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Out of India Theory

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Out of India theory



 
 
The Out of India theory (OIT, also called the Indian Urheimat Theory) is the proposition that the Indo-European language family originated in the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent is a large section of the Asian continent consisting of the land lying substantially on the Indian Plate. The subcontinent includes parts of various countries in South Asia, including those on the continental crust , an Island#Continental islands country on the continental shelf , and an Island#Oceanic islands countr...
 and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations. A notable proponent was Friedrich Schlegel.

Originally proposed in the late 18th century in an attempt to explain connections between Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
 and European languages, it is today deprecated by academics who favor the Kurgan model
Kurgan hypothesis

The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language....
.

The Out of India theory builds on the idea that Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent
Indigenous Aryans

The notion of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are ":wikt:indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent. It is widespread in Hindu nationalism, and can take various forms, all of them emphasizing that Vedic Sanskrit and Vedism are native to Northern India....
  and its recent revival in Hindu nationalist writing has made it the subject of a contentious debate in Indian politics.






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The Out of India theory (OIT, also called the Indian Urheimat Theory) is the proposition that the Indo-European language family originated in the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent is a large section of the Asian continent consisting of the land lying substantially on the Indian Plate. The subcontinent includes parts of various countries in South Asia, including those on the continental crust , an Island#Continental islands country on the continental shelf , and an Island#Oceanic islands countr...
 and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations. A notable proponent was Friedrich Schlegel.

Originally proposed in the late 18th century in an attempt to explain connections between Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
 and European languages, it is today deprecated by academics who favor the Kurgan model
Kurgan hypothesis

The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language....
.

The Out of India theory builds on the idea that Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent
Indigenous Aryans

The notion of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are ":wikt:indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent. It is widespread in Hindu nationalism, and can take various forms, all of them emphasizing that Vedic Sanskrit and Vedism are native to Northern India....
  and its recent revival in Hindu nationalist writing has made it the subject of a contentious debate in Indian politics. These recent "OIT" scenarios posit that the Indus Valley Civilization
Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley Civilization , abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin. Primarily centered along the Indus river, the civilization encompassed most of Pakistan, including its Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, and extending into modern day Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab...
 was Indo-Aryan
Indo-Aryan

Indo-Aryan refers to:* Indo-Aryan languages* Indo-Aryan migration, a supposition that holds that the Indo-Aryans migrated to India.* Indigenous Aryans, a theory that holds that the Indo-Aryans are native to India....
 and uses mainly evidence from Sanskrit literature. Their main proponents are Flemish freelance Indologist Koenraad Elst
Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst is a Demographics of Belgium writer and orientalist .He was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal TeKoS from 1992 to 1995, focusing on criticism of Islam, various other conservative and Flemish separatist publications such as Nucleus, t Pallieterke, Secessie and The Brussels Journal....
 (1999), taken up by Shrikant Talageri (2000) and strengthened by arguments of University of Cambridge human genetics professor Dr. Toomas Kivisild
Toomas Kivisild

Toomas Kivisild, is an Estonian geneticist. He graduated in 1992 as a zoologist, and completed his Ph.D. at the Estonian Biocentre research institute....
 in his 2003 and 2007 works.

History


Early proposals

When the finding of connections between languages from India to Europe led to the creation of Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European language , and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their soc...
 in the late 1700s some Indians and Europeans believed that the Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
 must be Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
, or something very close to it. A few early Indo-Europeanists, such as Friedrich Schlegel, had a firm belief in this and essentially created the idea that India was the Urheimat
Urheimat

Urheimat is a Linguistics term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language....
 of all Indo-European languages. Most scholars, such as William Jones
William Jones (philologist)

Sir William Jones was an England Philology and student of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages....
, however realized from earliest times that instead, Sanskrit and related European languages had a common source, and that no attested language represented this direct ancestor.

The development of historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, specifically the law of palatals and the discovery of the laryngeals in Hittite, shattered Sanskrit's preeminent status as the most venerable elder in this reconstructed family. The demotion of Sanskrit to the status of one daughter language among many eroded the remaining support of India as the Indo-European homeland.

The ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham
Robert Gordon Latham

Robert Gordon Latham was an ethnologist and philologist.Born at Billingborough Vicarage, Lincolnshire, Latham studied philology in Scandinavia....
 was the first to state that, according to the principles of natural science
Natural science

In science, the term natural science refers to a methodological naturalism approach to the study of the universe, which is understood as obeying rules or law of nature origin....
, a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity which, in the case of Indo-European, is roughly in Central-Eastern Europe, where the Italic
Italic languages

The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European languages language family's Centum branch. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin , and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian language, Oscan language, and the aforementioned Latin....
, Venetic
Venetic language

Venetic is an extinct Indo-European languages that was spoken in ancient times in the North-Italy Veneto and modern Slovenia, between the Po River river delta and the southern fringe of the Alps....
, Illyrian
Illyrian languages

The Illyrian languages are a group of Indo-European languages that were spoken in the western part of the Balkans in former times by groups identified as Illyrians: Delmatae, Pannoni, Illyrians, Autariates, Taulanti ....
, Germanic
Germanic languages

The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European languages language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Pre-Roman Iron Age....
, Baltic
Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European languages language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe....
, Slavic
Slavic languages

File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
, Thracian
Thracian language

The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians in South-Eastern Europe....
, and Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 branches of the Indo-European language family are attested, as opposed to South Asia, where only the Indo-Aryan branch is. Lachhmi Dhar Kalla
Lachhmi Dhar Kalla

Lachhmi Dhar Shastri Kalla was Reader of Sanskrit at St.Stephen's College, the University of Delhi and head of the Department of Sanskrit from 1922 to 1949....
 responded by arguing that the greater linguistic diversity of Indo-European in Europe is the result of absorbing foreign linguistic elements, and that a language family's point of origin should be sought in the area of least linguistic change, since it has been least affected by substrate interference. Dhar's line of argument has a history in Western debates in the Indo-European homeland (e.g. Feist 1932 and Pissani 1974 as cited in ) where it has been used to locate the Indo-European homeland near the area where the Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
 and Anatolian
Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language....
 branches of Indo-European are attested.

