1. Horse and 2. Dice in India

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Just a quick note about what seems to be a gap in communication.]

George Thompson <thompson at JLC.NET> wrote:
>[...] the
> horse is virtually if not totally insignificant in IVC, whereas it is
> patently  both fundamental and native in Vedic [as well as Avestan]. This
> fact is an obvious problem for those who insist on some sort of cultural
> continuum between IVC and Vedic.

It should be noted that there are >three< different theories around,
not just two. Thompson and many philologists seem to assume that
either Vedic culture developed mostly outside South Asia and was
introduced as a finished product, or India must have been the
urheimat of PIE speakers.

> From the perspective of archaeology, it is very possible that IE speakers
got to the Northwest part of the subcontinent well before 2000 BCE,
and the Indo-Iranian culture, with its emphasis on the horse
developed in situ, after the domesticated horse reached them via
trade. In fact, one archaeologist, in South Asian Archaeology '95,
noted that various features considered to be hallmarks of Vedic
culture arise and spread in this area, rather than marching lockstep
from Central Asia, in a Northwest to Southeast direction.

It is not good scholarship to ignore this model, even if it is good
politics/propaganda.