SV: method of dating RV, III

[Vidhyanath Rao]

I have been following the discussion, wanting to join in, but I have
not had time to refresh my memory or read the new references given.
So I will simply ask the questions I have.

1) Drews assumes that PIE-speakers invented the chariot. But the
records of the >Old< Hittite kingdom show that horse drawn
vehicles were used in battles both by them and their enemies before
1700 BCE. So, why should we not put chariots to the time before
Hittites split from the rest of IE, rather then after they did, but
before the rest split up? [Of course the whole question of who
invented the chariot remains. I don't wnat to start that up again
except to say that I still haven't seen any answers to the old objections
to the view of IE or I-Ir speakers did so all by themselves.]

2) The Kikkuli text has `panza' for five. This implies that
both the I and II palatalizations and the merger of a/e/o were
complete well before 1400 BCE. Does Drews say anything about this?

3) Regarding the occurance of `Varuna' in the well-known treaty:
The actual text reads urvan(n?)assil, with another version reading
arunassil. urvana and varuna cannot both be traced to the same PIIr
word [wrwa should be syllabified (in Sans. letters) as v.rva]. Diakonoff
says that the development w- > zero is not knwon in any of the
relevant languages. [Which is one reason why he rejects the idea that
Mittani rules were proto-Indian.] And then there is the suffix ssil:
Why were they swearing by ``those of Urvana, those of Mitra'', instead
of just by Varuna and Mitra? What is the explanation of all this
according to those who claim that Mittani's were ruled by a
proto-Aryan dynasty? [Yes, I have read Thieme's 1960 JAOS paper.
He relegates the first objection to a footnote, without any further
discussion and leaves the second to experts in Near Eastern languages.]

4) Archaeologists tell us that there was trade contact between the
steppes and the Kopet Dagh area in the Neolithic times, becoming rare
(unimportant?) during the Namazga IV/V periods and then picking up
again after the `collapse' of urbanism. If we put IE speakers in the
Caspian-Aral area in 3000 BCE, shouldn't we expect some of them to
turn up in points south before 2500 BCE?

5) IA sounding names of kings of Mittani and Kassites were throne names.
The birth names were not IE. If they were still speaking an IA dialect,
why was this uniformly so?

These are all these I can think of at the moment. If I think of any others,
I will be back. Otherwise, I will thank all those who answer in advance
and go back to lurking.

-Nath