"invasion"?

[Vanbakkam Vijayaraghavan]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001 06:10:19 +0100, L.S.Cousins <selwyn at NTLWORLD.COM> wrote:


>It is not necessarily the case. An incoming group may establish the
>dominance of their language. That doesn't inevitably mean that they
>killed all the existing inhabitants - something that would be very
>difficult to do without modern technology.
>
>In general, it is the ruling groups that change under these
>circumstances, not the mass of the population.


Your second para holds true even in the case of language, even assuming the
rulers linguistically differed from the ruled.. For example, Mongols ruled
Persia for three generations, but merged in the latter completely, ethnically
and linguistically. The same thing happened to the barbarians who captured Rome
in it's downfall.

The period we are talking about in India i.e. the second millenneum BC, does not
have any reliable historical records. It looks like a fanciful speculation to
assume that masses of Indians were waiting to relieved of their language, gods,
and women by some chariot driving and arrow wielding "foreigners" - who it is
assumed were only a small percentage - as another poster writes.