Indo-Aryan words in Hurrian

[Swaminathan Madhuresan]

Dear Mr. Kardhol,

The presence of Aryans, (many of them, see below) and the Aryan kings
etc., from atleast 2000 BCE (!!) is usually employed to posit
imaginary Aryans in the Indus civilization.

Dr. S. Kalyanaraman wrote:
http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-shl/WA.EXE?A2=ind9809&L=indology&P=R893
[Begin Quote]
A re-view of the Mitanni documents (including Kikkuli's horse-training
 manual)and Mesopotamian glyptic traditions of Mitanni cylinder seals seems to
 indicate the possibility of migration from India to Mesopotamia via the gulf,
 maritime route ca. 22nd century BC. cf. P. Thieme's thesis on 'aryan'gods in
 Mitanni (1960).
[End Quote]

For Thieme's JAOS paper extracts:
http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/mesopnew/mitanni.htm

SK wrote:" Burrow tries to refute (unsuccessfully, I think) these
views of Thieme by an extraordinary argument dating Avesta to a date as early
as 1000 BC!

But indeed many scholars after T. Burrow also have pushed back
the Avestan.

---------------------------------
From
http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/contacts/mitanni.htm

As a result of S'ulgi's (2029-1982) wars, large numbers of Hurrian prisoners
found themselves in Sumer, where they were employed as a labour force. This
why so many people with Hurrian names can be traced in Southern Mesopotamia
in the Ur III period...the etymology of some names is certainly or most
probably
Indo-Aryan, for example Artatama = Vedic r.ta-dha_man 'whose abode is R.ta',
Tus'ratta (Tuis'eratta) = Vedic tves.a-ratha 'whose chariot surges forward
violently', Sattiwaza = Old Indo-Aryan *sa_ti-va_ja 'acquiring booty',
Vedic va_ja-sa_ti 'acquisition of booty' (Mayrhofer 1974: 23-25)...since the
Hurrian language was in use in the 14th century BC at least as far away as
Central Syria (Qatna, also probably Qadesh), and since this expansion probably
results from the population shifts during the rise of Mittani, it is not a
priori impossible that Indo-Aryans also made their way to this part of the
country ...Among the gods who were still being honoured in the late 14th
century
by the kings of Mittani, we find Mitra-, Varun.a-, Indra-, and the
Na_satya-twins,
who are known to us from the Vedas, the oldest Indian poems. However, in as
much
as they are only attested so far in two versions of a state treaty (Laroche
1971
Nos. 51 and 52), the worship of these deities may have been restricted to
dynastic
circles. The inherited names of the kings of Mittani make it clear that the
Indo-Aryan speaking groups played a role in the changing scene in North
Mesopotamia
in the 16th and 17th centuries which was not unconnected with an accomplishment

suggested by the sparse remains of the Indo-Aryan language itself: various
terms
for horses, current in Nuzi in the early 14th century BC, were certainly or
probably of Indo-Aryan origin (Mayrhofer 1966: 17ff., 1974: 29f.; also
Kammenhuber
1968: 211ff.), and a Hittite tract on training horses (Kammenhuber 1961)
derives
from a Mittani expert in this field and contains Indo-Aryan technical terms,
and from these two facts we may deduce that the Indo-Aryans were experienced in
the breeding and training of horses. A combination of this equestrian skill and
the
use of the two-wheeled chariot engendered a military expertise which without
doubt
contributed much to the expansion of the Mittani kingdom...The two-wheeled
chariot
itself is now generally considered to have developed in the Near East and not,
as
once thought, to have been imported by the Indo-Aryans...In Mittani as well as
in
Syria and Palestine chariot-drivers were called marijanni-na, a term that has
often,
though not uncontroversially, been linked with the Old Indian marya 'yong man'
(in Avestan also 'member of a group of men' (Mayrhofer 1966: 19, 1974: 16,
Kammenhuber 1968: 222f., Diakonoff 1971: 76, Laroche 1980: 168)... (Gernot
Wilhelm,
1989, The Hurrians, trans. by Jennifer Barnes, Warminster, Aris and Phillips
Ltd.).
--------------
L. M. Fosse, once in Indology wrote:
          a) E.g., R. claims that the book on horsemanship written by Kikkuli
 is "written i pure Sanskrit". It is actually written in Hittite, but there
 are a number of Sanskrit terms related to horses and horseracing in the book.

--------------

L. M. Fosse:
 Here is Rajaram's own words, from "The Vedic Aryans and the Origins of
 Civilization", p. 123:

 .... In the years following the discovery of the Hittite-Mittani treaty with
 its Sanskrit names, the linguistic situation has grown only murkier and
 bedeviled by more contradictions. For instance, among the Hittite records in
 Anatolia has been found a manual on horse training [i.e. the manual of
 Kikkuli, LMF] written in what is virtually pure Sanskrit. Now there are more
 than a hundred such records testifying to the use of Sanskrit and Indian
 names. And all this dating to a period well before the hypothetical division
 of the Indians and the Iranians, at a time when the Sanskrit language
 supposedly did not even exist. ...

---------------

Miguel Vidal uses Kikkuli text to posit a 3000 B.C. Indo-Iranian:
<<
 The Kikkuli text on horsemanship, found in the Hittite archives at
 Boghazkoy, leaves no doubt about the presence of Indo-Iranian words
 in Mitanni Hurrian.  We have the series aikawartanna, terawartanna,
 panzawartanna, sattawartanna and nawartanna, i.e. 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9
 turns around the horse-track.  The question is, what are these Aryan
 words doing in the Hurrian vocabulary?  The old notion that the
 Mitanni were a Hurrian tribe ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy must
 be abandoned.  The fact that Hurrians and Indo-Iranians were at one
 time in contact, and that the Hurrians borrowed technical terms to do
 with horsemanship as well as the names of some Indo-Aryan gods
 (Indra, Mitra, Waruna) is undeniable, but the fact that these terms
 show up in texts from 1500 BC doesn't tell us anything about when
 exactly the borrowings took place.  "Mitanni Indo-Aryan" was clearly
 a dead language by then.

 Now, the Hurrians themselves are not native to the Near East, and
 Mesopotamian documents first mention the Hurrians as invadors shortly
 before 2000 BC.  It is not known where they came from, although it is
 usually conjectured from the Caucasus.  But if we suppose they came
 from the Caspian area in the north-east, i.e. from the neighbourhood
 of Gorgan and Shah Tepe, it is plain to see that the Hurrians may
 have adopted their grey wares and horsemanship from the Indo-Iranians
 of Central Asia already by 3000 BC.
>>

Regards,
SM


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