Viveka & Rta/Satya

[Michael Witzel]

(Subrahmanya:  Fri, 21 Jul 2000 15:44:43 CDT)
>Factual history can be known only by considering various views.
....

RB Fri, 21 Jul 2000 18:30:06 -0400

> I have seen the AIT compared with the spanish invasion of south america.
>The AMT also reminds me of an - eastward ho, covered wagon scenario like the
>settling of the american west.

I thought AIT was forbidden here. I will therefore restrict myself here to
aspects of cultural change.

All comparisons carry only so far. Conditions are never identical in any
two settings.

As for the eastward-ho covered wagons, I suggest to read W. Rau (even in
English, see below) before writing with limited knowledge of the texts. He
shows that the Vedic texts say exactly that: covered wagons:

wagons trains on the move; 2 days move, one day rest; at night, arranging
them in a circle like a snake biting its own tail. Graama means 'wagon
train' almost down to Patanjali (Rau in: HOS-Opera Minora vol 2.), who
still remembers it. Certainly so during much of the Brahmana period. Why
else aaryaavarta? They 'turn around' in their pastoral  territory.

>Are comparisions scientific? The spanish had guns, canons, armour, steel,
>new disases all of which had a drastic effect on the native population
>particularly the diseases. It was an interaction of two civilizations
>separated by a huge technological gap. The northern neighbours of the meso
>americans had barely started agriculture and the region was nowhere as
>advanced as europe.

The last sentence is patently wrong. There was agriculture up to Dakota and
Chicago. And the latter area shows exactly what RB denies: around 1300 the
agricultural people in that area reverted to hunting. Due to change of
climate (little Ice Age as in Greenland). A new economy, due to ecological
changes and influence from more successful (that is: better adapted)
neighbors.

Exactly what we can deduce from the Rgveda: there is the successful
pastoral "Aryan' economy in an area that has only some agriculture (and
much less people)  left (many Indus people moved eastwards to Haryana and
founded new settlements there, as the anti-AIT archaeologist J.Shaffer
says);  it had a lot more in Indus times; agricultural words in RV that are
largely non-Indo Aryan.  No wonder that many (not all) local Panjab people
took over the new economy (plus language, poetry, ritual, the horse and
spoked wheel chariot, etc. etc.) from the economically more succesful and
(therefore!) socially higher-status  Indo-Aryans of the RV.
Obviously, there was some technological gap as well, the Indus people being
very good at making beads and water management, etc., and the Indo-Aryans
at making chariots (...and suuktas).

What's the problem? As I have written here before, you only need one tribe
out of Afghanistan who took the wrong turn and stayed in the Panjab instead
of returning to the Afghani summer pastures, -- and you start  Ch. Ehret's
scenario of billiard-ball like innovation and cultural change, which
spreads successfully, so that no member of the end of the chain must have
any (genetic or other direct) connection with those that started it.

In other words, people in the Delhi/Allahabad area were CULTURAL 'Aryans'
(cf. Soutwhorth and Kuiper LONG ago!), who had (in)directly taken over
"Aryanism" from the original instigators on the Afghani borders.  [Most of
these data in my 1995-1999 papers, see my web site, below]

Ehret's scenario was, of course, developed in the eighties, in Africa.
 ===========
========================================================
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University
2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138, USA

ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages)
home page:  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm

Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies:  http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs