Some questions on Asuras

[George Thompson]

The pleasures of the holidays and the pressures of other duties have both
kept me from participating in recent List discussions, but as some of you
know this issue is of great interest to me.  Unfortunately, I am presently in
the unhappy position of severely bending a deadline.  I cannot give this
discussion the attention that it deserves, because further delays in
delivering a manuscript to a very patient editor will lead to the deadline's
breaking point. So perhaps a few words, with apologies, will suffice.

There seems to be some evidence in both Avestan and in Vedic of some small
measure of contact and mutual awareness of each other.  Some of this evidence
comes in the form of onomastics. Two examples [one from Iranian, ther other
from Indic]:

[1]  the name of a Zoroastrian, dAztAGni, appears to contain an isolated form
of the Vedic word agni, as well as an isolated form of the Vedic verb dAz-
[i.e., dAzta- found only in one other proper name in Avestan, dAztAiiAni, in
this case the name of a hostile person].  Given the isolation of both dAzta-
and -aGni in Iranian, it is possible that this name [as well as dAztAiiAni]
is Indic, and that the bearer of the name may have belonged to an Indic clan
in contact with Iranians.

[2]  the name of a patron in the RV at 8.46.21-24, pRthuzravas kanIta: the
latter has been connected [by Hoffmann and Witzel] to the name of a certain
Scythian prince, Kanites, which is attested on a Scythian coin.  Briefly,
this may be evidence of a Vedic patron [to whom this dAnastuti is being
offered], who bears an Iranian name.  The eighth book of the RV, well-known
for its "Iranian connections" seems to attest here the participation of an
Iranian, or at least a person with an Iranian name, in the Vedic rituals of
exchange. This has been discussed on the List in the past.

There is other evidence as well, and of other kinds, but the matter is
difficult.  For example, not very long ago on the List H.H. Hock pointed out
that the Avestan change of s > h may in fact be fairly late.  In one of his
recent posts Bjarte Kaldhol has noted [citing M. Hutter] that the name Assara
Maza$ is mentioned in an Assyrian text from the ninth or eighth century BCE.
This is also cited by A. Hintze in a recent article, as evidence of the late
date of this phonological change.  This lateness makes it more difficult to
distinguish proto-Iranian from proto-Indic, as we've seen already in the
discussion of the presumably Indo-Aryan forms attested in the Mitanni texts.
Similarly, when I look for evidence [not only linguistic but also cultural]
for identifying what is proto-Iranian and what is proto-Indic, in Avestan and
in Vedic texts, well, I am frequently confronted with the problem of not
being able to clearly distinguish the one from the other.  But this
difficulty is double-edged, because it exposes, I think, an important point:
that in our oldest Indo-Iranian texts there remains significant evidence not
only of a common linguistic and cultural inheritance, but also of an
ascertainable measure [though admittedly small and steadily shrinking through
time] of continued contact.

In fact, the paper that I should be writing now touches on another aspect of
these very issues.  I hope to have the chance to discuss them on the List in
the near future.

Best wishes, and with apologies for being in such a rush: the clock is
ticking loudly!

George Thompson