Indo-Aryan words in Hurrian

[L.S.Cousins]

One or two points bearing on this:

1. I doubt that we can assume that training horses is a low status or
low class occupation. Certainly charioteers are high status
individuals in both Greek and Indian Epic literature. (And Kesi the
Assadammasaarathi of Anguttara II 112 is clearly a high status
individual.) Involvement with horses has remained a
characteristically aristocratic occupation down to the present-day.
Of course, you may say that they would have grooms and the like. But
that seems doubtful in the past. Certainly among the ruling class of
nomadic peoples you might expect personal involvement in the training
and care of their own horses. In early times one might suppose that a
horse was an expensive possession of the elite and anything to do
with them would be prestigious.

2. Iron is being mentioned a lot in regard to dating the earliest
Vedic texts. I wonder how much can be predicated on this basis. After
all the .Rgveda is not that large a text; so an argument from silence
is not entirely convincing. For the sake of argument let us suppose
that it is actually the case that Tennyson does not mention steam
engines. (They are certainly not frequent in his verse !) That is of
course not an argument for redating Tennyson or steam engines. It
simply tells us about the ideas which Victorians (and many other
peoples) had as to what is appropriate in poetry. So, if the
.Rg-vedic texts were composed at a time when iron was known but not
yet used widely, the absence of mention of it may be due to chance.
If they were produced at a time when iron was in wide use, then the
absence can still be accounted for by cultural and literary
preferences.

3. it is important to note that iron probably did not have
significant advantages over bronze initially. By this I mean that an
immature iron-working technology might not have had significant
advantages over a mature bronze-working technology i.e. it was
probably not sharper, stronger or longer-lasting. It might have been
cheaper, but that would not have been a major consideration for kings
who would certainly want the best available for their personal
weapons. We should probably view iron as the cheepo plastic of the
late 'Bronze age'. Now of course plastics are increasingly replacing
metals, but at first they were very much a cheaper and inferior
product.

4. Without the Mitanni evidence I would see no conclusive evidence to
_prove_ a date earlier than the eighth century. With it an earlier
date does seem likely. But, given that, one feels that a thorough
reexamination of the Mitanni material is overdue.
--
HEADINGTON, UK

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