Evidence for Indo-Aryans has never seemed so meager (Kohl 2007)

[Guest guest]

" There is no question that some of the Chalcolithic inhabitants of

the Eurasian steppes from eastern Ukraine to western Kazakhstan

intensively hunted horses from at least the fifth millennium. In

order to do this more efficiently, some may have ridden early tamed

or " domesticated " horses. Evidence for such activity is ambiguous,

but what is clear is that there were no immediate major social

consequences from such practices; no mounted Chalcolithic warriors

wreaking havoc on their sedentary neighbors as they pressed westwards

and southwards to destroy " Old Europe, " or eastwards and southwards

to carry their Aryan heritage ultimately into northern India and to

the western border of China (Kohl 2007, pp. 140-141). "

" As reconstructed, carriages on these vehicles are small, either

square or rectangular in shape roughly 1 to 1.3 m wide by 1 to 1.9 m

long (Gening et. al. 1992: 166-168; 204-206; 215-216), though Anthony

(n.d.) reports that nine " chariots " (four from Sintastha) have now

been excavated that extend at least 1.5 m in track width (overlapping

the dimensions of later Egyptian war chariots) and could have carried

both driver and armed javelin-hurling warrior.

Are these two wheeled horse-driven carts, then, battle chariots? If

so, they should not conjure up the images of Ben-Hur racing in Rome

or an Assyrian king hunting animals on his royal preserves. Some

appear to have been too small to have been used as effective weapons

of war. The larger ones could have accommodated both driver and

warrior, but the quarters still would have been somewhat cramped

(Kohl 2007, p. 153). "

" How convincing is the empirical support for the thesis of a gradual

continuous movement into and settling of the Margiana and Bactrian

plains by northern cattle herders? Do a total of 336 incised coarse

ware sherds from 34 " nomadic camp sites " (Cerasetti 1998: 67; or 75

such sites, according to Salvatori [personal communication])

constitute sufficient proof for such postulated movements? Evidence

for the Indo-Aryans—if that is the correct ethnic/linguistic

identification of these cattle herders (see later discussion)—has

never seemed so meager and puny (Kohl 2007, p. 205). "

" Many theories also, for example, have been advanced to explain the

collapse of the famous Indus Valley cities, including the now-

discredited and archaeologically unattested conquest by invading Indo-

Aryan warriors. One intriguing hypothesis focuses on the

introduction at the end of the Mature Harrapan period of sorghum and

millets from Africa (possible via Oman) and rice and millets from

Asia that lead to double—cropping or the adoption of summer-sown,

fall-harvested (kharif) cereals to complement the winter-sown spring-

harvested (rabi) crops of wheat and barley (Kohl 2007, p. 231). "

" Nevertheless, what is perhaps most striking are the ROUGHLY

CONTEMPORANEOUS collapses of most these states. Why did everything

fall apart in the lands east of Sumer towards the end of the third of

during the first centuries of the second millennium BC (Kohl 2007, p.

231, emphasis in the original)? "

" Archaeological cultures only occasionally correspond to actual, self-

recognized human groups. Finally, the always-problematic ethnic or

linguistic identification made on archaeological evidence is

necessarily also exclusionary. These Andronovo remains are Indo-

European, not Turkic, and the Andronovo trans-Urals, " homeland, "

consequently, is ours, not theirs. Other Aryan homelands, of course,

have been and/or are still postulated for politically motivated

reasons in central Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, and northern India (Kohl

2007, p. 234). "

" Similarly, Lamberg-Karlovsky (2002: 74) has observed that " not a

single artifact of Andronovo type has been identified in Iran or in

northern India " and that, although BMAC materials can be found in

eastern Iran on sites dating to the late third and early second

millennium, it is " impossible..to trace the continuity of these

materials into the first millennium and relate them to the known

cultures of Iranian—speakers—the Medes or the Achaemenids (or their

presumed Iron age ancestors…). " The material culture trail vanished,

and the linguistic identification remains tenuous (Kohl 2007, p. 235-

236). "

" The gigantic settlements of the terminal Tripol'ye culture represent

the culmination of " Old Europe, " an agricultural way of life whose

origins can be traced back to the Balkans and, ultimately, to

Anatolia. The spectacular Chalcolithic remains of the Balkans

clearly emerged out of the earlier equally spectacular Neolithic

remains of Anatolia (Kohl 2007, p. 236). "

" One could easily tell a different, potentially less dangerous tale

from the archaeological evidence. There was no single Indo-European

or Proto-Indo-European " homeland " but just an ever unfolding

historical process of development in which peoples not only

continuously transformed themselves, including their basic

livelihoods, and sometimes moved into new areas, but in which they

also continuously borrowed and assimilated the technological

innovations and cultural developments of other peoples with whom they

always came into contact. The linguists' favorite metaphor of

likening a family of languages to a tree with its trunk and diverging

branches is misleading, for the trunk itself has roots resembling

both branches and trunks that extend deep into the earth, perpetually

intertwining with other neighboring trunks and branches. Perhaps a

better metaphor acknowledging both the continual divergence and

CONVERGENCE of related languages would be overlapping networks of

highways coming together at busy intersections and then spreading

apart to form a continuously developing non-random interconnected

system of movement and communication (Kohl 2007, pp.236-237, emphasis

in the original). "

" Finally, the attempt to identify such archaeological cultures as

ancestral to much later, historically mentioned ethnic or linguistic

groups is always hazardous and, occasionally, dangerous enterprise,

as perhaps is best illustrated in the endless search for the mythical

Aryan " homeland. " (Kohl 2007, p. 259). "

 

Kohl, P. (2007). The making of bronze age Eurasia. New York, NY:

Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-84780-3 (Hardback)

 

M. Kelkar