Paired Horse and PIE breakup

[Paul Kekai Manansala]

N. Ganesan wrote:
>
> >The big problem is that the spread of ritual or technology doesn't
> >necessarily coincide with mass migrations of people. Take, for example,
> >the presence of Islam in Indonesia, or Tibetan Buddhism in the United
> >States.
>
>     Never said mass migration of people. Books say IE were 10%
>     and natives 90%. Let us reduce it further: 5% and 95%.
>
>     Without a core of people these things won't travel.
>     This is true even today when a multitude of technologies
>     available to spread the message. But in those days???
>     Horse sacrifice rituals match in many specific details
>     that it is highly unlikely that they diffused from India to Rome
>     intact.
>
>     Islam spread to Southeast Asia because of the growth in Arab
>     sea-borne trade/traders.
> Before Muslims, Indian traders, mainly from
>     the South and East India took their religions,first Hinduism and
>     then Buddhism to Southeast Asia.
>
>     D. T. Suzuki, his guru established Zen first. Have seen
>     Dalai Lama touring USA. After 1959, a need was felt to
>     study Tibetan buddhism. watched little buddha movie,
>     Richard Gere, ... A core group of trained Lamas are working
>     for Tibetan Buddhism in US.
>

Well these latter examples are really relevant.  Buddhism started in
India, but often is transmitted by non-Indians.  For example, Chinese
were largely responisble for the spread of Buddhism in Japan.  Tibetans
and Japanese have done the most to spread Buddhism in the United States.

So religion and technology are not language or "race" specific.  They
skip from one language or ethnic group to another.  Thus, attempting
to judge the breakup of PIE on the spread of horse rituals and/or
chariot technology is open to much criticism.

> >Let's consider the cuneiform inscriptions of Persia.  Are these part of
> >the same migrations that brought the Vedic peoples to India?  If so,
> >why don't they have a script similar to that used with Sanskrit?  Did
> >they ever have such a script?
>
>      In India, writing came much later (after Asoka). This is true
>      for today's scripts barring IVC writing. Vedas
>      were transmitted orally for many centuries and committed to
>      writing much later. Indo-Iranian movements happened
>      one thousand years before.
>

One thousand years before what?  Were there other migrations, other than
the Vedic ones that accounted for the appearance of the Indian scripts?

> >If we accept that the Ashokan and related scripts came from the
> >"Middle East" and are related to Phoenician-type scripts, how did these
> >vault over to India and when?  And if Vedic peoples came from Ural and
> >Caucasus mountain region (or the Caspian-Aral one) how did they come
> >about using a phonetic script rather than cuneiform (given a lower
> >limit of 2000 BCE for the PIE breakup).
>
>      IA movements and writing are vastly separated in time.

They might be or they might not.  Your evidence appears to be mainly
legendary.  The earliest hypothesized archaeological evidence of
"ayrans" is Painted Grey Ware culture.  And many do not accept PGW as
IA (see the Allchin's work on urban growth).  The culture could be as
late as the 6th century BCE or just a few centuries before the first
inscriptions appear.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala