> Er, but the "aryans set up the indus valley > civilization" is pure > rubbish -
As far as I know, any attempt at attributing Harappa to any particular group of people fails also because a number of tribes/peoples in the Middle East and Northern India spoke languages and had art forms that do not lend themselves to easy classification. The Dravidian/Aryan split is fairly simplistic. I would be amused if Harappan turned out to be a relation of Sumerian, a language that is an isolate and is steadfastly resisting any attempt at relating it to the rest of the human language tree. If such a tree should be constructed at all, that is. at least, rubbish of the sort I didnt see > in my textbooks > (CBSE as of high school a dozen or so years ago, so > that several > thousand school students in india who actually read > the history stuff > instead of memorizing answers for an exam before > forgetting it would see > the same thing I saw) > > The aryans typically settled closer to the gangetic > valley plus the > sutlej / jhelum / beas etc region, so that MP, UP, > Bihar etc, all the > cowbelt states, plus punjab and haryana, would have > been aryan. Most > origins that I've seen posited for them place them > as horseborne nomads > - with war chariots - from central asia > (transoxiana) who then migrated > over before settling mostly around the gangetic > delta and elsewhere. But isn't this based mostly on textual evidence internal to the Vedas? There is quite a bit of evidence for similar migrations from somewhere in Central Asia to the Middle East (the Mitanni, for instance), but geography and archaeology supports this theory much better than in the Indian case. Also, we are talking early Eastern Iranian languages, the traces of which were preserved in documents written by Semitic speakers or Hittite, I believe, not Dardic or Indic languages. > > The indus valley people were rather unrelated to > this bunch, and > probably got invaded and overrun by the aryans as > well .. Or just had an encounter with a rather nasty virus of some kind. I am becoming more and more sceptical of such dramatic encounters the older I get: conquest is often a small-scale event, barring Gengis Khan and his rather insalubrious imitators in the Middle East, China and India. sharing just > one god that the aryans recognized (the famous > sitting figure at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pashupati.gif) Still only one? Didnt they claim slightly more recently? I have a hazy memory of some kind... -Frank > > > ___________________________________________________________ NEW Yahoo! Cars - sell your car and browse thousands of new and used cars online! http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/