1999 "revival"

An Indian Urheimat has been promoted more recently by and , which led to an exchange of criticisms with Michael Witzel.

In what its editor J. P. described as a "sense of fair play," the Journal of Indo-European Studies
Journal of Indo-European Studies

The Journal of Indo-European Studies is a journal of Indo-European studies, established in 1973. It aims to serve "as a medium for the exchange and synthesis of information relating to the anthropology, archaeology, mythology, philology, and general cultural history of the Indo-European languages speaking peoples."...
 waived peer review
Peer review

Peer review is the process of subjecting an author's Scholarly method work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field....
 in order to publish Kazanas' (2002
Out of India theory

The Out of India theory is the proposition that the Indo-European language family Indo-European homeland in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations....
, 2003
Out of India theory

The Out of India theory is the proposition that the Indo-European language family Indo-European homeland in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations....
) defence of the "Indigenous Indo-Aryan" viewpoint — which cited and . Mallory's reasoning for this exceptional omission of peer-review was as follows:

The debate consisted of an article by , nine highly critical reviews by referees, and Kazanas' (2003)
Out of India theory

The Out of India theory is the proposition that the Indo-European language family Indo-European homeland in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations....
 response to those criticisms.

warned:

Chronology

Neolithic and Bronze Age Indian history is periodized into the Pre-Harappan (ca. 7000 to 3300 BC), Early Harappan (3300 to 2600), Mature Harappan (2600 to 1900) and Late Harappan (1900 to 1300 BC) periods.

The Indian Urheimat proposal put forward by , which he dubs the "emerging non-invasionist model," is as follows: During the 6th millennium BC, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were living in the Punjab region
Punjab region

Punjab , also Panjab , is a region straddling the border between India and Pakistan. The "Five Rivers" are Beas River, Ravi River, Sutlej, Chenab and Jhelum River; all these are tributaries of the Indus river, Jhelum being the biggest one....
 of Northern India
North India

Northern India is a loosely defined region in the northern part of India. The exact meaning of the term varies by usage. The dominant geographical features of northern India are the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Himalayas, which demarcate the region from Tibet and Central Asia....
. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria
Bactria

Bactria is a historical region of Greater Iran. Known by the ancient Greeks as "Bactriana" the region is located between the range of the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya ; in later times, the region became known as Tokharistan. The name of the region has survived to present time in the name of Afghan province "Balkh"....
 as the Kamboja
Kamboja

Kamboja may refer to:*the ancient tribe of the Kambojas of the Hindukush in Iron Age India**Kambojas in South Asian literature*the Kamboja Kingdom, one of the Mahajanapadas of Iron Age India...
s. The Parada
Parada

Parada may refer to:*The Paradas, a tribe in ancient Central Asia.*Parada in Argentine Tango*There are several parishes and hamlets that have the name Parada in Portugal:...
s moved further and inhabited the Caspian
Caspian

Caspian can refer to:*The Caspian Sea*The Caspians, the ancient people living near the Caspian Sea*The Caspian region, the loosely-defined area surrounding the Caspian Sea...
 coast and much of Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
 while the Cina
CINA

File:CINA-AM.pngCINA is a Canada radio station, which broadcasts multicultural programming at AM radio 1650 in Mississauga, Ontario.The station is owned by Neeti P....
s moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin
Tarim Basin

The Tarim Basin is a large endorheic basin occupying an area of more than 400,000 km2. It is located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in PRC's far west....
 in northwestern China, forming the Tocharians
Tocharians

The Tocharians were the Tocharian language-speaking inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, making them the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity....
 group of I-E speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that region by 2000 BC. These people took the oldest form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE) language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region, transformed it into its own dialect. While inhabiting Central Asia they discovered the uses of the horse
Horse

The horse is a hoofed mammal, a subspecies of one of seven extant species of the family Equidae. The horse has evolution of the horse over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, odd-toed ungulate animal of today....
, which they later sent back to Urheimat
Urheimat

Urheimat is a Linguistics term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language....
. Later on during their history, they went on to take Western Europe
Western Europe

Western Europe refers to the countries in the western most half of Europe. This concept has had different meanings, political and cultural as well as geographical issues have influenced the area....
 and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that region. During the 4th millennium BC, civilization in India was evolving to become the urban Indus Valley Civilization
Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley Civilization , abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin. Primarily centered along the Indus river, the civilization encompassed most of Pakistan, including its Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, and extending into modern day Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab...
. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-Indo-Iranian Some time during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Iran....
 and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas. They also expanded into parts of Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
. By the end of this migration, India was left with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river began drying up and the remainder of Indo-Aryans split into separate categories. Some travelled westwards and established themselves as rulers of the Hurrian Mitanni
Mitanni

Mitanni or Hanigalbat was a loosely organized Hurrian-speaking Hittite vassal state in northern Syria from ca. 1500 BC-1300 BC."The Assyrians called the lands of Mitanni Hanigalbat while to the Hittites it was the land of the Hurrians....
 kingdom by around 1500 BC (see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni
Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni

Some theonyms, proper names and other terminology of the Mitanni exhibit an Indo-Aryan languages superstrate, suggesting that an Indo-Aryans elite imposed itself over the Hurrian population in the course of the Indo-Aryan migration....
). Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

Linguistics

See also linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 or historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
.


According to , OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and inconclusive (e.g. Chakrabarti 1995 and Rajaram
N. S. Rajaram

Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram is an Indian mathematician, who is however notable for his publications with the Voice of India publishing house focusing on the "Indigenous Aryans" controversy in Indian politics, in some instances in co-authorship with David Frawley....
 1995, as cited in ), or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude and neglect significantly minimizes the value of most OIT publications.

and have adapted the language dispersal model proposed by Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols

Linguistics Johanna Nichols is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen languag...
 (in ) to support OIT by moving Nichols' proposed Indo-European point of origin from Bactria
Bactria

Bactria is a historical region of Greater Iran. Known by the ancient Greeks as "Bactriana" the region is located between the range of the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya ; in later times, the region became known as Tokharistan. The name of the region has survived to present time in the name of Afghan province "Balkh"....
-Sogdiana
Sogdiana

Sogdiana or Sogdia was the ancient civilization of an Iranian peoples and a province of the Achaemenid Empire Persian Empire, the eighteenth in the list in the Behistun Inscription of Darius I of Persia ....
 to India. These ideas have not been accepted in mainstream linguistics.

argues that it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form. This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Comparative linguistics

Centum Satem Map
There are twelve accepted branches of the Indo-European family
Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
. The two Indo-Iranian
Indo-Iranian

Indo-Iranian can refer to:* Indo-Iranian languages* Prehistoric Indo-Iranians * Indo-European languages* Proto-Indo-Iranian religion* Proto-Indo-Iranian language...
 branches, Indic
Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages family.SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani language , Bangla language , Punjabi language , Marathi , Gujarati language , Nepali language , Oriya language , Sindhi language , Sinhal...
 (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian
Iranian languages

The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages and its subfamily, Indo-Iranian languages. These languages are mainly spoken by the Iranian Peoples....
, dominate the eastern cluster, historically spanning Scythia
Scythia

The Scythians or Scyths were an Eastern Iranian languages of Equestrianism nomadic pastoralists who dominated the Pontic steppe throughout Classical Antiquity....
, Iran
Iran

Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran and formerly known internationally as Persian Empire until 1935, is a country in Central Eurasia, located on the northeastern shore of the Persian Gulf and the southern shore of the Caspian Sea....
 and Northern India. While the exact sequence in which the different branches separated or migrated away from a homeland is disputed, linguists generally agree that Anatolian
Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language....
  was the first branch to be separated from the remaining body of Indo-European.

Additionally, Graeco-Aryan isoglosses seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian may have shared a common homeland for a while after the splitting of the other IE branches. Such a homeland could be northwestern India (which is preferred by proponents of the OIT) - or the Pontic steppes (as preferred by the mainstream supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis).

According to Hock, if evidence like linguistic isogloss patterns is ignored, then the hypothesis of an Out-of-India migration becomes "relatively easy to maintain".

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit


Evidence of a pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum
Substratum

In linguistics, a stratum or strate refers to a language that influences, or is influenced by another through language contact. A substratum is a language which is influenced by another, while a superstratum is the language that exerts the influence....
 in South Asia is solid reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland.

Burrow
Thomas Burrow

Thomas Burrow was an Indologist and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1944 to 1976. His work includes Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, The Problem of Shwa in Sanskrit and The Sanskrit Language....
 compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the ?gveda
Rigveda

The Rigveda is an ancient Indian subcontinent sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the Rigvedic deities . It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas....
 that he considered to be loans predominantly from Dravidian
Dravidian languages

The Dravidian Language families and languages includes approximately 73 languages and are mainly spoken in South India and northeastern Sri Lanka Tamils , as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan, Iran, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Si...
. Kuiper identified 383 ?gvedic words as non-Indo-Aryan—roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary—borrowed from Old Dravidian
Dravidian languages

The Dravidian Language families and languages includes approximately 73 languages and are mainly spoken in South India and northeastern Sri Lanka Tamils , as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan, Iran, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Si...
, Old Munda
Munda languages

The Munda languages are a language family spoken by about nine million people in central and eastern India and Bangladesh. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic languages, generally placed in opposition to the Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia, which means they are distantly related to Vietnamese language and Khmer language....
, and several other languages. Thieme
Paul Thieme

Paul Thieme was a scholar of Vedic Sanskrit. He received his doctorate in Indology in 1928 in G?ttingen, and habilitated there in 1932. From 1932 to 1935 he taught German and French at the University of Allahabad....
 has questioned Dravidian etymologies proposed for Vedic words, most of which he gives Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies, and condemned what he characterizes as a misplaced “zeal
Zeal

Zeal may refer to:* Zealotry, excessive ideological zeal* Zeal , an internet directory* Kingdom of Zeal, a kingdom in the Chrono Trigger video game...
 for hunting up Dravidian
Dravidian

Dravidian may refer to the following about southern South Asia:* Dravidian languages, a language family comprising about 21 languages including the four literary languages spoken mainly in South India and North-Eastern Sri Lanka...
 loans in Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
”. Das
Rahul Peter Das

Rahul Peter Das is the professor of South Asian studies at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he is also the dean responsible for studies of the Faculty of Philosophy I and Director of the Centre for Languages of the University....
 contends that there is “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”. Burrow in turn has criticized the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words". Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative material—and the scarcity of Dravidian or Munda—the inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it is not. argues that the earliest level of the Rigveda shows signs of para-Munda
Munda languages

The Munda languages are a language family spoken by about nine million people in central and eastern India and Bangladesh. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic languages, generally placed in opposition to the Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia, which means they are distantly related to Vietnamese language and Khmer language....
 influence and only later levels of Dravidian, suggesting—against the older widespread two century old belief—that the original inhabitants of Punjab were speakers of para-Munda
Munda people

The Munda are Adivasi people of the Chotanagpur region, which is spread over eastern states of India , and in parts of Bangladesh. Their language is Mundari language, which belongs to the Munda languages of the Austro-Asiatic languages; the Munda language group is in fact named after the Munda people....
 rather than speakers of Dravidian, whom the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rgvedic times.

Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical and morphological
Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
 features that are alien to other Indo-European languages. Phonologically, there is the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals
Dental consonant

In linguistics, a dental consonant or dental is a consonant that is articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , , , and in some languages....
 in Indo-Aryan; morphologically
Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
 there are the gerund
Gerund

In linguistics, ?gerund? is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb in various languages:* As applied to English language, it refers to what might be called a verb's action noun, which is one of the uses of the -ing form....
s; and syntactically there is the use of a quotative
Quotative

A quotative is grammatical device to mark reported speech in some languages. It can be equated with "spoken quotation marks". In the English language sentence...
 marker
Marker (linguistics)

In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished....
 ("iti"). Several linguists, all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on other grounds, are quite open to considering that various syntactical developments in Indo-Aryan could have been internal developments (Hamp 1996 and Jamison 1989, as cited in ) rather than the result of substrate influences, or have been the result of adstratum (Hock 1975/1984/1996 and Tikkanen 1987, as cited in ). About retroflexion states that "in view of the strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early loanwords, it is hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that did not have a substratum with retroflexes."

Another concern raised is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.

proposes that any Dravidian in Sanskrit can still be explained via the OIT. He suggests through David McAlpin's Proto-Elamo-Dravidian theory
Elamo-Dravidian languages

The Elamo-Dravidian languages are a hypothesised language family which includes the living Dravidian languages of India, and Pakistan, in addition to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam, in what is now southwestern Iran....
, that the ancient homeland for Proto-Elamo-Dravidian was in the Mesopotamia region, from where the languages spread across the coast towards Sindh
Sindh

Sindh is one of the four Subdivisions of Pakistan of Pakistan and historically is home to the Sindhi people. Different cultural and ethnic groups also reside in Sindh including Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees who migrated to Pakistan from India upon independence as well as the people migrated from other provinces after independence....
 and eventually to South India
South India

South India is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the Union territories of India of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of area....
 where they still remain. According the Elst, this theory would support the idea that Early Harappan culture was possibly bi- or multi-lingual. claims that the presence of the Brahui language
Brahui language

The Brahui or Bravi is language, spoken by the Brahui people, is believed to be a remnant of Dravidian languages spoken in northern South Asia....
, similarities between Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans southwards and the resultant intermixing of races and languages.

Elfenbein (as cited in ) argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late immigration that took place within the last thousand years.

Elst believes that there is evidence suggesting that Dravidian influences in Maharashtra
Maharashtra

Maharashtra is a States and territories of India located on the western coast of India. Maharashtra is a part of Western India. It is India's List of states of India by area and List of states of India by population....
 and Gujarat
Gujarat

Gujarat is a States and territories of India in western India. Gujarat borders Pakistan to the north west and the state of Rajasthan to the north and northeast, Madhya Pradesh to the east, Maharashtra and the Union territory of Diu, Daman District, India, Dadra and Nagar Haveli to the south....
 were largely lost over the years. He traces this to linguistic evidence. Some occurrences in Sangam Tamil
Sangam

The Tamil Sangams are legendary assemblies of Tamil scholars and poets that, according to traditional Tamil accounts, existed in the remote past....
, or ancient forms of Tamil, indicate small similarities with Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
 or Prakrit
Prakrit

Prakrit refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the Kshatriya caste, but were regarded as illegitimate by the Brahmin orthodoxy....
. As the oldest recognizable form of Tamil have influences of Indo-Aryan, it is possible that they had Sanskrit influence through a migration through the coastal regions of western India.

Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, state that there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony
Occam's razor

Occam's razor, also Ockham's razor, is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham....
; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

Hydronymy


Indo-Aryan languages
Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages family.SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani language , Bangla language , Punjabi language , Marathi , Gujarati language , Nepali language , Oriya language , Sindhi language , Sinhal...
 are the oldest source of place and river names in northern India - which Shrikant G. Talageri sees as an argument in favor of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest documented population of that area
Demographics of India

This article is about the demographics features of the population of India, including population density, Ethnic group, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population....
.

According to Witzel, river names are conservative, and "in northern India, rivers in general have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter languages of Sanskrit later on." Talageri cites this in support of the Out of India theory, though Witzel himself would dispute jumping to that conclusion. Rather, he points out that non-Sanskritic names are common in the "Sarasvati" (Ghaggar) area.

Kazanas argues that this indicates that the Harappan
Harappan

Harappan can refer to:* Aspects related to Harappa an archaeological site and city in northeast Pakistan* The Indus Valley Civilization that thrived along Indus River ...
 civilization must have been dominated by Indo-Aryan
Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages family.SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani language , Bangla language , Punjabi language , Marathi , Gujarati language , Nepali language , Oriya language , Sindhi language , Sinhal...
 speakers, supposing that the arrival of Indo-Aryan migrants in Late Harappan times to the remnants of a Indus Valley Civilization
Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley Civilization , abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin. Primarily centered along the Indus river, the civilization encompassed most of Pakistan, including its Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, and extending into modern day Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab...
 formerly stretching over vast area could not have resulted in the suppression of the entire native hydronymy.

However, Witzel argues exactly that: "The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions, noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population."

Paralleling Witzel, characterizes place names as the deepest ethnic and linguistic layer, and states that the first network of river and place names in Spain was created by very ancient Indo-European populations, and was dense enough to resist successive language changes. According to , even in those areas which are historically Basque (i.e. non-Indo-European), the ancient names of places and people have a prevailing Indo-European character, with very few names of non-Indo-European Basque etymology documented in ancient sources. cites this in support of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory
Paleolithic Continuity Theory

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory is a hypothesis suggesting that the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language can be traced back to the Paleolithic era,...
.

Position of Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit conserves many archaic aspects, in the words of T. Burrow: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family".

