SV: method of dating RV, III

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"N. Ganesan" <naga_ganesan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>From R. Drews, The coming of the Greeks: The Indo-European conquests
>in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton UP, 1988:
>p. 200:
>
>"A second conclusion on which our alternative picture of 'the IE
>invasions' is based has to do with the so-called Hittites. There was
>once a consensus among historians that a Hittite nation had invaded
>central Anatolia by the beginning of the second millennium. This
>Hittite nation, historians supposed, was the first in a series of
>IE nations to have left its distant homeland and to have arrived in the
>more-or-less civilized world. Indo-Europeanists, however, have long
>known that the relationship of Hittite (or Proto-Anatolian) to the other
>IE languages is unclear: although possibly a sibling to Greek, Sanskrit,
>Latin and the other daughter languages of PIE, it is increasingly
>more likely that Proto-Anatolian was an 'aunt' rather than a siser
>of the IE languages.

So far so good.

>In a clear light not only the Hittite invasion
>but even the Hittite nation disappears: its existence depended not upon
>any evidence, literary or archaeological, but upon a cluster of
>presuppositions (the most importatnt being that a Greek nation had come
>to the other side of the Aegean by 1900 B.C.)."

This doesn't make any sense.  Of course there is literary and
archaeological evidence for the Hittite language and state.  What is
he talking about?


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam