The Elephant and the Proto-Indo-European
Homeland
Preface.
In the linguistic debate on the
subject of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland, the discussion of flora and fauna
holds a special position. As Mallory and Adams put it: "generally,
those concerned with locating the Indo-European homeland through its lexicon
tend to employ the evidence of its reconstructed fauna […] and flora"
(MALLORY-ADAMS:2006:131). And it is generally argued that this evidence shows a
homeland in the Steppe areas far outside India. As we saw recently (see my blog
on Manasataramgini and the subsequent attacks on me by some others), even the
racist-casteist elements among staunch Hindus (out to prove their
"superior Aryan invader" brahmin ancestry) mindlessly parrot this
argument in their desperation to prove an Aryan Invasion of India, in total
disregard of the fact that most languages generally only preserve the names
for animals and trees found in their territory and not for those found in other
territories. In short, no Indo-Aryan language has a name for an animal or
plant found in the Steppes of South Russia and not found in India. As Mallory
and Adams reasonably point out:
"If an item is severely
restricted in space, for example, the camel, then any Indo-European group who
moved beyond the natural territory of the camel might do one of three things
with their original word 'camel':
1. They might
simply abandon the word altogether as they and their linguistic descendants
were not likely to encounter a camel for the next several thousand years.
2. They might use
the name 'camel' when they come across another animal that they were unfamiliar
with but which bore some similarity in appearance or function. From the
perspective of the historical linguist we might then have to confront a
situation where the original meaning 'camel' was (or was not) retained in those
groups where camels have always dwelled while other languages developed a
totally different meaning for this word. The other languages might well
outnumber those who retained the original meaning or, worse, no language might
retain the original meaning.
3. The population
might retain the name and the meaning of 'camel' for thousands of years as a
gesture of benevolence to future historical linguists.
Now, put so
baldly, a scenario such as number three is impossible." (MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:132-133).
Therefore, generally, it would
not be possible to locate the Indo-European homeland on the basis of an
analysis of names of fauna and flora, since each group of speakers of
Indo-European languages would only preserve names for animals and plants found
in their historical habitats and not of those found in some ancient
long-forgotten homeland.
Nevertheless, many scholars and
writers insist on using arguments about fauna and flora to locate the PIE
homeland outside India or specifically in the Steppe region of South Russia.
They unblinkingly use blatantly self-contradictory "logic" to make
their claims: see Witzel further on in this article.
Unfortunately, for all these
polemicists, there are certain animals in the reconstructed names of
Proto-Indo-European fauna which point unmistakably to an Indian rather than a
South Russian Steppe (or even Anatolian) homeland: the tiger, lion, leopard,
ape and elephant. Discussions on the reconstructed fauna and its
implications usually ignore these names, or argue against them.
The tiger, with a proto-form *wy(H)āghras
is found in three branches: Indo-Aryan vyāghra-, Iranian (Persian) babr,
and Armenian vagr (borrowed into the non-Indo-European Caucasian
Georgian language as vigr).
The lion, with a proto-form *sinĝhos
is found in two branches: Indo-Aryan siṁha-, and Armenian inj
(with a transfer of name to the leopard).
The leopard, with a proto-form *perd
is found in four branches: Indo-Aryan pṛdāku, Greek pardos/pardalis,
Iranian Persian fars-, and Anatolian (Hittite) paršana.
The monkey, with a proto-form *qhe/oph,
is found in four branches: with the initial *qhe in Indo-Aryan kapí-
and Greek kēpos, and without it in Germanic (e.g. Old Icelandic) api
and Slavic (e.g. Old Russian) opica.
Finally, and most important of all,
the elephant (with alternate meaning, or a word transfer to, ivory) with the
proto-form *leHbho-nth- or *ḷHbho-nth- is found in at least four
branches: Indo-Aryan íbha-, Greek eléphas (Mycenean Greek erepa),
Italic (Latin) ebur, and Hittite laḫpa-. With a transfer of
meaning to "camel", it is found in two more branches: Germanic (e.g.
Gothic) ulbandus, and Slavic (e.g. Old Church Slavic) velibodŭ,
apart from Hittite ḫuwalpant ("hunchback", obviously
"camel").
These reconstructed PIE animal names
go against the establishment theory that the environment depicted by the
reconstructed PIE fauna is that of the cold or temperate areas of the north.
Hence most AIT supporters (including the staunch but racist-casteist Hindus)
ignore these names in their discussion and wax eloquent on the reconstructed
names of animals (and trees) found (i.e. also found) in the temperate
areas: the wolf, bear, lynx, fox/jackal, deer/elk, bull, cow, hare, squirrel,
otter, beaver, mouse, duck/swan, dog, cat, horse, bull/cow, goat, sheep, pig,
etc. However, in any Indian homeland theory, all these animals are found in
India, or, where they (and their names) are not found within India, they are
found in areas to the north-west of India which, in any OIT scenario, would
form a part of the secondary homeland which the other branches would have to
inhabit and pass through in their movement out from India. The same cannot be
said for the southern/eastern animals (tiger, lion, leopard, ape and elephant)
in any Steppe homeland theory!
Nevertheless, many arguments are made
against these reconstructed names. We will first note the arguments made
against the first four names:
1. The words vyāghra, kapi
and pṛdāku are not found in the Rigveda and are therefore post-Vedic
words (although one of the composers of the Rigvedic hymn IX.97 bears
the name Vyāghra-pāda "tiger-foot", a person named many
times in X.86 bears the name Vrṣā-kapi, and a person named
in VIII.17.15 bears the name Pṛdāku-sānu!).
2. The word for tiger may have been
borrowed by Old Persian and Old Armenian from India in historical times.
3. Lions, leopards, and even tigers,
were found in parts of Iran, West Asia and the Caucasus region in early
historical times. Likewise monkeys were found as far as West Asia in earlier
historical times. Names for these animals may therefore have been known to the
PIE language speakers in their steppe homeland.
4. There may be no connection between
Indo-Aryan kapí- and Greek kēpos, which may have evolved
separately, and the identification of the Germanic and Slavic words as related
to the above forms with k- may also be wrong.
5. These names may be
"wanderwörter" (i.e. "migratory words": words of
indeterminate origins which spread over large areas and were borrowed by
different originally unrelated languages) from West Asia into the Steppe areas:
e.g. Egyptian gjf, Aramaic kōpā, Sumerian ukupu,
"monkey".
All these arguments can be argued
against, but here we will deal only with the word for "elephant",
since it is the most important and significant, for two reasons:
1. The word is found distributed over
the entire spectrum of Indo-European languages: it is found in both Asia and
Europe, in both the south-easternmost branch (Indo-Aryan) as well as the
north-westernmost one (Germanic). It is found in all the oldest recorded
Indo-European languages: "the earliest attested Indo-European languages,
i.e. Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Indo-Aryan" (MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:99),
as well as in the oldest attested "North-western" or
"European" IE languages in southern Europe (Latin), northern Europe
(Gothic) and eastern Europe (Old Church Slavonic). It is found in Anatolian
(Hittite) as well as in five other branches: as per Mallory and
Adams, the criterion for determining a word to be definitely
Proto-Indo-European is "if there are cognates between Anatolian and any
other Indo-European language", to which they add: "This
rule will not please everyone, but it will be applied here"
(MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:109-110)!
2. Unlike the other animals named
above, the elephant is found in only one of the historical Indo-European
habitats: that of Indo-Aryan. There are two distinct species of
elephants: the Indian elephant (elaphas maximus), found in India and
in areas to its east (i.e. southeast Asia), and the African elephant (loxodonta
africana), found in sub-Saharan Africa, in both cases far from
the historical habitats of all the other branches of IE languages other than
Indo-Aryan.
The above facts about the PIE
elephant, in conjunction with the names of the four other animals named above
(and see further the evidence of other animal names in the section, below, on
the elephant in the Rigveda), constitute clinching evidence for the Indian
homeland theory as opposed to the Steppe (South Russian) homeland theory; but
it is testimony to the motivated nature of the discussion on the subject of the
PIE homeland that the evidence of the elephant in the Rigveda is just "the
elephant in the living room" for most western scholars as well as for most
staunch Hindu racist-casteist writers, who write as if they don't know it
exists.
Others try to minimize the importance
of the evidence with special pleading. Mallory and Adams write: "*(y)ebh-
'elephant' (Lat ebur, Skt íbha-) and *lebh- 'ivory' (Myc e-re-pa,
Grk eléphas). There are those who would claim that they are both
Proto-Indo-European (and indicate an Asian homeland), but the word for elephant
is close enough to the Egyptian word (3bw) to suggest a wanderwort
and objects of ivory were widely traded in the eastern Aegean during the Bronze
Age, and borrowing is usually, and surely correctly, suspected here as well"
(MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:141).
Others go many steps ahead in their
zeal to try and dismiss, negate or neutralize the evidence of the PIE elephant.
Václav Blažek, for example, writes a long article loaded with data and details,
and presumptuous pronouncements loaded with special pleading, for this express
purpose, discreetly and ambiguously titled "Two Greek words of a
foreign origin":
a) He tells us that "both
Anatolian and Greek 'ivory'/'elephant' were borrowed independently from a
common source" (BLAŽEK 2004:13),
b) firmly pronounces that "Latin
ebur 'ivory' reflects a late Egyptian pronunciation of Egyptian 3bw
'elephant'" (BLAŽEK 2004:14), and
c) completely and authoritatively
dismisses the very idea that the word ibha means
"elephant" at all: "The Old Indic, at least Vedic, íbha
means 'Gesinde, Tross, Hauswesen, Hofstaat' (EWAI I:194). Mayrhofer, KEWA
III:644 confirms that the meaning 'elephant' appears only in the later language
(Mānava Dharmaśāstra) probably thanks to misinterpretation of an original Vedic
text (further cf. Pali ibha-, Prakrit i(b)ha-; Sinhalese iba
looks like a direct borrowing from Pali - see Turner 1966:71, # 1587)"
(BLAŽEK 2004:14)!
d) And finally he even dismisses
outright "any connection (cognate or borrowing) of Gothic ulbandus,
Old Icelandic ulfalde, Old English olfend 'camel' with Greek ἐλέφαντ"
(BLAŽEK 2004:13). That is, he accepts that the Germanic (and Slavic) words are
cognate to the Hittite ḫuwalpant "hunchback", but he insists
that the word originally meant neither "elephant" nor
"camel" but only "hunchback", and is totally unrelated to
the Greek word!
Thus even the oldest, most widespread
and most rock-solid evidence can be dismissed with a wave of the hand by
entrenched and motivated scholars when found inconvenient!
But can it really be dismissed so
easily? We will examine the case under the following heads:
Section I. The elephant in the
Rigveda.
I A. Tugra, Bhujyu and
Tugra's ibha-s.
I B. The ṛbhu-s and the elephant.
Section II. The case for the African elephant
in a Steppe Homeland.
II A. The Case for the
North African elephant.
II B. The Iberian
Evidence.
II C. Hannibal's
elephants and the elephants of Ptolemy IV.
II D. Egypt as the
Conduit for the African Elephant.
II E. The Name of the
African elephant.
Section III. The case for the "Syrian"
elephant in a Steppe Homeland.
III A. The
"Syrian" elephant.
III B. The Mitanni.
III C. The West Asian
names for the elephant.
Section IV. The case for the Indian
elephant in an Indian Homeland.
IV A. The Trail of
Elephants and Ivory from India.
IV B. The Trail of the
Name from India.
Section V. The Flora and Fauna of the
Rigveda vis-à-vis the PIE world.
V
A. The Flora and Fauna of the Old Books vis-à-vis the New Books.
V
B. PIE Flora and Fauna of the North-west and beyond.
V
C. Soma, Honey, Wine and Aurochs, Horses and Cows.
Section I. The elephant in the Rigveda.
The elephant is found in the Rigveda
already with three distinct names: íbha-, vāraṇá, and hastín.
[Later on there are many more: gaja, mātaṅga, kuñjara, dantī,
nāga, karī, etc. In the
Rigveda itself, Griffith and Wilson translate two more words as
"elephant": apsah in VIII.45.56 and sṛṇí in X.106.6].
It is clearly a very familiar
animal fully integral to the traditional culture and environment of the Vedic
people: IV.16.14 compares Indra's might to that of a mighty
elephant, and at least three verses (I.64.7; 140.2; VIII.33.8)
refer to a wild elephant crashing its way through the forests and bushes: in
the third reference the elephant is "rushing on this way and that way, mad
with heat" (GRIFFITH). X.40.4 refers to hunters
following two wild elephants. I.84.17 refers to household
elephants as part of the possessions of a wealthy householder, IV.4.1
refers to royal elephants as part of the entourage of a mighty king, and IX.57.3
refers to a ceremonial elephant being decked up by the people. VI.20.8
refers to battle elephants, or, at least to elephants in the course of the
description of a battle.
[Now
throughout the rest of this article, one thing that must be constantly kept in
mind is the early chronology and antiquity (both in terms of date as well
as of PIE history) of words and references found in the non-redacted portions of
the Old Books of the Rigveda. In my earlier blog article "The
Recorded History of the Indo-European Migrations - Part 2, The chronology and
geography of the Rigveda", I have shown that the overwhelming mass of names, name types,
words and metres common to the Rigveda, the Avesta and the Mitanni records are
found as follows:
1. In not a single one of the 280 Old Hymns and
2351 verses in the Old Books 6,3,7,4,2: i.e. in 0 % of the hymns
and verses.
2. In 15 of the 62 Redacted Old Hymns and 23 of
the 890 Redacted verses in the Old Books 6,3,7,4,2: i.e. in 24.19
% of the hymns but only 2.58 % of the verses.
3. In 425 of the
686 New Hymns and 3692 of the 7311 verses in the New Books 5,1,8,9,10:
i.e. in 61.95 % of the hymns and 50.50 % of the verses, and in
all subsequent Vedic and Sanskrit texts.
In short, unless
positive proof to the contrary can be produced in respect of any particular
reference, words found in the non-redacted portions of the Old Books
(2,3,4,6,7) of the Rigveda:
1. can go back beyond
2500 BCE at the least in terms of absolute chronology, and
2. represent a period anterior
to the period of "Indo-Iranian" and Mitanni unity, and even,
as we will see in Part 3 of my above article (to be completed and uploaded), anterior
to the period of "South Indo-European" (i.e. Indo-Aryan-Iranian-Greek-Armenian-Albanian)
unity.
Anyone who disputes
these conclusions must first disprove the case presented in part 2 of my above
article, already uploaded on this blogsite].
The references to the elephant in the Rigveda (without counting apsah
in VIII.45.56, and sṛṇí in X.106.6) are as follows:
Old Books:
IV.4.1 (íbha-); 16.14 (hastín).
VI.20.8 (íbha-).
New Books:
I.64.7 (hastín); 84.17 (íbha-); 140.2 (vāraṇá).
VIII.33.8 (vāraṇá).
IX.57.3 (íbha-).
X.40.4 (vāraṇá); 49.4 (íbha-).
The word íbha- in the Rigveda is
found right from the oldest book 6 to the latest book 10. It is the oldest
Vedic/Sanskrit word for "elephant", and, like many other older and
PIE Vedic words (nakta and kṣap for "night", uda-
and āpa- for "water", etc) which fell out of use in comparison
with newer words in later Indo-Aryan (even in Classical Sanskrit), it also fell
out of popular or common use in comparison with newer words after the period of
the Vedic Saṁhitā-s: in fact, it is found even in the other three Vedic Saṁhitā-s
only in repetitions of Rigvedic verses.
The determined bid by some Indologists to establish that the word does
not mean "elephant" at all, but means something like "servants,
attendants, household", etc. is totally untenable:
Throughout the entire tradition of Indian Vedic and linguistic
tradition, the word íbha- means
"elephant": the Uṇādi Sūtra-s (III.147) of Pāṇini (or, according to
many authorities, of sources even anterior to him) tell us that the word means hastī
"elephant". The same meaning is given by Yāska, Mahīdhara, Sāyaṇa,
and all other traditional Indian Vedic scholars, grammarians, etymologists and
lexicographers. Many of the western Indologists (Müller, Wilson, Uhlenbeck, Pischel,
Geldner) also unambiguously translate the word as "elephant".
Then what is the basis for translating the word as "attendants,
servants"? This motif was introduced in the last few hundred years, in
defiance of the meaning accepted since thousands of years, and without any
basis in either Indo-European or Sanskrit etymology, initially by a motley
crowd of Indologists (Ludwig, Grassmann, Roth, Zimmer, etc.), on the basis of
the following: the Nirukta of Yāska (6.12) elaborates on the meaning of "yāhi
rājevamavāṁ ibhena" (a section of the Rigvedic verse IV.4.1)
as follows: "yāhi rājeva/ amātyavān/ abhyamanavān/
svavānvā/ irābhṛtā gaṇena gatamayena/ hastinetivā",
i.e. "Go like a king who is accompanied by his minister, or who
is the terror of his enemies, or who is followed by his own attendants, i.e.
retinue well nourished with food, or (riding) a fearless elephant".
The word "attendants" in the above commentary actually refers to the
word ama: Wilson, in his footnote to his translation, tells us that
"ama has also different interpretations, a minister, for amátya,
or ama, an associate". But it has been transferred to the
following word íbha and
interpreted as the "real" meaning of the word íbha -
so the "misinterpretation
of an original Vedic text" was done not by
ancient Indian grammarians, lexicographers and interpreters of the Rigveda, but
by certain early Indologists
- and this misinterpretation
has been blindly followed by most subsequent Indological scholars.
It may, incidentally, be noted that the word íbha is translated as
"attendants, servants" by Griffith, who follows that interpretation,
when the context is sufficiently general, eg. "Tugra with his íbha-s", but in IX.57.3,
where the reference is to people decking up an íbha, he perforce
translates the word as "elephant"!
But, on the basis of this authoritative "evidence", scholars
like Blažek (see above) confidently assert
that "the meaning 'elephant' appears only in the later language (Mānava
Dharmaśāstra) probably thanks to misinterpretation of an original Vedic text",
and that the word for "elephant" is not a common PIE word at all: according
to Blažek, "both Anatolian and Greek 'ivory'/'elephant' were borrowed independently
from a common source". Latin independently borrowed a
cognate sounding word from "a late Egyptian pronunciation of
Egyptian 3bw 'elephant'". The ancient pre-Pāṇinian Indian Vedic
scholars independently (and unanimously) "misinterpreted"
another cognate sounding word originally restricted to the
oldest book, the Rigveda, a word which which really meant "attendants,
servants", to mean "elephant". The Germanic tribes, in the
camel-less South Russian homeland itself, independently borrowed yet another
cognate sounding word meaning "hunchback" from Hittite, and, after
reaching north-western Europe, applied the name to camels! Does this constitute
a credible case?
The above authoritative edicts are lapped up by AIT proponents to negate
the evidence for the PIE elephant. Witzel tells us: "Vedic ibha does not even seem to
indicate 'elephant' but 'household of a chief' (details in EWA I 194); i-bha 'elephant' is
attested only in Epic/Class. Skt. (EWA III 28)...", and, not
satisfied with quoting "authorities", he sagely adds a linguistic
angle: "...and the combination with Grk. elé-pha(nt-),
Latin ebur, Gothic ulbandus, 'camel' suffers from lack of proper
sound correspondences" (WITZEL 2001a:44).
This argument, about "lack of proper sound correspondences"
is a demonstrably fake one: the PIE elephant is sought to be denied by
Witzel on the grounds of "lack of proper sound correspondences",
but, when it comes to animals of the temperate region, this same "lack of
proper sound correspondences" apparently enhances the value of
the evidence: "the major carnivores [...] are well represented
although often showing substantial independent re-formation. This is the
case with *wl(o)p- 'fox' (e.g. Lat vulpēs, Lith lãpė, Grk alṓpēks
~ alōpos, Arm aluēs, Hit ulip(pa)na- 'wolf', Av urupis
'dog', raopi- 'fox, jackal', Skt lopāsá- 'jackal, fox'), for
example, which boasts at least six different potential proto-forms"
(MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:138)!
Therefore, the question now is not whether the elephant is a PIE animal:
it definitely is PIE. The question is whether the elephant known
to the PIEs was the African (or "Syrian") elephant (in a PIE homeland
in the Steppes of South Russia), or the Indian elephant (in a PIE homeland in
India), and we will examine the three cases in the next three sections.
But before that, let us examine some other matter in the Rigveda, which
indicates a much greater role for the elephant in the Vedic culture than
hitherto suspected, under the following heads:
I A. Tugra, Bhujyu and Tugra's ibha-s.
I B. The ṛbhu-s and the elephant.
I A. Tugra, Bhujyu and Tugra's ibha-s:
The word íbha is
found five times in the Rigveda, but one notable thing is that out of these
five references two occur along with the name of a "person" named Tugra.
If the word meant "attendants, servants", it would be strange that
such a general or common term as "attendants, servants" should be
associated so exclusively with only one particular person in the whole of the
Rigveda. The first reference is tugrám śaśvád-ibham in VI.20.8,
the second is tugrám smad-íbham in X.49.4. The references seem
to confuse both the sets of Indologists: those who translate íbha as
"elephant" as well as those who translate it as "servant,
attendant". Most of them, belonging to both sets, translate the second as
the name of a person Smadibha, and the first as the name of the same
person "in abbreviation" as Ibha! Griffith, who belongs to the
second set, however, translates the first as "Tugra with all his
servants", but the second rather illogically as a name Smadibha
- illogical since (apart from the clear identity of the two references) the
word smad in the second reference actually means "together
with".
It is clear that the reference in both cases means "Tugra with
his elephants". And, since in two of the five references in the
Rigveda, the word íbha is closely linked
with the word Tugra, the question then arises: why should the elephant
be so often linked with Tugra? For that, one must first understand who,
or what, tugra is in the Rigveda.
The words tugra and ibha, and certain other words directly
connected with them (tugrya with tugryā-vṛdh, taugrya,
bhujyu and ibhya), are found in the Rigveda as follows:
Old Books:
IV.4.1 (ibha); 27.4 (bhujyu).
VI.20.8 (tugra, ibha); 26.4 (tugra); 62.6 (tugra, bhujyu).
VII.68.7 (bhujyu); 69.7 (bhujyu).
New Books.
I.33.15 (tugrya); 65.7 (ibhya 'rich'); 84.17 (ibha);
112.6 (bhujyu), 20 (bhujyu); 116.3 (tugra, bhujyu), 4 (bhujyu), 5
(bhujyu); 117.14 (tugra, bhujyu), 15 (taugrya); 118.6 (taugrya); 119.4
(bhujyu); 158.3 (taugrya); 180.5 (taugrya); 182.5 (taugrya),
6 (taugrya), 7 (taugrya).
VIII.1.15 (tugryā-vṛdh); 3.23 (tugrya); 5.22 (taugrya);
22.2 (bhujyu 'rich'); 32.20 (tugrya); 45.29 (tugryā-vṛdh);
46.2 (bhujyu 'rich'); 74.14 (tugrya); 99.7 (tugryā-vṛdh).
IX.57.3 (ibha).
X.39.4 (taugrya); 40.7 (bhujyu); 49.4 (tugra, ibha);
65.12 (bhujyu); 95.8 (bhujyu 'snake'); 143.5 (bhujyu).
These above words constitute:
a) a small group of words connected with each other,
b) they are all "Old Vedic words" in the sense that they are almost
purely exclusive to the Rigveda among the four Samhitās, and, except for one single
reference in the Yajurveda (Yaj 18.42 bhujyu) are not found
independently in the other three Samhitās (i.e. there are three Rigvedic
verses repeated in the other texts: IV.4.1 ibha in Yaj
13.9; VIII.99.7 tugryā-vṛdh in Sām 2.83 and Ath
20.105.3; and IX.57.3 ibha in Sām 2.1113).
c) they all seem to have connections to contexts having to do with trade
and commerce, sea travel, and elephants(/ivory?):
The references to tugra form three distinct groups:
1. The first group is found in Indra hymns in the oldest book 6 (VI.20.8;
26.4). VI.20.8 refers to Indra forcing Tugra
with his ibha-s (along with vetasu and daśoṇi) into
submission, and VI.26.8 refers to Indra killing Tugra (and
vetasu). Wilson's translation suggests this was done for a king (whose
name he identifies as Dyotana, a word which appears in the verse). This (Indra
forcing tugra with his ibha-s and vetasu into submission) is
referred to again in X.49.4. As book 10 of the Rigveda often
imitates themes, words and verses from older hymns, this theme would appear to
be basically restricted to the oldest book 6.
The one thing clear in these three references is that they are hostile
to Tugra, and therefore stand out from the rest of the references to
him.
In the light of the references to follow, I would speculate as follows: Tugra
was the name for an elephant breeder, and the reference is to some kind of
"elephant-raid" (like the cattle raids depicted in the Vedas and
Epics) in which the king, or the Vedic Aryans (the Pūru-s), took over
the elephants from Tugra (which may be the name of the elephant-breeder,
or a generic name for "elephant-breeders"), or the control of the
trade in elephants/ivory from the paṇi-s or traders (see below). In this
context, note the references to two words, vetasu and daśoṇi, which
occur only in the Rigveda and never after that:
a) The word vetasu is found only in the three verses (VI.20.8;
26.4; X.49.4) which refer to Tugra's defeat at the
hands of Indra. It is not found in any other context either in the
Rigveda itself or in any other text after that. The only word from which it can
be derived is vetasa "reed, cane". Clearly, this word, in
conjunction with the word ibha "elephant", must be a reference
to cane-fields or grounds covered with reeds or bamboos, which constitute the
main food of elephants.
b) The word daśoṇi is also found in only three verses (VI.20.4,8;
X.96.12) in the Rigveda,
and nowhere after that, except for the repetition of X.96.12 daśoṇi,
in Ath 20.32.2. But, in this verse, the word has a different meaning, and is
translated as "ten fingers", and therefore the word in the two
references in VI.20 has no other context. In VI.20.4, the
verse talks about Indra driving away the paṇi-s (i.e.traders, merchants)
for, or from, daśoṇi. Since oṇi means "protection,
shelter", in the Rigveda, daśoṇi could be a reference to
elephant-stables.
Thus the verses refer to the take-over of the elephants, cane-fields and
elephant-stables of Tugra by Indra (i.e. by the kings of the
Vedic Aryans or Pūru-s).
2. The second group is found in an Aśvin hymn (VI.62.6),
which refers to the Aśvin-s rescuing bhujyu, the son of tugra
(tugrasya sūnu) from the seas or waters with the help of
"birds" (i.e. ships).
These references are later found throughout the Rigveda in hymns to the Aśvin-s:
a) A few verses simply refer to bhujyu or taugrya
("son of tugra" as a patronymic, the phrase "tugrasya sūnu"
being used only in VI.62.6 above) being "helped" by the
Aśvin-s: I.112.6,20; X.40.7; 65.12. (In
I.180.5, taugrya is mentioned as a worshipper of the Aśvin-s).
b) Most of the verses specifically refer to bhujyu or taugrya
being rescued from amidst the seas or waters by the Aśvin-s and brought
to safety: I.116.3,4,5; 117.14,15; 118.6; 119.4;
158.3; 182.5,6,7; VI.62.6;
VII.68.7; 69.7; VIII.5.22; X.39.4;
143.5. [One verse, IV.27.4, in a hymn to the falcon, mythically
identifies the falcon with the "bird" which carries him to safety].
The following details of this "rescue", given in these verses,
are significant:
a) tugra is forced to abandon bhujyu in the waters "as
a dead man leaves his riches" (I.116.3). VII.68.7;
69.7 also indicate bhujyu's "abandonment". This seems
to indicate the shipwreck of a goods-laden ship in the ocean, or perhaps
abandonment of a rich haul of cargo out at sea due to an act of treachery by
"wicked friends" (VII.68.7).
b) taugrya is left clinging to a tree in the waters (I.182.7):
i.e. clinging to the wreck of a ship, or abandoned on a small island.
c) the "bird" which carries bhujyu to safety becomes
"flying steeds" in many verses, and in I.117.14, these
are specifically "brown" in colour: i.e. wooden ships.
d) the rescue takes place with the help of "a ship with a
hundred oars" (I.116.5), or "four ships"
(I.182.6), indicating the large amount of cargo involved.
e) the return journey takes "three days and three nights"
(I.116.4).
From all this, it is clear Tugra and his son Bhujyu are
sea-faring merchants carrying on trade with distant lands.
That the cargo in which they deal must be ivory is clear:
a) Tugra, as we saw, is specially associated in the oldest hymns
with elephants.
b) From the oldest records from India as well as West Asia (see also
later on in section 3 of this article), it is clear that ivory was one of
the main items exported from India.
c) There is a word ibhya derived from ibha
"elephant". It is found only once in the Rigveda: in I.65.7,
where it means "rich". Later, it is found in two verses in the
Chāndogya-Upaniṣad (10.1,2), where also it means "rich". Later it is
found in its Pali form ibbha in Ashoka's Rock Edict No. 5, and in
various Pali texts, where it continues to mean "rich (people)" or
more specifically "traders, merchants".
d) the name of Tugra's son, bhujyu, has many connotations,
all of which seem to point towards elephants/ivory or trade (MONIER-WILLIAMS
1899:759):
i) "1 bhuj. .... bent, curved"
[note: a perfect word for ivory].
ii) "2 Bhuj. Bhuja, m. (ifc. f. ā) the arm
.... the hand .... the trunk
of an elephant" [note: like karī and hastin/hastī
from kara, hasta "hand", bhujyu from bhuja
"arm, hand" can certainly mean "elephant"].
iii) "2. Bhujyu, f. (for 2, see col. 3) a
snake or viper .... RV. x,95,8" [note: because of the
similarity between the snake and the elephant's trunk, many words, e.g. nāga,
which mean "snake" also mean "elephant" in Sanskrit].
iv) "4. Bhuj, f. enjoyment, profit, advantage,
possession or use of .... 2. Bhujyu, mfn (for 1, see col. 2) wealthy, rich, RV.
viii,22,1; 46,20" [note: this meaning coincides with the meaning of ibhya].
3. The third group is found in Indra hymns (and one in an Agni
hymn VIII.74) and consists of the word tugrya. All (but one) of
them are found in book 8: VIII.1.15; 3.23; 32.20; 45.29;
74.14; 99.7. The last one is in a Kaṇva hymn in the
related book 1 (I.33.15).
The word tugrya is generally translated as "the race of tugra",
but is used in three different but related senses:
a) In two verses (VIII.3.23; 74.14) it seems to refer
to the same theme as in the second group above, since the verses talks of
flying steeds bringing tugrya to his dwelling (although there is no
direct reference to the sea much less to any crisis out at sea, and the deed in
the two verses is credited to Indra and Agni respectively rather
than to the Aśvin-s).
b) The Nighaṇṭu 1.12, significantly, gives the meaning of the
word tugrya as "waters", and the word is so translated by, for
example, Wilson, in I.33.15; VIII.32.20. [Note another
related word in VIII.19.37: tugvan "ford". That tugā
in later texts means the sap of bamboos, one of the favourite foods of the
elephant, may or may not be significant.].
c) In three verses (VIII.1.15; 45.29; 99.7) it
is part of Indra's epithet tugryā-vṛdh: "increasing (the
wealth of) the tugrya-s" or "favourable to the tugrya-s".
This is in sharp contrast to the hostile references to tugra in the
references to him in the Indra hymns in the oldest book 6.
It is clear that in the period of book 8, the word refers to naval merchants. It
is significant that Indra, who is hostile to tugra in the first group of
references in book 6, is particularly the patron and protector of the tugrya-s
in these references. Book 8 is the period in which Vedic culture
was at its most open and cosmopolitan, and undoubtedly, trade and commercial
activities were at their height: it contains the only friendly references
to dāsa-s (VIII.5.31; 46.32; 51.9), i.e. non-Vedic people or non-Pūru-s;
also, as J.C. Tavadia puts it, it “bears the most striking similarity to the
Avesta” (TAVADIA 1950:3); it shows the closest affinity to the Mitanni
people who migrated out as far west as Syria-Iraq (even sharing a personal name
Indrota, apart from a large number of -atithi names); and, most
significantly, it contains two words which have been identified as
Babylonian words, which indicate a flourishing trade between the Vedic Aryans
and the Mesopotamians (VIII.66.10, bekanāṭa
"moneylender", and VIII.78.2 manā "a
measure of weight").
I B. The ṛbhu-s
and the elephant:
The word ibha, as we saw, is an
early Rigvedic word for "elephant", used in later texts as a Vedic
word. It is the oldest word for "elephant", found from the oldest
book 6, which gets replaced by newer words in later texts. It also has cognate
forms in other IE branches. These cognate words can mean either
"elephant" or "ivory", or both.
But the significant part of the
cognate forms is that they are found in two variants: Vedic ibha- and
Latin ebur lead to a reconstructed PIE form *(y)ebh, and Greek el-ephas
(extended form el-ephant-) and Hittite la-ḫpa- lead to a
reconstructed PIE form *lebh. The l-element in the second form is
often tentatively attributed to a borrowing from West Asia of a West Asian word
with a prefixed definite article al- as in Arabic. The consideration of
the Germanic words (Gothic ulbandus, Old Icelandic ulfalde, Old
English olfend 'camel' with the extended Greek form), with meaning
transferred to "camel", leads to an extended reconstructed form *lebhonth-
or *ḷbhonth-.
In an Indian homeland hypothesis, the
elephant would be a very important animal not just from around the period of
the separation and migration of the Indo-European dialects, but from long
before that. The word would therefore not be just an old Rigvedic
word (as its distribution in the texts shows it to be) but a very much pre-Rigvedic
(and pre-PIE) word. That this is so is proved by the fact that the
word ibha- has no known etymological derivation: Pāṇini does not
give the etymological derivation of the word, and its meaning is given in his Uṇādi-Sūtra-s
(which lists words not derived by him from verbal roots) as hastī
"elephant". Usually this would be taken (in an AIT scenario) as a
word borrowed by incoming "Aryan invaders" from some local language,
but in this case (apart from the fact that it has cognates in other IE
branches) the word is not found in any non-IE Indian language.
Therefore, in this case, the only
option is that ibha- could be that rare type of Vedic word: a word so
old that it has already undergone a process of Prakritization in the Rigveda.
The logical pre-Prakritization form of ibha- would be *ṛbha-. If
the more regularly settled meaning of *ṛbha- was "tusk, ivory"
(as it is in Hittite laḫpa-, Latin ebur, Myc. Greek erepa,
and one of the two meanings of Greek elephas and Rigvedic ibha-,
the other meaning being "elephant" itself) the suffix in Greek elephantas
and the Germanic words (ulbandus-, etc., and the related Slavic words)
would be explained by the suffix -vanta/-manta: *ṛbha-vanta/manta
would be "tusker".
In the Rigveda, we have a related
word: ṛbhu-, which refers to a race of semi-divine artisans (identified
etymologically and mythologically with the elf of Germanic mythology and
folklore). As per Macdonell, the word ṛbhu- comes "from the root
rabh, to grasp, thus means 'handy', 'dexterous'" (MACDONELL
1897:133). The root (due to r/l alternation in the Vedic
language) has two forms in the Rigveda, √rabh and √labh, both meaning the
same thing: √rabh: "to take hold of, grasp, clasp,
embrace" (MONIER-WILLIAMS 1899:867) and √labh: "to
take, seize, catch" (MONIER-WILLIAMS 1899:896). [A regular epithet of
the ṛbhu-s is su-hastah "deft-handed" (IV.33.8;
35.3,9; V.42.12; VII.35.12; X.66.10)].
The word ibha- ~ *ṛbha-
is thus also derived from the root √rabh,√labh: in
this case, we have an advantage over Pāṇini in the modern comparative
evidence of the word as found in other IE languages. This not only explains the
Vedic etymology of the word ibha-, it also explains the PIE etymology:
i.e. the l-element in the Greek and Hittite versions (and the
reconstructed PIE form *lebh-). [Note that ibha, also
derived from the meaning "handy, dexterous", thus actually has the
same sense as the later word hastin. This is ironic since the very
transparent descriptive etymology of hastin has often been used as a
rather pedestrian argument for it being a "new" word coined by
"invading Aryans" for a "new" animal encountered by them in
India].
It also explains the dual meaning of ibha-
in the Rigveda: ibha- "elephant" (*ṛbha- from √rabh,√labh),
ibhya "rich" (*rabhya, *labhya): the root √labh
is, in later times, regularly associated with profit, wealth and riches, and
the Goddess of wealth, Lakṣmī, is regularly depicted surrounded by
elephants (and even bears the names lābha-lakṣmī
and gaja-lakṣmī).
[The following points in respect of
the Rigvedic ṛbhu-s may also be noted, for whatever they are worth:
a) The ṛbhu-s are three in
number, and their respective names are ṛbhu, vāja and vibhu.
The word ṛbhu is "said […] also of property or wealth,
RV.iv,37,5; viii,93,34" (MONIER-WILLIAMS 1899:226), and is translated
as "wealth" in the two verses (IV.37.5; VIII.93.34)
by, e.g., Wilson and Griffith. Likewise, the word vāja means "strength,
vigour", and also "wealth, booty, prize", and also
means "a powerful animal" as a word for "horse"
- in a pre-horse environment in India, it could have indicated the elephant.
The word vibhu, for what it is worth, rhymes with ṛbhu, and
resembles ibha. [Note also the forms ṛbh-van and vibh-van
in the Rigveda, and the forms ṛbhu-manta and vāja-vanta
(both) in III.52.6 and VIII.35.15]
b) The two epithets of Indra, ṛbhu-kṣaṇ
and tugryā-vṛdh, are used together in VIII.45.29.
c) The ṛbhu-s are said to have
fashioned the steeds of Indra. In IV.37.4, a hymn to the ṛbhu-s, Indra's "horses" (i.e.
vehicles) are said to be fat and corpulent (pīvo-aśva), a phrase
used nowhere else. In all (admittedly) later mythology, the vehicle of Indra
is the elephant].
There can be no doubt, therefore,
that:
1. the word ibha- in the
Rigveda means "elephant/ivory".
2. The word is an Old Rigvedic
and even a proto-Indo-European
word.
3. The elephant is a very important
animal in the Rigveda, and an integral part of the Vedic culture, from the
period of the Old Books, which, as pointed out in the beginning of this
article, pertain to a period, as demonstrable from the evidence in the Rigveda
itself, before the separation of the proto-Mitanni and
proto-Iranian people (and even the proto-Greek, proto-Albanian and
proto-Armenian people) from the Vedic Aryans.
[To speculate: the word *ṛbha/*ḷbha,
from the root *labh/*rabh, may have been carried by the early migrants of
the proto-Sinhalese language (along with many other archaic words like watura,
"water") into Sri Lanka, maybe in the form *aliba or *aluva.
The words for elephant in Sinhalese are atha (fem. athini,
therefore obviously the equivalent of Vedic hastin), iba
(Rigvedic ibha) and ali/aliya (used for tusk-less
elephants: unlike Africa, India and southeast Asia, a majority of the elephants
in Sri Lanka, almost 95% for unknown reasons, are tusk-less. Could ali/aliya
be derived from *aliba, minus the iba "tusk"? The word aḷuwa
in Sinhalese is the post to which an elephant is tied (the cerebral l
in the word makes no difference since in most languages south of the Vindhyas,
including Marathi, Sanskrit dental l rather than ḍ
becomes cerebral ḷ). Curiously, the traditional elephant-training
community in Sri Lanka is called paṇikkar: connect with the reference
referred to earlier, in VI.20.4, which talks about Indra driving away the
paṇi-s (i.e.traders, merchants) for, or from, daśoṇi].
Nevertheless, let us, in the next three sections, examine, independently
of the above evidence, the case for the African elephant (and the
"Syrian" elephant), versus the case for the Indian elephant, as the
elephant known to the proto-Indo-Europeans in their Original Homeland.
Section II. The case for the African elephant in a Steppe
Homeland.
Let us first take up the case for the
African elephant in a Steppe Homeland around 3000 BCE. As the geographical
locations of the two places suggest, this is a pretty tall proposition. The
only safe alternative for advocates of the Steppe Homeland theory is to
completely ignore the evidence for the PIE elephant and act as if it simply
does not exist at all. This is what most articles and discussions on the
Steppe Homeland theory actually do.
But when scholars trying or feigning
to be truly scholarly find themselves compelled to actually deal with the
evidence, they do so in any one of two ways:
Alternative 1. By isolating the different IE words for
"elephant" and dealing with them independently as having different
origins in different areas in different periods of post-IE unity.
Alternative 2. By treating the PIE language speakers as
having acquired a "migratory word" or "wanderwort" for the
African elephant in the PIE Steppe Homeland itself during the period of PIE
unity.
Alternative 1: Václav Blažek, as we saw, postulates that
the different IE words for ivory/elephant were independently borrowed by the
different branches from different sources all leading back to the African
elephant. We have here a case of multipronged special pleading:
To begin with, as we have already
seen, Blažek tries to eliminate from the discussion the IE branches farthest
away from the influence of Egypt and Africa: viz. the Indo-Aryan and Germanic
(and Slavic) branches, by denying that the Rigvedic ibha- means
"elephant" at all, and that the Germanic (and related Slavic) words,
Gothic ulbandus- "camel", etc., have any relation to the Greek
and other IE words for "ivory/elephant".
Then he derives the three other words,
from languages (Latin, Greek, Hittite) which were historically in contact with
Egypt and North Africa in general, from three totally different sources:
a) to begin with, Latin ebur is
derived from "a late Egyptian pronunciation of Egyptian 3bw 'elephant'"
(BLAŽEK 2004:14),
b) the Greek elaphas and the
Hittite laḫpa-, both having the l-element in the names, are
derived, after a long and convoluted discussion (BLAŽEK 2004:15-19, involving listing
of the names for "elephant", and even "lion", in various
North African languages, tenuously connecting together various hypothetical
reconstructed forms of words, interspersed with confusing comparisons,
derivations, reconstructions and suggestions) as follows: "Accepting
the presented arguments and regardless of the concrete etymology,
Egyptian ỉbḥt (attested only in the late language, but certainly
older) can reflect *ʔǝ3bḥat = *ʔǝlbḥat. This form, borrowed in
the East Mediterranean substratal language knowing only open syllables (judging
by the Linear B script), should be remodelled in *ʔǝlǝbhat
vel sim. And just this hypothetical reconstruction is well compatible
with Greek ὲλέφᾱς < ὲλέφᾱτ(-ς). Hittite/Luwian laḫpa could be
borrowed from a source [unspecified and unknown] of the type labḥaw
or labḥat" (BLAŽEK 2004:19).
The elimination of the connection of
Rigvedic ibha- and the Germanic (and Slavic) words with these three separately
"borrowed" forms involves a great deal of special pleading:
1. To begin with, the whole of ancient
Vedic interpretation of the word ibha-, prevailing from pre-Paninian
times to the advent of the western Indologists, and including the
interpretation of many of the most prominent Indologists themselves (Müller,
Griffith, Wilson, Pischel, Geldner, etc.), is to be treated as a
"misinterpretation" of a word actually meaning "servant,
attendant".
2. The Germanic tribes, in the
camel-less South Russian homeland itself, are to be treated as independently
borrowing a word meaning "hunchback" from Hittite, and, carrying it
through their journey through camel-less territories into equally camel-less north-western
Europe, applying the name to camels!
3. All these separate words (ibha-,
ulbandus-etc., ebur, elephas-/elephantas, laḫpa-)
are to be treated as having no connection with each other (three of them being
borrowed from three different sources, and the other two being totally
unrelated to each other and to the words for "elephant/ivory", or
even having that meaning) and it is only a remarkable coincidence
that they happen to resemble each other in ways which allow for common
reconstructed proto-forms.
But, as we saw, ibha-
definitely means "elephant/ivory", and we can logically derive all
the words from a PIE root *rebh/lebh, in the form *ṛbha/ḷbha
(with an extended form with -manta/-vanta).
Therefore, the different words (in the
oldest attested languages belonging to six different, and geographically widely
dispersed, branches) can only have been derived from a common PIE word for
"elephant/ivory" in the PIE Homeland. Can this have been a PIE name
for the African elephant (and its ivory) in a Steppe Homeland, i.e. Alternative
2? Let us examine this step by step through the rest of this section:
Alternative 2: To begin with, the African elephant is found
as two species, the Bush/Savannah elephant (loxodonta africana) and the Forest
elephant (loxodonta cyclotis), both found in the sub-Saharan areas of
Africa. This elephant is geographically far from the Steppe region of South
Russia, and, what is equally or more pertinent, none of the names for the
elephant in the African languages of these areas even remotely resembles the
Indo-European names: most of the eastern African Bantu languages (Swahili,
Zulu, Sotho, Kikuyu, etc.) have words of
the type ndovo/indlova/indofu/ndovu/tlovu/njovu.
Another Swahili word is tembo. Most of the western African Niger-Congo
languages, likewise, have different words, which seem to bear some connection
with each other: e.g. Yoruba erin, Igbo enyi, Fulani ñiiwa.
Most of the Nilo-Saharan languages also have different words: e.g. Kanuri kamagin,
Dinka akoon. Any connection of the PIEs living in a PIE homeland in the
Steppes of South Russia with the elephant of Africa, or with its name, would
have to be through North Africa and West Asia.
However, it is claimed that another species
or sub-species of elephant was found, till 2000 years or so ago, in certain
parts of northern Africa (west of Egypt) as well.
This raises the following series of
questions: were there really elephants in North Africa (west of Egypt) in the
relevant period (4000-3000 BCE)? Were these elephants a major source of ivory
to Egypt and areas further east? Did a name for "elephant/ivory" in
these languages provide the proto-form for a common PIE name? Was the
importance of this North African elephant/ivory, and more particularly the
name for this elephant/ivory, of such far-reaching significance that it
"wandered" or "migrated" through North Africa or Egypt into
West Asia and thence as far north as the Steppe region of South Russia as early
as 3000 BCE, where it gave birth to a PIE name which, again, was of such
significance in the PIE culture that it was individually carried by all the
oldest attested IE languages (Rigvedic, Hittite, Myc. Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old
Church Slavic) into their respective historical habitats? [This last
question is the most important because it is to avoid this question that Blažek
tries to eliminate the validity of the Indo-Aryan and Germanic-Slavic names,
and to individually derive the Hittite, Greek and Latin names from different
sources in their respective historical habitats].
The case can be examined under the following heads:
II A. The Case for the North African elephant.
II B. The Iberian Evidence.
II C. Hannibal's
elephants and the elephants of Ptolemy IV.
II D. Egypt as the Conduit for the African Elephant.
II E. The Name of the African elephant.
II A. The Case for the North African elephant:
1. North Africa, in the context of the
distribution of elephants, means Saharan Africa: i.e. the northernmost line of
African nations (from the east: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and
Western Sahara; the countries west of Egypt are together also known as the
Maghreb) and the northern halves of the second northernmost line of
nations (from the east: Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania). The question is:
were elephants a significant feature of the fauna of (this) North Africa in the
last four millennia BCE? Many scholars insist that they were: "Elephants
once inhabited all of Africa, but today are limited to small regions south of
the Sahara (Scullard 1974:24). The most northerly African elephant population
is in Mauritania, West Africa (north of latitude 17˚10ʹ up to the heights of
Tijelat) (Scullard 1974:25, Krzyszkowska 1990:29). This population may
represent the remnants of elephant populations spread throughout North Africa
before the severe desertification of the Sahara (Scullard 1974:24), and attested
in classical times north of the Atlas mountains" (LAFRENZ
2004:34). [Note: the few extant elephants in southern Mauritania,
referred to above, became extinct in the 1980s]. Further: "Literature
on the Maghreb was inaccessible or nonexistent, and the area is
represented by few finds, but historical evidence from the Iron Age and
later suggests elephants roamed the Maghreb into the first millennium A.D.
These would have been the elephants Hannibal and the Carthaginians utilized in
the Punic wars (Gautier et al 1994:13)" (LAFRENZ
2004:36-37).
Is this in accordance with the facts? Before
examining (in section II C) the "historical evidence from the Iron Age and
later", the attestations "in classical times", and the elephants
of Hannibal, let us see the evidence of fossils in the words of Lafrenz herself:
"The earliest evidence for elephants in the northern half of Africa is
the subject of a comprehensive article by Gautier et al (1994). The
article was prompted by the discovery of an elephant skull in Nabta Playa, a
drainage basin in the south of the western desert of Egypt, located
approximately 100 km west of Abu Simbel [….] and dated to 'several tens
of thousands' of years before present. The authors compiled an inventory of all
Holocene elephant finds in the Sahara and adjacent Sudano-sahelian belt,
excluding worked ivory (see figure 18 for a map illustrating this
inventory)" (LAFRENZ 2004:36)
The map referred to above, figure 18 on p. 37,
shows that of the 28 elephant fossils of the Holocene (the period after
around 9000 BCE), 10 are well to the south of the
Morocco-Algeria-Tunisia belt, 3 arch slightly northwards into S. Libya, and the
remaining 15 are (4-5) in southern Egypt and (the rest) southwards along the
Nile into Sudan (ancient Nubia)]. Even here (in ancient southern Egypt), as
pointed out in detail by B. Adams, the elephant "had been hunted to
extinction by 3500 BC, in Early Naqada II times, an interpretation that fits in
with the disappearance of elephants from the rock drawings by 3600 BC",
and "the objects made of elephant ivory that we find in the famous Main
Deposit in the temple of Nekhen at Hierakonpolis" were "imported
through the town of Elephantine (present day Aswan) from further south in
Africa" (ADAMS 1998:50). "Transportation over a long
distance probably also needs to be envisaged to explain the presence of the two
elephants at Hierakonpolis. The overview of the Holocene found record of
elephants in Northern Africa by Gautier et al (1954) shows that no
other physical remains of this species are known from the Nile Valley in Egypt
and Nubia. The evidence for elephants in the Western Desert is limited to
the Early Holocene finds from Dakhleh Oasis and possibly the Fayum [both
within Egypt]; the remains from Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba represent Middle
Palaeolithic reworked fossils. The Predynastic inhabitants [of the Nile
valley] were familiar with the creature as illustrated by the depictions on
Predynastic objects and pottery for the most part datable to Naqada I-IIa"
(VAN NEER ET AL 2004:112-13). In short, not a single fossil is found in the
Maghreb after around 9000 BCE, except a few in southern Libya, but the
elephants were long extinct even in southern Egypt by 3600 BCE. There are
some prehistoric pictorial representations on stones in the north, but these do
not testify to the actual presence of elephants in that region and only show
that the artists were acquainted with these elephants found in the
interior of Africa to their south and earlier also in Egypt to their east. Even
about the elephant depictions in Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic times in
Egypt: "the standardization of these images suggests a symbolic
significance that may not be associated with their actual presence"
(VAN NEER ET AL 2004:113). [Predynastic Egypt is 5500-3100 BCE].
2. As in the case of actual elephant fossils,
the ivory used in Egypt also points to the south and not to the west (the
Maghreb): "The archaeological evidence for contact with the South is
certainly more prevalent than for any interaction with the coastal areas of
North Africa, and it is from the southern reaches that elephants and elephant
products were collected" (VAN NEER ET AL 2004:113).
Lafrenz also accepts that "much of the
evidence for ivory imports points to the south" (LAFRENZ 2004:39), and
gives plenty of details of this evidence (LAFRENZ 2004:38-41). As she notes:
"The land to the south from which elephant ivory came was known as Punt
and Meroe to the Egyptians and corresponds roughly to Somalia and
eastern/southeastern Sudan, respectively [….] tusks were shipped down
the Nile [….] Ivory was imported from the Sudan by way of the Nile
Valley or the Red Sea during the 18th and 19th dynasties (c. 1550-1186 B.C.)"
(LAFRENZ 2004:40).
Lafrenz is a wishful supporter of the "North
African" elephant (as a source of ivory): "another source of
elephant ivory in the late Bronze Age may have been North Africa"
(LAFRENZ 2004:42). But the data she gives is inconsistent with her conjecture,
and she can produce no evidence at all for her arguments (pp.47-48) from any
archaeological or historical source. In fact the only
"evidence" she can produce is one cited by L.G. Hayward (1990), the
scholar who "reconstructs" elephants in the 2nd millennium B.C. in
Libya, N. Algeria and Tunisia as a source of ivory in the ancient world, and
with whom she admits to being in agreement (p. 47), but she is compelled to
discount this sole "evidence": "It must
be emphasized that this hypothesis, advocated by L.G. Hayward (1990), is based
on seemingly shaky ground, according to Krzyszowska (1990:18,29)[….] Krzyszkowska
(1990) does not see North Africa as a source for ivory until the 8th century"
(LAFRENZ 2004:43).
What is this "evidence"? Hayward
"cites one of the obelisks erected by Hatshepsut at Karnak, which bears
the inscription 'I brought the goods of Tjehenu [Eastern Libya/Western Egypt]
consisting of 700 ivory tusks [….] numerous panther skins (measuring) 5
cubits along the back (and) belonging to the southern panther [….]'. Hayward
(1990:107) then proceeds to suggest the tusks 'must have originated further to
the west, in North Western Libya …. or, just possibly, south of the Sahara'.
How the tusks must have originated further to the west when the panther
skins in the same inscription originated from the south seems questionable.
Both the ivory and the panther skins could have been traded northwards from
south of the Sahara, as Hayward suggests" (LAFRENZ 2004:45).
Further, Lafrenz discusses (LAFRENZ
2004:45-48) the arguments for the possibility of contacts between North Africa
and the Aegean, and writes: "the subject is addressed by Knapp (1981)
who, after reviewing the above points in favour of such contact, flatly
dismisses the hypothesis as insupportable based on the available archaeological
record in North Africa" (LAFRENZ 2004:46).
All in all, no scholar is able to produce any
evidence for elephants, much less for elephants as a source of ivory in the
ancient world, in North Africa. Even if, contrary to all the evidence,
elephants are to be hypothetically assumed to have existed at all somewhere
deep in the interior of the Maghreb "with low population densities in
the Sahara [….] until the second and maybe even the first millennium
B.C., although the range was probably fragmented and gradually reduced to the
point of extinction by increasing aridity, deterioration of the environment and
human activities (Gautier et al 1994:7,16)." (LAFRENZ 2004:38),
it is only an academic issue: they, or their ivory, had absolutely no role
to play in history.
II B. The Iberian Evidence:
However, there is some very important evidence from a different source
which brings out some startling facts: the study and analysis of ivory found in
sites on the southern and western coast of the Iberian Peninsula (southern
Spain and Portugal) dating from around 3000 BCE. The synopsis at the beginning
of the paper publishing the findings of this study tells us: "A recent
review of all ivory from excavations in Chalcolithic and Beaker period Iberia
shows a marked coastal distribution - which strongly suggests that the
material is being brought in by sea. Using microscopy and spectroscopy, the
authors were able to distinguish ivories from extinct Pleistonic elephants, Asian
elephants and, mostly from African elephants of the savannah type. This all
speaks of a lively trade in the first half of the third millennium BC, between
the Iberian peninsula and the north-west of Africa, and perhaps deeper still
into the continent" (SCHUHMACHER ET AL 2009:983).
The examination covered "all ivory objects from the Iberian
peninsula dated from the Chalcolithic at about 3000 BC until the end of the
Early Bronze Age, about 1650 BC, in the southeast [....] 1060 objects
from 130 sites [....] restricted to the southern part of the Iberian
peninsula" (SCHUHMACHAR ET AL 2009:984).
All the sites (but one) are on the west coast of the
peninsula on the Atlantic coast, in south-eastern Spain and Portugal well to
the west of the Strait of Gibraltar. That one site, Los Millares, is on
the eastern tip of southern Spain on the Mediterranean coast well to the east
of the Strait of Gibraltar. The two areas show a marked difference in the
ivory found: "Whereas in Portugal are found a majority of African
savannah elephant in the early chalcolithic, in south-eastern Spain on the
contrary we cannot identify this type of ivory before the Early Bronze Age (end
of the third and first half of the second millennium BC). So the analysis of
ivory from various tombs from the metropolis of Los Millares revealed a
majority of Asian ivory (Elephas maximus). The situation in south-western Atlantic Spain,
on the other hand, coincides with the one in Portugal, where African savannah
elephant ivory can be found in the Early Chalcolithic. This speaks for the
existence of an Atlantic route of contact and exchange for the western part of
the Iberian Peninsula already in the first half of the third millennium BC." (SCHUHMACHER ET
AL 2009:992).
The above evidence shows that:
1. The western Iberian sites on the Atlantic coast have ivory from the
African Savannah (Bush) elephant from 3000 BCE, but this African ivory is not
found in the southeastern site of Los Millares on the Mediterranean coast till
around the end of the third millennium BC. In short: any African ivory that
reached the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula from (or
before) 3000 BCE till the end of the third millennium BCE was not
received from North Africa across the Mediterranean but from distant parts of
western Africa much further south via a western Atlantic sea-route.
2. At the same time, the site to the east of the Strait of Gibraltar on
the southeastern coast of Spain on the Mediterranean has ivory from the Asian
elephant elephas maximus from the earliest period. In short, ivory
from the Asian elephant was being traded by sea from as far back as at least
3000 BCE via a Mediterranean route from the east (which must naturally have
passed through the Red Sea and past Egypt).
The first point is reinforced by another kind of evidence, showing a marked
difference between the North-African-Iberian trade in the pre-Bell-Beaker
period (pre-2600 BCE or so) and the Bell-Beaker period (well post-2600 BCE):
"Another surprising result was the
identification of one of the Leceia pins and three other contemporary objects
from the Early Chalcolithic Portugal as ivory from the African savannah
elephant (Loxodonta a. africana). In 1977 Harrison and Gilman developed
a hypothesis on the ivory exchange between northern Africa and the Iberian
Peninsula, based on the work of Jodin and Camps (Jodin 1957; Camps 1960;
Harrison & Gilman 1977). They supposed this involved an exchange of
prestige-goods, African ivory and ostrich egg-shells for Iberian metallic and
ceramic productions (Palmela points, tanged swords, halberds, axes and Bell
Beakers). In fact, it appears that this kind of exchange really can be
demonstrated for the Bell Beaker period because of the quite large quantity
of such products of Iberian typology in northern Africa, along both the
Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.
Harrison and Gilman had already noticed the difficulties of applying this
scheme to the Pre-Bell Beaker Chalcolithic, commenting, '... no
characteristic Millaran or VNSP pieces have been found in Northern Africa'.
And they asked themselves, '... why were no VNSP channelled,
pattern-burnished copos (the so called Importkeramik) sent to
North Africa like the luxury ware of a later time (Beakers)?' But
nevertheless they argued that the hypothesis need not be discarded out of hand." (SCHUHMACHER ET
AL 2009:992).
The conclusion (that ivory in 3000 BCE being imported into western Iberia
from western Africa further south on the Atlantic coast, but not into
southeastern Spain from North Africa on the Mediterranean coast, indicates that
there was no trade between Iberia and the Northern coast of Africa in the
earlier pre-Bell Beaker period) is therefore confirmed by the simultaneous
absence of other signs of trade with the Mediterranean coastal region of North
Africa (in the form of Iberian products) till well into the Bell-Beaker period.
The earlier presence of Asian ivory (elephas maximus) rather than
African ivory (loxodonta africana) at the Mediterranean site of Los
Millares in Iberia even makes the authors wonder (before the receipt of
the evidence from the Portuguese sites) whether the "North African"
elephant may not have been a species of elephas after all (rather than loxodonta):
"In
a former article (Schuhmacher & Cardoso 2007), while still awaiting the
results from Portugal, we asked ourselves whether it would not be possible that
a species of Elephas, maybe E. iolensis [a species of elephas which
had existed in North Africa in pre-Holocene times and become extinct by 10000
BCE], survived much longer than supposed and evolved into the North African
elephant, extinguished in Late Roman times (Schuhmacher & Cardoso 2007; cf.
Todd 2001: 696 claiming a revision of the African Elephantidae). So in fact,
Northern Africa was populated by relatives of the Asian elephant, E. recki and
E. iolensis, until the Late Pleistocene, when Loxodonta africana spread into
Northern Africa" (SCHUHMACHER 2009:995)! [Although, as we saw, the
total absence of Iberian products in the pre-Bell-Beaker period sites
in North Africa shows that the place of origin of the Los Millares elephas
maximus ivory could not have been North Africa anyway]. In any case, the authors
concede: "of course we still cannot exclude an even more distant,
Sub-Saharan origin of this African savannah elephant ivory" (SCHUHMACHER
ET AL 2009:995).
So the ivory from Asia (i.e. from India) was already being
exported by sea around 3000 BCE, through the Red Sea and Mediterranean
sea-route, to areas as far west as the southeastern coast of Spain close to the
westernmost end of the Mediterranean sea long before any African ivory reached
these areas!
II C. Hannibal's elephants and the
elephants of Ptolemy IV:
As we saw, many scholars assert that elephants
were "attested in classical times north of the Atlas mountains"
(LAFRENZ 2004:34), and that the "historical evidence from the Iron Age
and later suggests elephants roamed the Maghreb into the first millennium A.D.
These would have been the elephants Hannibal and the Carthaginians utilized in
the Punic wars (Gautier et al 1994:13)" (LAFRENZ 2004:37)]
In general, African elephants are not
historically known to have been tamed: "The African elephant is larger
than the Indian form and can be tamed, although African elephants are seldom
trained" (ADAMS 1998:49). But "North
African" elephants, in full form as war elephants, suddenly appear out of
thin air in the historical record in the 3rd century BCE, in the descriptions
of two wars which took place in the region around almost the same time:
a) the Second Punic war (218-201 BCE) across
the Mediterranean between Carthage (on the northern coast of Africa) and
Rome, in which Hannibal, the military commander of Carthage, crossed the
Pyrenees and Alps with an army including 40 elephants in order to invade Rome,
and
b) the Battle of Raphia (in 217 BCE) near Gaza
between on the one hand the Seleucid king Antiochus III, of the Greek Seleucid
Empire stretching from the borders of India to Palestine in West Asia, and on
the other Ptolemy IV Philopater of Egypt, in which the Egyptian army had 73
elephants, as described by Polypius in his work "The Histories" 5.84.
Before these two wars, there were the Pyrrhic
wars between the city-state of Epirus in N.W. Greece and Rome, in which Pyrrhus
of Epirus used Indian war elephants against the Romans. But these two latter wars
are interpreted as featuring "African war elephants" used by Hannibal
(the military commander of Carthage) and by Ptolemy IV respectively. These
literary descriptions, in total defiance of all the negative osteological,
archaeological and the other literary evidence, are treated as
"historical evidence" for the existence of a "North African"
elephant as late as the 2nd century BCE, long after they would be universally
accepted as extinct in North Africa. This elephant is also suggestively
referred to as the "Atlas" or "Libyan" elephant, indigenous
to the Maghreb (i.e. the countries of North Africa to the west of Egypt: Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) and particularly to the Atlas mountains of that area.
These references have been the subject of
contentious debate among scholars for decades for the following reason: the two
wars refer to African elephants, but Indian elephants figure in both the
narratives in a prominent way. In the first case, while Hannibal is referred to
as having a troop of African elephants in his army, his own personal elephant
is a "Syrian" (Asian) elephant named Surus, and, in the second case,
the 73 African elephants of Ptolemy IV are confronted by the 102 Indian
elephants of Antiochus III (reportedly the only such confrontation in history).
And in both the cases, the Asian elephants are described in the reports of the
respective battles as being bigger and more ferocious than the African
elephants, which is why Hannibal's own personal elephant is an Asian one, and
why the African elephants in the battle of Raphia are reported to have fled in
terror from the Indian elephants. All this led to a belief in Europe (whose
inhabitants had little direct experience with elephants, much less any occasion
to compare the African and Asian elephants) to believe that Indian elephants
are indeed bigger and more ferocious than African ones, a belief that persisted
till the eighteenth century. However, after the eighteenth century, when
European colonists in Africa discovered that the African elephants are far
bigger than Indian ones, and almost untamable, the identity of Hannibal's (and
Ptolemy's) elephants became a matter of great debate and controversy. So this
phantom species of a "North African" elephant, smaller in size than
the average African elephant, was created.
The whole debate and controversy is about
whether the elephants in question were the African Bush/Savannah elephant (Loxodonta
africana) or the African Forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), the latter
of which is smaller in size than the former but it is only bones of the former
which have ever been found (in the remote past) in North Africa. Many scholars
have expended plenty of energy in supporting one or the other species.
However the debate has clearly gone off at a
tangent. The issue should have been whether the elephants used in these battles
could have been African Bush/Savannah elephants or African Forest elephants brought
northwards from the interior of Africa. Most of the scholars insist on
creating a totally different phantom species or sub-species, now
extinct, of North African elephant from the Maghreb and the Atlas mountains
area to the west of Egypt, smaller in size than the average African elephant
, which must have existed till the end of the first millennium BCE or the
beginning of the first millennium CE, and the debate is about whether this
hypothetical "Atlas" elephant was Bush/Savannah or Forest.
But no specimen of "Atlas" elephant
of this description has been found in the area from any period either before,
during or after the 3rd century BCE. Then where did these African war elephants
suddenly appear in North Africa in the 3rd century BCE? Surprisingly, the
origin of these African war elephants is a fully documented story:
"The military use of elephants was
millennia old in Asia. Greeks and Macedonians first encountered them in battle
during Alexander's campaign [….] the Ptolemies and other Hellenistic kings
considered these living 'tanks' as essential components of their armies.
Ptolemy I had acquired the nucleus of an elephant corps, possibly obtaining
some of Alexander's elephants following his victory over Perdiccas in 321 BC
and then capturing forty-three of Demetrius Poliorcetes' elephants and their
Indian mahouts at the battle of Gaza in 312 BC. The elephants and their mahouts
were, however, a wasting asset, as age increasingly eroded their numbers and
battle worthiness.
By contrast, the Ptolemies' Seleucid rivals
enjoyed ready access to Indian elephants and mahouts thanks to their good
relations with the Maurya rulers of north India. If Ptolemy II was not aware of
the potential significance of the Seleucids' Maurya connections, it was
certainly made clear to him when Antiochus I was able to bring fresh elephants
from Bactria to Syria in 275 BC just before the outbreak of the First Syrian
War. Ptolemy II had no choice, therefore, except to find and develop an
alternative African source for war elephants as well as train new mahouts. He
set about this task immediately after the end of the First Syrian War in 271
BC, and his successors continued to pursue it until the great Egyptian revolt
of 207-186 BC severed ties between Ptolemaic Egypt and Nubia". (BURSTEIN 2008:140-141).
This is actually recorded in "the
triumphal inscription Ptolemy III set up after the Third Syrian War in the port
of Adulis in present day Eritrea. The original inscription does not exist, but
it was copied in the 6th century AD by Cosmas Indicopleustes at the request of
the Axumite governor of Adulis. In it, Ptolemy III boasted that his army
included 'elephants, both Trog(l)odytic and Aithiopian', which he claims that
he and his father Ptolemy II 'first hunted in these countries, and having
brought them back to Egypt, trained for military use'. [….] Wild
elephants were hunted and brought back to Egypt for training from two regions:
Trogodytice and Aithiopia. The former term in Ptolemaic sources refers to the
African coast of the Red Sea and its hinterlands, and the latter to the Nile
Valley south of Egypt. Greek graffiti at Ramses II's great temple at Abou
Simbel confirm that elephant hunters hunted elephants using the Nile Valley
route" (BURSTEIN 2008:141). Burstein (BURSTEIN 2008:141-145) gives the
detailed documented particulars regarding these steps taken by Ptolemy II and
his successors.
So the African elephants used by Ptolemy IV
and Hannibal in the late 3rd century BCE, the simultaneous use of Indian
elephants by them in both cases also being well-documented (on Carthaginian
coins and Egyptian records of the time: see also CHARLES 2007), were not
phantom elephants from the Maghreb and the Atlas mountains as many scholars
confidently assert. They were elephants originally from areas to the south of
Sudan, brought northwards down the Nile, and trained for war by Ptolemy II and
III in the earlier part of the same century.
Logistically, also, the route (northwards)
down the Nile into Egypt through Sudan is the most obvious way for either of
the two species of African elephants from the south to be brought to the north:
the Forest elephants are found from the present day Central African Republic
(to the immediate southwest of Sudan) westwards and Bush elephants are found in
South Sudan, and even today a small isolated section is found in the
Gash-Barka area in Eritrea (far from the other Bush elephant populations of
Africa) to the immediate east of Sudan and constitute the northeasternmost Bush
elephants in Africa. These elephants are at least 400 miles away from their
nearest elephant neighbours, and it is possible that these elephants represent
the remnants of an ancient population brought northwards from further south for
breeding purposes by the Ptolemaic kings. The reasons they were bred in Eritrea
may have been because Eritrea is on the coast of the Red Sea, not far from the
Nile either, and it was convenient to get Indian mahouts, for their training,
by sea (bypassing the land routes controlled by the Seleucids).
[The only point which at all seems
to plead for a "different" variety of African elephant, and therefore
an unknown phantom elephant attributable to North Africa, is the supposed
"smaller" (than the Indian elephants) size of the African elephants
of the Ptolemies. But, this may be an exaggerated subjective opinion of the
Greek writers (as suggested by many scholars) who had been used to the myth of
huge Indian elephants: the flight of the African elephants may have been not
due to their smaller size but due to their relative unfamiliarity with warfare
in comparison to the Indian elephants (of the Seleucids) with their millennia
old history of warfare and the experienced training of their Indian trainers.
Or, as pointed out in the study of Iberian ivory referred to earlier, the whole
issue "seems to depend primarily on Punic and Roman images and literary
sources indicating that African elephants are smaller than Indian ones. [….]
As Sukumar says, however, size is not a good criteria to differentiate between
the different species, as even among living Loxodonta a. africana we can
observe a great variation in size depending on their living conditions (Sukumar
2003: 86-7)" (SCHUHMACHER ET AL 2009:993), and smaller or younger
African elephants may have been used for practical reasons, if the bigger and
older ones were more difficult to control.]
In
any case, one thing stands out from all this: the only African elephants historically
known (through the medium of Egypt) to West Asia and areas further north and north-west
"in classical times" and "in the iron age" were southern
elephants from the interior of Africa, and it is these elephants
(and not phantom elephants from the Maghreb) which were used in wars in the 3rd
century BCE by the Ptolemaic kings and Hannibal.
II D. Egypt as the Conduit for the African Elephant:
As we saw, there is no evidence for any North African elephant
which (or its name, or the name for its ivory) could have reached the Steppes
of South Russia either through southern Europe, through the Aegean or through
West Asia, either directly or via Egypt, in a period (pre-3000 BCE) where it
could have provided the proto-form for the PIE word for
"elephant"/"ivory".
Nor is there any evidence that the sub-Saharan African elephant
(or its name, or the name for its ivory) could have reached the Steppes of
South Russia either through southern Europe, through the Aegean or through West
Asia, via the Maghreb area of North Africa in a period (pre-3000 BCE)
where it could have provided the proto-form for the PIE word for
"elephant"/"ivory".
Then did the sub-Saharan African elephant (or its name, or the
name for its ivory) reach the Steppes of South Russia via Egypt
in a period (pre-3000 BCE) where it could have provided the proto-form for the
PIE word for "elephant"/"ivory"?
The fact is that elephants and their ivory play a minor role in the
history of ancient Egypt. The trail of elephants and ivory through Egypt is as
follows:
1. pre-5000 BCE: "Unlike the more or less contemporaneous
cave dwellings of France, Spain and Italy, however, the open camps of Egypt's
Late Paleolithic people have preserved no paintings or reliefs nor any of the
small works of sculpture and decorative art carved of bone, tusk or antler for
which the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe are deservedly famous. Their
failure to develop any effective graving tool, or burin, suggests that they did
not, in fact, work in bone, ivory or horn to any extent" (HAYES 1964:
68).
2. 5000-4000 BCE: Different isolated cultures came into existence
in Egypt during this period. Speaking about the "Neolithic Fayumis"
of northern Egypt: "The complete lack of any articles carved of ivory
is not only striking, but puzzling, since both the elephant and the
hippopotamus were common in the area and were hunted by the Fayum people, as
attested, among other indications, by a number of decayed hippo tusks found in
a pot and in one of the middens of Kom W" (HAYES 1964:96).
What ivory was found in the Neolithic Merimde culture (4800-4300 BCE) in
Lower (i.e. northern) Egypt was mostly in the rudimentary form of ivory tools
and implements: "Two or three hundred implements of bone, ivory and
horn were recovered from the ruins of the settlement at Merimda. Most of them
were used in the dressing and stitching together of animal skin [....] knife-like
implements [....] fine awls, sewing needles [....] ivory fish
hooks [....] disk shaped beads [....] ring-shaped bangles of
ivory" as also "an ivory plaque [....] possibly [....]
it was for mixing of colours" (HAYES 1964:110-111).
The Chalcolithic (i.e. with the use, for the first time, of
copper along with stone) Badari culture (220 miles south of modern Cairo, in
Central Egypt, 4400-4000 BCE) developed sharper tools, and some stray ivory
figures are found.
But all the ivory found in ancient Egyptian period before 4000 BCE is
restricted to small and almost isolated cultures in restricted parts of Egypt,
and certainly there was no outflow of this ivory out of Egypt into West
Asia and beyond.
Most significantly, the ivory throughout this period is probably hippopotamus
ivory and not elephant ivory. The elephant is rare in early Egyptian
history, and the hippopotamus is one of the most important animals in Egyptian
culture, art and iconography: the Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient
Egypt describes the very prominent faunal presence of hippopotami in sites all
over Egypt, from the Khormusan sites (53000-43000 BCE) (BARD 1999:11) to the
Epi-paleolithic sites (10000-5500 BCE) (BARD 1999:16), but elephants are not
named.
In
the site of Merimde (see above) for example, the "typical remains were
of small round buildings [….] some of the doorsills were made from the
shinbones of native hippopotami [….] their vertebrae and leg bones were
sometimes used to form a sort of pillar to support a roof". A unique find in a cooking
pot (which had escaped the devastation of most of rest of the site) revealed
"five nicely rounded, highly polished axe heads made from a number of
variegated stones, part of what appears to be a splendid ivory bracelet, two
small circular boxes also made of ivory and probably cut from hippopotamus
teeth, and an eroded ivory figurine of a portly hippo sporting what appears to
be the head of a gazelle or goat. Here, then, laid out in a domestic stew pot,
were some fine axes and various precious little objects cut from the ivory of
the most fearsome beast the Merimdan hunters ever stalked" (ROMER
2012).
3.
4000-3000 BCE: The record for the period from 4000 BCE is the same. Most
of the ivory used in the earlier parts of this period is hippopotamus ivory,
and the hippopotamus is an important figure in Egyptian mythology, art and
iconography: Predynastic pottery (3500-3100 BCE) depict "animals such
as scorpions, antelopes or gazelles, giraffes, hippopotami, and
horned sheep or goats" and "the pursuit with harpoons of hippopotami"
(BARD 1999:829). The 4th dynasty pyramid of Djedefre (Redjedef) at Abu Roas
contained "a small wooden hippopotamus" (BARD 1999:89).
The late Predynastic Cemetery (3250-3050 BCE) contained "a few small
carved animal figurines (dogs, lions and a hippoptamus)" (BARD
1999:100). The Predynastic burials at Armant had "two carved stone
hippopotami" (BARD 1999:164). "Many scenes in the temple
of Edfu show Horus killing Seth, the latter appearing in the shape of a crocodile,
a hippopotamus or a donkey" (BARD 1999:321). The excavations
from Tell el Rub'a (Greek "Mendes") revealed "several
fragments of cattle bones as well as a hippopotamus tooth"
(BARD 1999:602). At the temple of El Bahnasa (Greek "Oxyrhynchus"),
the main god was Seth, and the second most important was the hippopotamus
goddess Taweret with the head of a hippopotamus (BARD 1999:718). Even
so late as Ptolemaic times, in Qus (Greek "Apollinopolis Parva"),
"texts from the scenes in these ruins show Ptolemy XI harpooning hippopotamus"
(BARD 1999:801).
In
contrast, the elephant plays hardly any role in Egypt. The only prominent
presence of the elephant is in the 3700 BCE burial at Hierakonpolis (the
discovery of which was described as "unexpected" in ADAMS
1998:46) , and about this: "the objects made of elephant ivory that we
find in the famous Main Deposit in the temple of Nekhen at Hierakonpolis"
were "imported through the town of Elephantine (present day Aswan) from
further south in Africa" (ADAMS 1998:50). "Transportation
over a long distance probably also needs to be envisaged to explain the
presence of the two elephants at Hierakonpolis. The overview of the Holocene
found record of elephants in Northern Africa by Gautier et al (1954)
shows that no other physical remains of this species are known from the Nile
Valley in Egypt and Nubia. The evidence for elephants in the Western Desert
is limited to the Early Holocene finds from Dakhleh Oasis and possibly the
Fayum [both within Egypt]; the remains from Nabta Playa and and Bir
Kiseiba represent Middle Palaeolithic reworked fossils" (VAN NEER ET
AL 2004:112-13).
