IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT OF THE INDO-ARYANS
IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT OF THE INDO-ARYANS
The second millennium BC witnessed another major historical event in the
early history of the South Asian subcontinent after the rise and fall of the
Indus civilisation: a semi-nomadic people which called itself Arya in its
sacred hymns came down to the northwestern plains through the mountain
passes of Afghanistan. In 1786 Sir William Jones, the founder of the
Asiatic Society of Calcutta, discovered the close relationship between
Sanskrit, the language of these Indo-Aryans, and Greek, Latin, German
and Celtic languages. His epoch-making discovery laid the foundation for
a systematic philological study of the Indo-European family of languages
which as we know by now includes many more members than Jones had once assumed. The serious scholarship of the early philologists who
discovered these linguistic affinities was later on overshadowed by
nationalists who tried to identify the speakers of these ancient languages
with modern nations whose origins were to be traced to a mythical Aryan
race. In the late nineteenth century scholars had already agreed that the
original home of the Aryans could be traced to the steppes of Eastern
Europe and Central Asia. But in the twentieth century nationalist German
historians and, more recently, also Indian nationalists have staked out a
claim for their respective countries as the original home of the Aryans. In
India this has become a major issue in contemporary historiography.
During the last decades intensive archaeological research in Russia and
the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union as well as in
Pakistan and northern India has considerably enlarged our knowledge
about the potential ancestors of the Indo-Aryans and their relationship
with cultures in West, Central and South Asia. Excavations in southern
Russia and Central Asia convinced the international community of
archaeologists that the Eurasian steppes had once been the original home
of the speakers of Indo-European language. Since the fourth millennium
BC their culture was characterised by the domestication of horses and
cattle and by the use of copper and bronze tools and weapons and horsedrawn chariots with spoked wheels. In the third millennium BC this
‘Kurgan culture’ (named after a special type of grave) spread from the
steppes in the west of the Ural eastwards into Central Asia. Tribes of this
nomadic population located in the area of present-day Kasakhstan which
belonged to the timber-grave culture are now considered to be the
ancestors of the Indo-Iranian peoples. By the end of the third millennium
the Indo-Aryan tribes seem to have separated from their Iranian ‘brothers’.
Although the eventual arrival of the Iranian and the Indo-Aryan
speaking people in Iran and northwest India is well documented by their
respective sacred hymns of the Avesta and Veda, the details and the
chronology of their migrations from Central Asia are still a matter of
controversy among archaeologists, historians and scholars of Indo-Iranian
languages. Earlier historians had believed that there was a clearly
identifiable gap of about five centuries (eighteenth to thirteenth centuries
BC) between the end of the Indus civilisation and the coming of the
Aryans. These scholars concentrated their attention on the Vedic Aryans,
but more recent archaeological research has changed our knowledge about
this period nearly as dramatically as in the case of our knowledge about
the antecedents of the Indus civilisation. The alleged gap between Late
Harappan and Early Vedic India is no longer considered to be as clearly
defined as it used to be. On the one hand it becomes more and more clear
that in some regions of South Asia Late Harappan traits continued right up
to the Early Vedic period, whereas, on the other hand, ‘intrusive elements’
which are ascribed to early Indo-Aryan migrations into South Asia can be traced in Late Harappan sites. Excavations in Baluchistan (e.g. Mehrgarh
VIII and nearby Nausharo III) brought to light a considerable number of
new cultural elements around 2000 BC. These findings indicate a close
relationship with the contemporary Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran
which is known from archaeological sites like Namazga V in southern
Turkmenistan and Teppe Hissar III in northwest Iran. This culture may
have been controlled by a semi-nomadic elite which is assumed to have
belonged to the speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages.
