Sanskrit and PIE

[Steve Farmer]

Arun Gupta writes, on the "Iron Age":

> E.g., quoting the Britannica ( apologies to all for doing this ) :
>
> "Certainly by 1400 BC in Anatolia, iron was assuming considerable
> importance, and by 1200-1000 BC it was being fashioned on quite a large
> scale into weapons, initially dagger blades. For this reason, 1200 BC has
> been taken as the beginning of the Iron Age."
>
> We find iron objects in China from around 700 BC, supposedly. If it was
> theorized that the technology migrated from West to East, then you have cut
> down the migration time from around 500 years to around 200 years, by
> revising the Hittite time line.
>
> That is, if the Anatolian dates are not established by independent physical
> evidence and are established via the Egyptian and/or Assyrian chronologies.

Apologies for citing the Encyclopedia Britannica on this topic
are, indeed, very much in order. :^)

Chronologies re the first use of iron in Anatolia, in different
areas of India (and regional variations are *critical*) are
wholly independent of Egyptian and Assyrian chronologies. Same
for Central Asia and China. Even the use of terms like "Iron Age"
is, for good reasons, being widely challenged by people in the
field. In India - and this has deep implications for dating of
the RV and later Vedic literature - the dates have been pushed
well into the first millennium. For recent overviews and
extensive bibliography, see the studies in Vincent C. Pigott,
_The Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World_ (University
Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1999).