the mechanism of historical change. In such constructions of

the past, the maryanni class has either been equated with the

postulated Indo-Aryan population, or used as an index of Indo-Aryan

influence. It can have been neither (Dassow 2008, p. 79). "

 

" The mid second millennium Indo-Aryans have by now lost the role of

introducing the horse into the Near East, since horses are known to

have appeared in Mesopotamia soon after the midpoint of the third

millennium BCE and perhaps earlier in Anatolia. Other elements of the

construct linking the chariot, Indo-Aryan(s), Mittani and, maryanni

have also been eroded through inquiry (Dassow 2008, p. 80). "

" Littauer and Crouwel concluded, based on their investigation of the

development of wheeled vehicles in the ancient Near East, that the

evidence indicates " a local evolution of the light spoked wheel

horse-drawn chariot in the Near East itself, in contrast to the long

held theory that this was introduced…by Indo-European-speaking steppe

tribes (1979: 68), Their assessment has met a partial challenge on

the basis of new evidence, has since been reaffirmed on logical as

well as evidentiary grounds (Dassow 2008, p. 81). "

 

" The Kikkuli text exists in a thirteenth-century copy of an original

from the Middle Hittite period, roughly the late fifteenth-early

fourteenth century BCE. But by the late fifteenth century,

horse-drawn chariotry had been a standard component of Near Eastern

military forces, in particular Hittite ones, for several generations.

An instruction manual of such late date that uses a few words of

Indo-Aryan origin hardly serves to demonstrate any Indo-Aryan role in

introducing or developing the techniques of training horses for

chariot warfare, much less the leading role that has been claimed for

the Indo-Aryans, with allusions to the Kikkuli text as if it were

proof (Dassow 2008, p. 84). "

 

" Some form of this claim is reiterated in almost every redaction of

the Indo-Aryan myth, though often without actually identifying the

Kikkuli text or mentioning its date, language and provenience,

perhaps because it would damn the hypothesis to observe that its

evidentiary basis is so late, isolated, and essentially non-Indo-Aryan

(Dassow 2008, p. 84, fn 207). "

 

" Direct evidence for the veneration of Indo-Aryan deities in Mittani

is isolated and late. Only once do Indo-Aryan deities appear as

divine actors, rather than as theophoric elements in personal names,

and that once is in the treaty between Hatti and Mittani whereby

Mittani was reduced to a puppet kingdom, in the late fourteenth

century BCE. There Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatyas, appear in

the middle of a list of two dozen divine witnesses of Mittani (Dassow

2008, p. 86). "

 

" While noting the paucity and vestigial nature of Indo-Aryan

linguistic material, which consists mostly of elements incorporated

into non-Indo-Aryan onomastica and lexica, Myarhofer (1974: 33),

Klinger (1988: 27), and Wilhelm (1989: 18-20) emphasize that the

tradition of Indo-Aryan royal names among Mittani's ruling families

signifies, nonetheless, that contact with Indo-Aryan speakers was

influential in that kingdom's formation and development (Dassow 2008,

p. 86). "

 

" Finally, identifying Indo-Aryan influence as a factor in Mittani's

formation leaves unexplained why the practice of taking Indo-Aryan

throne names, along with the sparse evidence for veneration of

Indo-Aryan deities and for the use of Indo-Aryan-derived terminology

in the context of horse-training, comes clearly into focus only at the

time of Mittani's decline (Dassow 2008, p. 87). "

 

" Four decades, ago, Mayrhofer pointed out that even the most basic

building-blocks for a historical description of the (Indo-) Aryan

presence in the Near East are missing….No New evidence has emerged

that would provide the basis for revising Mayrhofer's assessment and

giving form to the putative Indo-Aryan presence in the Late Bronze Age

Near East (Dassow 2008, p. 87). "

 

" It certainly does not appear that Indo-Aryan names were concentrated

in the maryanni class. Rather, they were distributed throughout

society, as exemplified by the fact that the name Suwatii (=Suwatiti)

was borne by members of three different classes (Dassow 2008, p. 88). "