Kazanas argues that linguistic stability corresponds to geographic stability, claiming that if " the Indo-Aryans were on the move over many thousands of miles (from the Russian steppe
Steppe

In physical geography, a steppe , pronounced , is a grassland plain without trees . The prairie can be considered a steppe. It may be semi-desert, or covered with Poaceae or shrubs or both, depending on the season and latitude....
, Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
 and/or Anatolia
Anatolia

Anatolia or Asia Minor is a region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. It is a geographic region bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Aegean Sea to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Iranian plateau to the east and southeast....
) over a very long period of centuries encountering many different other cultures", their "language should have suffered faster and greater changes".

points out that this reasoning can be countered by arguing that Vedic retained the Indo-European accent because, as a sacerdotal language
Sacred language

A sacred language, or liturgical language, is a language that is cultivated for religion reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life....
, it artificially preserved forms that would otherwise have evolved in a normal spoken language. Vedic Sanskrit is, like other sacred language
Sacred language

A sacred language, or liturgical language, is a language that is cultivated for religion reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life....
s, an extinct language
Extinct language

An extinct language is a language which no longer has any speakers .Extinct languages may be contrasted with Language death: no longer spoken as a main language....
, having evolved into Classical Sanskrit by the 6th century BC, reaching stability long after Northern India had been settled by Indo-Aryans.

By contrast, Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
 is a living, vernacular
Vernacular

Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or a locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to Lingua franca, official standards or global languages....
 language that has preserved Indo-European archaisms to the present day, thousands of years longer than Vedic did.

Philology


The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its consequences for the Indo Aryan question. The oldest text, the Rigveda
Rigveda

The Rigveda is an ancient Indian subcontinent sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the Rigvedic deities . It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas....
, is full of precise references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Punjab and Haryana, and was unmistakably recorded in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm terminus ante quem for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in India. In the academic mainstream view it was composed the mid to late 2nd millennium BC (Late Harappan) and OIT proponent propose a pre-Harappan date.

OIT proponents propose that bulk of Rigveda was composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization by linking archaeological evidence with data from Vedic text and archaeo-astronomical evidence.

Sarasvati River


Many hymns in all ten Books of the Rig Veda (except the 4th) extol or mention a divine and very large river named the Sarasvati, which flows mightily "from the mountains to the [Indian] Ocean”. Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda
Rigveda

The Rigveda is an ancient Indian subcontinent sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the Rigvedic deities . It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas....
 that it is worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses".

According to palaeoenvironmental scientists the desiccation of Sarasvati came about as a result of the diversion of at least two rivers that fed it, the Satluj and the Yamuna
Yamuna

The Yamuna is a major tributary river of the Ganges in northern India. With a total length of around , it is the largest tributary of the Ganges....
. "The chain of tectonic events … diverted the Satluj westward (into the Indus) and the Palaeo Yamuna eastward (into the Ganga) … This explains the ‘death’ of such a mighty river (the Sarasvati) … because its main feeders, the Satluj and Palaeo Yamuna were weaned away from it by the Indus and the Gangaa respectively”. This ended at c 1750, but it started much earlier, perhaps with the upheavals and the large flood of 1900, or more probably 2100. P H Francfort, utilizing images from the French satellite SPOT, finds that the large river Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up in the middle of the 4th millennium BC; during Harappan
Harappan

Harappan can refer to:* Aspects related to Harappa an archaeological site and city in northeast Pakistan* The Indus Valley Civilization that thrived along Indus River ...
 times only a complex irrigation
Irrigation

Irrigation is an artificial application of water to the soil usually for assisting in growing crops. In crop production it is mainly used in dry areas and in periods of rainfall shortfalls, but also to protect plants against frost....
-canal network was being used in the southern region of the Indus Valley. With this the date should be pushed back to c 3800 BC.

The Rig Vedic hymn X, however, gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely mentioned while Sindhu receives all the praise. This may well indicate that the Rig Veda hymn from the latest mandala X RV 10 could be dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati (c 3500) when the river lost its preeminence. It is agreed that the tenth Book of the Rig Veda is later than the others.

The 414 archeological sites along the bed of Saraswati dwarf the number of sites so far recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River, which number only about three dozen. About 80 percent of the sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium B.C.E., suggesting that the river was in its prime during this period. If this date were used, then the Indo-Aryan migration
Indo-Aryan migration

Models of the Indo-Aryan migration discuss scenarios of prehistoric migrations of the early Indo-Aryans to their historically attested areas of settlement ....
 scenario would not be able to logically occur. If the Indo-Europeans were in India in the 4th millennium BC, it would be likely for that the spread of Indo-European languages after this point began within India.

Items not in the Rigveda

The Indus Valley Civilization
Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley Civilization , abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin. Primarily centered along the Indus river, the civilization encompassed most of Pakistan, including its Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, and extending into modern day Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab...
 was quite advanced and urbanized for its era. Based on the IAM
Indo-Aryan migration

Models of the Indo-Aryan migration discuss scenarios of prehistoric migrations of the early Indo-Aryans to their historically attested areas of settlement ....
, the migrating Aryans, who wrote the Rig Veda, would have had some contact with the Harappan
Harappan

Harappan can refer to:* Aspects related to Harappa an archaeological site and city in northeast Pakistan* The Indus Valley Civilization that thrived along Indus River ...
s before settling in their lands. The Aryan
Aryan

Aryan is an English language loanword. As the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states at the beginning of its definition, "[it] is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly di...
s would also have begun to use some of the resources the Harappan
Harappan

Harappan can refer to:* Aspects related to Harappa an archaeological site and city in northeast Pakistan* The Indus Valley Civilization that thrived along Indus River ...
s possessed; however, the Rig Veda possesses some gaps which indicate it was composed prior to the first use of these resources in India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
.