 

" To extrapolate the existence of an Indo-Aryan population at Alalah IV

from the Indo-Aryan elements in the onomasticon, even if those

elements formed a less miniscule percentage of the total than they do,

would be logically unsound. In the absence of any evidence, such as

an ethnicon or gentilic, for the existence of an actual ethnic group

that could be described as Indo-Aryan, this holds true not only for

the maryanni class and the population of Alalah, but for Mittani and

the Near East generally. And if there was no identifiable Indo-Aryan

population in the Near East, there can have been no Indo-Aryan

" military aristocracy, " (Dassow 2008, p. 89). "

 

" In sum, though the term maryanni is of Indo-Aryan origin, the

maryanni class was not. Neither the membership of the maryanni class

nor its most characteristic features, namely, nobility and association

with chariotry, were Indo-Aryan. The caste of noble Indo-Aryans

warriors who supposedly mastered the Orient from their horse drawn

chariots, founded Mittani, and ushered in the Late Bronze Age is a

product of modern imagination (Dassow 2008, p. 90) "

 

" In this chapter's last section I address the persistent modern myth

of Indo-Aryans as catalyst for the changes that ushered in the Late

Bronze Age, a pseudo-historical fantasy that has been constructed in

part out of data derived from the Alalah IV tablets (Dassow 2008,

ix). "

 

" In particular, Indo-Aryan names and terms appear in small numbers in

the Alalah IV tablets, inspiring an abundance of research out of

proportion to the slender quantity of these data (Dassow 2008, p.

70). "

 

" The political history of Alalah from the end of Level VII to the end

of Level IV, the topic of the previous section, forms a pendant to

that of Mittani (parts of which, ironically, are known only on the

basis of the evidence from Alalah). This history took place against

the background of the increasing " Hurrianization " of upper

Mesopotamia and surrounding regions, a process accompanied by a light

infusion of Indo-Aryan lexical and onomastic material (Dassow 2008,

p. 71). "

 

" On this point it is worth quoting Astour's remark, in writing of the

Hurrianization of Alalah, that " there was no relation between the

social position of an individual and the linguistic affilation of his

name " (1978: 11). The same was true of persons who bore Indo-Aryan

names, confuting the persistent claims that an invading Indo-Aryan

aristocracy was the vehicle for the exercise of Mittani's hegemony

(Dassow 2008, p. 76). "

 

" Hence they (Littauer and Crouwel 1996: 938) suggest the transmission

of invention went the other direction: " it was the prestige value of

the Near-Eastern two-wheelers that inspired imitations on the

steppes, " (Dassow 2008, p. 82, parenthesis added). "

 

" Though parts of Anthony's argumentation are persuasive, it relies on

numerous weak links, most fundamentally the unsubstantiated

assumption that an inferred ancestral ( " proto " ) language necessarily

implies the past existence of a unitary community identical to the

hypothetical (and hypothetically unitary) language's speakers.

Hall's critique of the practice of mapping the differentiation of

putative historical populations onto a " family tree " of antecedent

and descendant languages (such family trees being theoretical models

of relationships among languages, not, though they incorporate

historical data, histories of those languages) is pertinent here

(Hall 1997: 162-70), (Dassow 2008, p. 82, fn 198). "

 

" The designation maryanni means essentially " man " but being a

loanword derived from an exotic language it functions as a technical

term denoting a special category of man (Dassow 2008, p. 96). "

 

" (the etymology of maryanni) has been challenged by Kammenhuber

(1968: 220-23) and by Diakonoff, who replaces the Indo-Aryan

etymology with a Hurro-Uratian one.. Diakonoff and Sarasotin derive

maryanni from a Hurro-Uratian stem " *mari- " which they trace to a

proto-East Caucasian lexeme meaning, ironically, " man, male (Dassow

2008, p. 96, fn 11). "

 

" This term (maryanni), a Hurrianized form of an Indo-Aryan word

for " man, " designated a " noble " class and may be

rendered " nobleman. " It was applied to members of the uppermost

class at Alalah, who were characterized by high status, proximity to

the throne, and their military role in the chariotry (Dassow 2008, p.