  • The Rig-Veda knows no silver
    Silver

    Silver is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal....
    . It knows ayas (metal
    Metal

    In chemistry, a metal is a chemical element whose atoms readily lose electrons to form positive ions , and form metallic bonds between other metal atoms and ionic bonds between nonmetal atoms....
     or copper
    Copper

    Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29.It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity....
    /bronze
    Bronze

    Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive, but sometimes with other chemical element such as phosphorus, manganese, aluminium, or silicon....
    ) and candra or hiran-ya (gold
    Gold

    Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and atomic number 79. It is a highly sought-after precious metal, having been used as money, as a store of value, in jewelry, in sculpture, and for ornamentation since the beginning of recorded history....
    ) but not silver. Silver is denoted by rajatám híran-yam literally ‘white gold’ and appears in post-Rigvedic texts. There is a generally accepted demarcation line for the use of silver at around 4000 BC and this metal is archaeologically attested in the Harappan Civilization


  • The Harappan culture is also unknown to the RV. The characteristic features of the Harappan culture are urban
    Urban contemporary

    Urban contemporary is a music radio format. The term was coined by the late New York DJ Frankie Crocker in the mid 1970s. Urban contemporary radio stations feature a playlist made up entirely of hip hop music, contemporary R&B, and, on occasion, Caribbean music such as reggae and reggaeton....
     life, large building
    Building

    In architecture, construction, engineering and Real estate developer the word building may refer to one of the following:# Any man-made structure used or intended for supporting or sheltering any use or continuous occupancy, or...
    s, permanently erected fire
    Fire

    Fire is the oxidation of a combustion material releasing heat, light, and various Chemical reaction products such as carbon dioxide and water....
     altars and brick
    Brick

    A brick is a block of ceramic material used in masonry construction, usually laid using mortar ....
    s. There is no word for brick in the Rig Veda and iswttakaa (brick) appears only in post-Rigvedic texts. (Kazanas 2000:13) The Rigvedic altar is a shallow bed dug in the ground and covered with grass (e.g. RV 5.11.2, 7.43.2-3; Parpola 1988: 225). Fixed brick-altars are very common in post-Rigvedic texts.


  • The RV mentions no rice
    Rice

    Rice is a staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in tropical Latin America, and East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, making it the second-most consumed cereal grain, after maize....
     or cotton
    Cotton

    Cotton is a soft, staple fiber that grows in a form known as a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, India and Africa....
    . A compound term is used which later referred to rice cakes used for sacrificial purposes, but the word vrihí, meaning 'rice', does not occur. Rice was found in at least three Harappan sites: Rangpur
    Rangpur

    Rangpur stands for the following:*Rangpur - citrus fruitplaces*Rangpur Baghoor*Rangpur, India*Rangpur District in Bangladesh**Rangpur, Bangladesh, administrative centre of Rangpur District...
     (2000 BCE - 1500 BCE), Lothal
    Lothal

    Lothal is one of the most prominent cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Located in the modern state of Gujarat and dating from 24th century BC, it is one of India's most important archaeology site that dates from that era....
     (c 2000 BCE) and Mohenjodaro (c 2500 BCE) as Piggott, Grist and others testify. Yet, despite the importance of the rice in ritual in later times, the Rig Veda knows nothing of it. The cultivation of cotton
    Cotton

    Cotton is a soft, staple fiber that grows in a form known as a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, India and Africa....
     is well attested in the Harappan civilization and is found at many sites thereafter.


  • Nakshatra
    Nakshatra

    A nakshatra or lunar mansion is one of the 27 or 28 divisions of the sky, identified by the prominent star in them, that the Moon passes through during its monthly cycle, as used in Hindu astronomy and Jyotisha....
     were developed in 2400 BCE, they are important in a religious context yet the Rig Veda does not mention this, which suggests the Rig Veda is before 2400 BCE. The youngest book only mentions constellations
    Constellations

    Constellations is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal of critical theory and democratic theory. It is edited by Nadia Urbinati and Andrew Arato and published at the New School for Social Research....
    , a concept known to all cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions.


  • On the other hand, it has been claimed that the Rigveda
    Rigveda

    The Rigveda is an ancient Indian subcontinent sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the Rigvedic deities . It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas....
     has no term for "sword
    Sword

    A sword is a long, edged piece of metal, used as a cutting, thrusting, and clubbing weapon in many civilizations throughout the world. The word sword comes from the Old English language wikt:sweord, cognate to Old High German swert, Middle Dutch swaert, Old Norse sver? Old Frisian and Old Saxon swerd and Dutch langua...
    ", while Bronze swords
    Bronze Age sword

    Bronze Age swords appear from around the 17th century BC , evolving out of the dagger. Before bronze, stone was used as primary material for cutting edged tools and weapons....
     were used aplenty in the Bactria
    Bactria

    Bactria is a historical region of Greater Iran. Known by the ancient Greeks as "Bactriana" the region is located between the range of the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya ; in later times, the region became known as Tokharistan. The name of the region has survived to present time in the name of Afghan province "Balkh"....
    n culture and in Pirak
    Pirak

    Pirak is an archaeological site belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization located in Balochistan , Pakistan. It is 20 km south of Sibi east of the Nari River....
    . Ralph Griffith uses “sword” twelve times in his translation, including in the old books 5 and 7, but in most cases a literal translation would be more generic "sharp implement" (e.g. ), the transition from "dagger
    Dagger

    A dagger is a typically double-edged blade used for stabbing or thrusting. They often fulfill the role of a companion weapon in close combat....
    " to "sword
    Sword

    A sword is a long, edged piece of metal, used as a cutting, thrusting, and clubbing weapon in many civilizations throughout the world. The word sword comes from the Old English language wikt:sweord, cognate to Old High German swert, Middle Dutch swaert, Old Norse sver? Old Frisian and Old Saxon swerd and Dutch langua...
    " in the Bronze Age
    Bronze Age

    The Bronze Age is, with respect to a given prehistory, the period in that society when the most advanced metalworking included smelting copper and tin from naturally-occurring outcroppings of copper and tin ores, creating a bronze alloy by melting those metals together, and casting them into bronze artifact s....
     being a gradual process.


The fore-mentioned features are found in post Rigvedic texts – the Samhitas, the Brahmanas and fully in the Sutra literature. For instance, brick altars are mentioned in Satapatha Brahmana?a 7.1.1.37, or 10.2.3.1 etc. Rice ( vrihi ) is found in AV 6.140.2; 7.1.20; etc. Cotton karpasa appears first in Gautama’s (1.18) and in Bandhayana's (14.13.10) Dharmasutra. The fact of the convergence of the post-Rigvedic texts and the Harappan culture was noted long ago by archaeologists. Bridget
Bridget Allchin

Bridget Allchin is an archaeologist who specializes in South Asian archaeology. She has published many works, some co-authored with her husband F....
 and F. Raymond Allchin
F. Raymond Allchin

Frank Raymond Allchin is an archaeologist who specializes in South Asian archaeology. He first visited India in 1944 whilst serving with the army in the Royal Corps of Signals, and from then on his interest in the area grew....
 stated unequivocally that these features are of the kind “described in detail in the later Vedic literature” (1982: 203).

Based on these set of statements, OIT proponents argue that the whole of the RV, except for some few passages which may be of later date, must have been composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization.

Memories of an Urheimat

The fact that the Vedas do not mention the Aryans' presence in India as being the result of a migration or mention any possible Urheimat
Urheimat

Urheimat is a Linguistics term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language....
, has been taken as an argument in favour of the OIT. The reasoning is that it is not uncommon for migrational accounts to be found in early mythological and religious texts, a classical example being the book of Exodus
Exodus

Exodus is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God Sinai....
 in the Torah
Torah

The term "Torah" , or Five Books of Moses or Pentateuch, refers to the entirety of Judaism's founding Halakha and ethical religious texts....
, describing the legendary migration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.

Proponents of the OIT, such as Koenraad Elst, argue that it would have been expectable that migrations, and possibly an Urheimat were mentioned in the Rigveda if the Aryans had only arrived in India some centuries before the composition of the earliest Rigvedic hymns. They argue that other migration stories of other Indo-European people have been documented historically or archaeologically, and that the same would be expectable if the Indo-Aryans had migrated into India.

From the mainstream academic viewpoint, concern is the degree of historical accuracy that can be expected from the Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns, not an account of tribal history, and those hymns assumed to reach back to within a few centuries of the period of Indo-Aryan arrival in Gandhara make for just a small portion of the text.

Regarding migration of Indo-Aryans and imposing language on Harappans, Kazanas notes that " The intruders would have been able to rename the rivers only if they were conquerors with the power to impose this. And, of course, the same is true of their Vedic language: since no people would bother of their own free will to learn a difficult, inflected foreign language, unless they had much to gain by this, and since the Aryan immigrants had adopted the “material culture and lifestyle” of the Harappans and consequently had little or nothing to offer to the natives, the latter would have adopted the new language only under pressure. Thus here again we discover that the substratum thinking is invasion and conquest." "But invasion is the substratum of all such theories even if words like ‘migration’ are used. There could not have been an Aryan immigration because (apart from the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for this) the results would have been quite different. Immigrants do not impose their own demands or desires on the natives of the new country: they are grateful for being accepted, for having the use of lands and rivers for farming or pasturing and for any help they receive from the natives; in time it is they who adopt the language (and perhaps the religion) of the natives. You cannot have a migration with the results of an invasion."

Material archaeology


Haüsler (as cited in ) found that archaeological evidence in central Europe showed continuous linear development, with no marked external influences.

grants that "there is at least a series of archaeological cultures that can be traced approaching the Indian subcontinent, even if discontinuous, which does not seem to be the case for any hypothetical east-to-west emigration."

Physical anthropology

There is no clear genetic evidence for a prehistoric migration out of India. There is no evidence of widespread genetic displacement in Europe after the Paleolithic. And finds "no support for any model that calls for the ultimate origins of north Bactrian oasis Oxus Civilization populations to be inhabitants of the Indus Valley."

The virtual absence of India-specific mtDNA haplogroups outside of India precludes a large scale population movement out of India. Tracing a possible "out of India" migration therefore focusses on Y-chromosome haplogroups
Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups

In human genetics, a Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup is a haplogroup defined by differences in the non-genetic recombination portions of DNA from the Y chromosome ....
.

The Y-chromosome haplogroup R2
Haplogroup R2 (Y-DNA)

R2 is a Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups characterized by genetic marker M124, and is rarely found outside India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern Central Asia....
 is characterized by genetic marker
Genetic marker

A genetic marker is a gene or DNA sequence with a known location on a chromosome and associated with a particular gene or trait. It can be described as a variation, which may arise due to mutation or alteration in the genomic loci, that can be observed....
 M124, and is rarely found outside India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern Central Asia. Outside of southern Eurasia, M124 was found at an unusually high frequency of 0.440 among the Kurmanji
Kurmanji

Kurmanji or Northern Kurdish is the most commonly spoken variety of the Kurdish macrolanguage....
 of Georgia
Georgia (country)

Georgia is a transcontinental country in the Caucasus region, located at the dividing line between Europe and Asia. It is bordered by the Russia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, Armenia to the south, and Turkey to the southwest....
, but at a much lower frequency of only 0.080 among the Kurmanji
Kurmanji

Kurmanji or Northern Kurdish is the most commonly spoken variety of the Kurdish macrolanguage....
 of Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan is a Turkic peoples country in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic ....
. The M124 frequency of 0.158 found among Chechens
Chechen people

Chechens constitute the largest native ethnic group originating in the North Caucasus region. They refer to themselves as Nokhchii , which comes from the name of a large Chechen teip, the Nokhchmekhkakhoi, and their homeland....
 may be unrepresentative because it was derived from a sample size
Sample size

The sample size of a statistical sample is the number of observations that constitute it. It is typically denoted n, a positive integer ....
 of only 19 Chechens. Outside of these populations and the Gypsies, M124 is not found in Eastern Europe.