138, parenthesis added). "

 

" Though it has encountered sporadic opposition, the conception of the

maryanni class as a sort of feudal aristocracy, its prestige and rank

predicated on possession and use of war chariots, has become standard

in the literature. This concept, in conjunction with the theory

SHOWN ABOVE TO BE INVALID (Ch. 1, III.2), that the membership as well

as the characteristic features of the maryanni class were of Indo-

Aryan origin, has given rise to a number of assumptions or

propositions about this class. These may be tested and either

rejected or refined on the basis of closely examining the evidence

concerning the maryanni class, and particularly members thereof, at

Alalah, for as noted already (Ch.1., III.2, p. 77) the Alalah tablets

are the source of the earliest substantial body of evidence for the

existence of this class (Dassow 2008, p. 269. emphasis added). "

 

" The foregoing citations practically exhaust the attestations of the

term maryanni in the extant Alalah IV texts…. Considering that

possession of chariots is exclusively correlated with membership in

the maryanni class at Alalah IV (below, IV.6), it could be suggested

that this feature attests this class EVEN IN THE ABSENCE OF THE

DESIGNATION MARYANNI ; in that case the people denoted sa narkabti or

bet narkabti in the census lists and troop rosters of groups B and D,

which all date to the early part of Niqmepa's reign , could be

identified as members of the maryanni class (Dassow 2008, p. 270,

emphasis added). "

 

" Did the maryanni class originate as an aristocracy of chariot

warriors, or an aristocracy of wealth? One cannot have it both ways

if one also holds to the oft-repeated view that the maryanni class

developed from a caste of noble chariot warriors into a class of

wealthy landowners.

The evidence does not support any of the foregoing assumptions and

assertions very well. " (Dassow 2008, p. 290). "

 

" It should be recalled that, but for the attestations of maryanni

POWs in the records of Thutmose III's campaigns, the Alalah IV

tablets are the earliest sources attesting a class denoted maryanni.

To retroject onto fifteenth –century Alalah interpretations based on

data recorded in later centuries and other lands would be anti-

historical (Dassow 2008, p. 291). "

 

" The terminology used to describe the chariots listed in AIT 425 is

not fully understood and cannot be discussed adequately here……, and

ardiyanni is a Hurrian word probably based on Indo-Aryan

rathya, " wheel " (as well as " wheeled vehicle " : Mayrhofer 1960: 144-

45, 1974:33, n106; cf. Kemmenhuber 1968: 219, Diakonoff 1972: 114;

see now Maryrhofer, EW Aia II/16; 429, s.v. (ratha-). Thus a GIGIR

sesaduphe ardiyanni is a chariot with six-spoked wheels, and a GIGIR

up-pa-ra-ni ardiyanni would then be a chariot with some other kind of

wheels. The term up-pa-ra-ni has been assimilated to one found at

Nuzi (Draffkorn, HHA:212), but its derivation and interpretation

remain uncertain as do the rest of the terms on AIT 425 (Dassow 208,

p. 308, fn 116). "

 

" On the word as-wa-ni/a-su-wa-ni see Draffkorn, HHA: 161,

Mayrhofer1960: 144 and Kammenhuber 1968: 218-19; besides the

objection expressed by Kammenhuber, a possible derivation from Indo-

Aryan " asva,-, " " horse,' raises the problem that since all the

chariots were horse-drawn, it is hard to see how a term derived

from " horse " could distinguish one chariot from another (Dassow 2008,

309, fn 118). "

 

 

 

• Dassow, E. V. (2008). State and society in the late bronze

age:

alalah under the mittani empire. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press.

• Misra, S. S. (1992). The Aryan problem: a linguistic

approach. South Asia Books.

ISBN-13: 978-9993822141

M. Kelkar