The spread of the Indo-European languages is associated with Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a1, which is identified with genetic marker M17. "suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup". However, [https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html the Genographic Project] conducted by the National Geographic Society
National Geographic Society

The National Geographic Society , headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world....
 states that M17 arose "in the region of present-day Ukraine or southern Russia." Geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells
Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells is a geneticist and anthropologist, and an at the National Geographic Society. He leads The Genographic Project....
 states that "The Aryans came from outside India. We actually have genetic evidence for that. Very clear genetic evidence from a marker that arose on the southern steppes of Russia and the Ukraine around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. And it subsequently spread to the east and south through Central Asia reaching India." M17 "shows that there was a massive genetic influx into India from the steppes within the past 10,000 years. Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people – not merely their language – from the steppe appears to be true."

A recent study by S. Sharma et al., published in the ASHG Abstracts 2007, argued for an Indian origin of R1a1 lineage among Brahmins, by pointing out the highest incidence of R1a*, ancestral clade to R1a1, among Kashmiri Pandits (Brahmins) and Saharias, an Indian tribe.

Sengupta et al. in their 2006 paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics say that "Our overall inference is that an early Holocene expansion in northwestern India (including the Indus Valley) contributed R1a1-M17 chromosomes both to the Central Asian and South Asian tribes".

Criticism


  • The linguistic center of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, is found in India, whereas the Italic
    Italic languages

    The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European languages language family's Centum branch. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin , and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian language, Oscan language, and the aforementioned Latin....
    , Venetic
    Venetic language

    Venetic is an extinct Indo-European languages that was spoken in ancient times in the North-Italy Veneto and modern Slovenia, between the Po River river delta and the southern fringe of the Alps....
    , Illyrian
    Illyrian languages

    The Illyrian languages are a group of Indo-European languages that were spoken in the western part of the Balkans in former times by groups identified as Illyrians: Delmatae, Pannoni, Illyrians, Autariates, Taulanti ....
    , Germanic
    Germanic languages

    The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European languages language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Pre-Roman Iron Age....
    , Baltic
    Baltic languages

    The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European languages language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe....
    , Slavic
    Slavic languages

    File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
    , Thracian
    Thracian language

    The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians in South-Eastern Europe....
    , and Greek
    Greek language

    Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
     branches of Indo-European are all found in Central-Eastern Europe. Because it requires a greater number of long migrations, an Indian Urheimat is far less likely than one closer to the center of Indo-European linguistic diversity.


  • The Indic languages show the influence of the Dravidian
    Dravidian languages

    The Dravidian Language families and languages includes approximately 73 languages and are mainly spoken in South India and northeastern Sri Lanka Tamils , as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan, Iran, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Si...
     and Munda
    Munda languages

    The Munda languages are a language family spoken by about nine million people in central and eastern India and Bangladesh. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic languages, generally placed in opposition to the Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia, which means they are distantly related to Vietnamese language and Khmer language....
     language families. No other branch of Indo-European does. If the Indo-European homeland had been located in India, then the Indo-European languages should have shown some influence from Dravidian and Munda.


  • To postulate the migration of PIE speakers out of India necessitates an earlier dating of the Rigveda than is normally accepted by Vedic scholars in order to make a deep enough period of migration to allow for the longest migrations to be completed.


Bibliography and References

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  • Mallory, JP. 1998. A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia. In: The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Ed. Mair. Washingion DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
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See also

  • Indigenous Aryan Theory
  • Aryan Invasion Theory (history and controversies)
  • Indo-Aryan migration
    Indo-Aryan migration

    Models of the Indo-Aryan migration discuss scenarios of prehistoric migrations of the early Indo-Aryans to their historically attested areas of settlement ....
  • pre-Indo-European
    Pre-Indo-European

    Old Europe is a term coined by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe what she perceives as a relatively homogeneous and widespread pre-Indo-European Neolithic Europe culture in Europe, particularly in Megalithic Temples of Malta and the Prehistoric Balkans....
  • Proto-Indo-European language
    Proto-Indo-European language

    The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
  • Proto-Indo-Europeans
    Proto-Indo-Europeans

    The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, and likely lived around 4000 BC, during the Copper Age and the Bronze Age, or possibly earlier, during the Neolithic or Paleolithic eras....
  • Urheimat
    Urheimat

    Urheimat is a Linguistics term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language....
  • Indomania
    Indomania

    Indomania and Indophilia refer to the special interest India, or the Indian subcontinent, has generated in the Western world. During the initial period of colonialism everything about India had an aspect of novelty, especially in United Kingdom....
    , Indophobia
    Indophobia

    Indophobia refers to hostility towards Indians and Indian culture and prejudices against South Asian peoples, including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans....
  • In Search of the Cradle of Civilization
    In Search of the Cradle of Civilization

    In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India is a 1995 book by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley that argues against the theories that Indo-European peoples arrived in India in the middle of the second millennium BC and supports the concept of "Indigenous Aryans" and the Out of India theory....
Competing hypotheses
  • Armenian hypothesis
    Armenian hypothesis

    The Armenian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European language Urheimat, based on the Glottalic theory suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 4th millennium BC in the Armenian Highland....
  • Anatolian hypothesis
    Anatolian hypothesis

    The Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory ; it proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia....
  • Broad Homeland hypothesis
  • Kurgan hypothesis
    Kurgan hypothesis

    The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language....
  • Paleolithic Continuity Theory
    Paleolithic Continuity Theory

    The Paleolithic Continuity Theory is a hypothesis suggesting that the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language can be traced back to the Paleolithic era,...


External links

  • by Nicholas Kazanas
  • by Nicholas Kazanas
  • (Koenraad Elst
    Koenraad Elst

    Koenraad Elst is a Demographics of Belgium writer and orientalist .He was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal TeKoS from 1992 to 1995, focusing on criticism of Islam, various other conservative and Flemish separatist publications such as Nucleus, t Pallieterke, Secessie and The Brussels Journal....
    )
  • (S. Kalyanaraman and M. Kelkar)
  • by Shrikant Talageri
  • Ralph T.H. Griffith, Translator 1896
  • By B.B. Lal
  • By B.B. Lal