In
fact, the importance of the elephant in Egypt is represented by the word 3bw
(elephant) in the name of the island of (Greek name) "Elephantine" in
southern Egypt in this period (and possibly in the name 3bdw of Abydos
slightly further to its north, though this is disputed): this island came into
prominence in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE, but this had
nothing to do with any Egyptian cultural element (as, for example, an
elephant-God similar to the Indian Gaṇeśa: the deity of the island was,
rather, the antelope-goddess Satet): "It is unclear whether the
inhabitants of the early settlement at Elephantine were Egyptianized Nubians
[….] or if the site was already an Egyptian outpost [….] because of
its location at the northen end of the unnavigable cataract area, functioned as
a center for trade with the south. [….] The pharaonic name of the town,
which means 'ivory' as well as 'elephant', might well hint at what was traded
by the southerners with the Predynastic Egyptians" (BARD
1999:336).
Apart
from these few pieces of imported ivory in this period, it is ivory from the
hippopotamus that plays the major role in Egypt. As Krzyszkowska points out: "Strictly
speaking, usage demands that the term 'ivory' be reserved for the dentine of
elephant tusks alone, but a somewhat larger definition encompassing the dentine
of other large animals - hippopotamus, walrus, sperm whale - is gaining
acceptance […] By dynastic times, if not earlier, the elephant had
become extinct within Egypt proper. Elephant ivory was therefore an import
[….] By contrast, the hippopotamus was indigenous to the Nile, extinction in
the Delta occuring in the seventeenth century AD. It is unlikely
that the ivory of other large animals (e.g. walrus or indeed mammoth), attested
in northern Europe, ever reached Egypt [….] Even today, no systematic
study of Egyptian ivory exists: most published objects are described simply
as 'ivory' (and beyond this label may well lurk objects that are really bone).
This lamentable state of affairs seems all the more surprising since the hippopotamus
is amply attested in Egyptian art and iconography, and the tusks themselves are
easily recognized. However the poor record of interest and publication
hampers any attempt to discuss the development of ivory working throughout
Egyptian history. Changing sources, patterns of exploitation and use are
exceedingly hard to verify [….] By stark contrast, ivories from the
eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean have been well studied in recent years"
She reiterates this point repeatedly: "As indicated, hippopotamus
tusk and bone are both locally available in Egypt, while elephant tusk had to
be acquired further afield" (KRZYSZKOWSKA 2000:320-321).
In
short: most of the ivory used in Egypt throughout this period was hippopotamus
ivory, though there was some elephant ivory imported from the south
through the island of Abu (Greek "Elephantine") in southern Egypt. And
this was from the African elephant as well as from the Indian elephant
imported by sea through the ports on the Horn of Africa and then transported
northwards into Egypt through Sudan via the Nile. A more detailed study of
the Egyptian ivory artefacts, to identify the source of its ancient ivory, is
likely to reveal just this picture, since, as we have already seen, Indian
ivory, obviously passing through the Red Sea and past the Horn of Africa and
into the Mediterranean, was already being transported by sea as far west as the
southeastern coast of Spain already by 3000 BCE.
4.
3000-2000 BCE: In fact, it is only in the second millennium BCE, after the
Mitanni introduced the Indian elephant into Syria and through Syria into Egypt,
that there was a spurt of elephant ivory, both African and Indian, into
Egypt, and Egypt started exporting items of worked elephant ivory (from tusks
and unworked ivory imported from the south as well as from Syria). As
Kryzszkowska points out: "some general developments seem to be mirrored
in Egypt itself, such as a marked increase in elephant ivory in the middle
of the second millennium BC [….] (KRZYSZKOWSKA 2000:320-321): "in
Egypt the greatest exploitation of the New Kingdom seems to belong to the reign
of Amenhotep III and immediately after" (KRZYSZKOWSKA 2000:324). This
spurt in elephant ivory in the 2nd millennium BCE was a result of the
historical developments which followed the arrival of the Mitanni.
India
was the main source of elephant ivory in West Asia, and before the second
millennium BCE, there was no outflow of African elephant ivory from Egypt into
the outside world. In fact, as we saw, "Krzyszkowska (1990) does not
see North Africa as a source for ivory until the 8th century" (LAFRENZ
2004:43).
II E. The Name of the African elephant:
As we saw, Blažek derives
the Latin ebur from Egyptian 3bw or abu-,
and, through various reconstructed forms, the Greek elephas/elephantas
and Hittite laḫpa from other North African words.
1. First, let us take up the case for
the Egyptian word for elephant/ivory: 3bw or abu
(and the derived Coptic word (y)ebu). The Egyptian
language (with its descendant the Coptic language) constitutes one of the six branches
(Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, Omotic, Chadic) of the Afro-Asiatic
(formerly known as Semito-Hamitic) family of languages spread out over most of
North Africa and (Semitic) West Asia.
Since it was through Egypt that the
rest of the western world became acquainted with the African elephant, and the
Egyptian elephant came from the south, it is towards the south that we must
look for the source of this word. The entire trail for the elephant in Egypt leads
southwards: through the city of Abydos "elephant-mountain" in
Central Egypt and the island of Abu/Yebu (Greek Elephantinē)
in southern Egypt, the trail leads through Nubia (northern Sudan) into the eastern
and coastal areas of the Horn of Africa (present-day Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia,
Ethiopia). This is the area of the Cushitic languages in the east, with the
Omotic and (Ethio-)Semitic languages to their west (i.e. in Ethiopia).
The East Cushitic words for elephant
are: "East
Cushitic *ʔarb- 'elephant': Somali arba, Rendille arab,
Arbore arab, Dasenech 'arab, Elmolo árap, Oromo arba,
Konso arpa, D'irayta arp, Burji árba, Dullay arap-ka"
(BLAŽEK 2004: 15). [the words for ivory are
generally "elephant-tooth", e.g. Oromo arba
"elephant", ilkan arba "ivory"]. It is
also found in the Mbugu language further south (in Tanzania), considered to a
mixed register language with Cushitic vocabulary and Bantu grammar, with loss
of b: "S.Cush. *'ara > Mbugu áro 'large
herbivore elephant'" (BLAŽEK 1994:198).
The
Egyptian word 3bw is clearly
derived from this East Cushitic word with subsequent loss of r: "The
Egyptian 3 substitutes *r here. Hence the original reading of the
Egyptian word 'elephant' should be *r[a]baw or *ʔ[a]rbaw [….]
The proposed reading is fully compatible with East Cushitic *ʔarb-"
(BLAŽEK 2004:17).
As
we saw earlier, this word is practically not found at all in the other African
language families (Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Khoisan). In a copiously researched earlier article
(1990, published 1994), Blažek has listed all the (well over a hundred) words
for the elephant in the Afro-Asiatic language family. Among the branches
of the Afro-Asiatic language family, it is not found at all in the Berber
languages of North Africa (the Maghreb). It is not prominent even in the adjacent
(Ethio-)Semitic and Omotic languages of eastern Africa (i.e. the Horn of
Africa), or even in the Central Cushitic languages of Ethiopia. The word is
therefore clearly special to the East Cushitic languages: outside this area,
the word seems to have diffused westward as a secondary word only into some of
the Central Chadic languages (of the Chad-Nigeria-Cameroon area) with
modification of r and/or b: "Buduma ambu, [….] Ngala
ánve, Makeri árfu, Gulfei árfu(r), Kuseri árvi, Šoe arfu 'elephant'"
(BLAŽEK 1994:198), unless the resemblance
is coincidental.
But
the Chadic words for "elephant" are also generally different: "One
of the most widespread words for 'elephant' in CChad and EChad is the form *bakin
> Mafa bikine, Gisiga bigine, Mofu-Gudur bégíneg,
Mefele bekine, Magumaz bikine, Musugeu bígnī,
Muturua bēgīnē, Gidar bḗkne,
Lame bìá'nè, (Sachnine) bàknày,
Peve bwoknai, Misme bakni, Dari bagnei, Musgu
(Barth) fégenē, (Karause) pékene,
Mbara pìkìnè, Vulum pèknè,
Kera bānà, Kwang bágini"
(BLAŽEK 1994:197). Further: "The
most widespread Chadic word for 'elephant', reconstructed as *gyiwan
(Newman 1977, 25) on the basis (W) Hausa gīwā, Gwandora gyuwo,
Montol kān, SBauci: Seya gìwɨ, Bade gìyànw-an,
Duwai gīwɨn; (C) Vizik giwan, Wandala guwè,
Glavda gunà, Zeghwana gwinè, Gava gwunà,
Nakatsa gwona, Paduko gwihana, Lamang gwɨyan, Hidkala gìwàn,
Hide gwɨyɨn, Mora gɨwe; (E) Mubi gàwyàn"
(BLAŽEK 1994:198-199). Another word for
"'elephant' in CChad: Zulgo mbele, Mada mbile,
Hurzo, Moreme, Gwendele mbelele, Uldene, Muyang mbele"
(BLAŽEK 1994:197). And also, in Western and
Central Chadic, we have: "Hausa torō 'giant male elephant' [….]
(C) Musgu (Röder) tauraga, Muskun tàwràkà,
Baldamu turogo 'elephant'" (BLAŽEK 1994:197). Chadic, and particularly Central Chadic,
languages clearly have a great many inherited or borrowed words for
"elephant". There is even: "CChad: Margi (Meek) pir
'elephant' (Illich-Svtyich 1966,26: Sem+Margi)" (BLAŽEK 1994:196).
Therefore,
the word "East Cushitic *ʔarb- 'elephant'" is clearly
special to the East Cushitic languages of the coastal areas of the Horn of
Africa, and diffusion of the word took place from this area. But even in these
languages, it may not have been the original word, since there is, apart
from the Somali word maroodi(ga) (besides arba)
"elephant" and fool-maroodi "ivory", a
word for the elephant which, in different evolved forms, is common to Cushitic
(East, Central, and South Cushitic), Omotic (North and South Omotic) as well as
(Ethio-)Semitic, i.e. to the whole of the Horn of Africa: "The
most widespread word for 'elephant', common for most of Cushitic and Omotic
languages, and attested in CCush: *źaxn- (Ehret 1987, 66)
> Bilin žānā, Xamir zohón,
Qwara, Dembea, Kemant žānā, Falaša (Beke) djáni,
Awngi [….] (Fleming) ziγoni [….] borrowed
probably in Ethio-Semitic: Amharic zähon, zohon,
Gafat zohuniš, Caha zäxwärä,
Ennamor zäxwära, Gogot zegā,
Tigriña zihol, [….] Harari doxon, Selti dähano,
Ulbareg dehanō [….] ECush: Afar-Saho dakāno,
Somali dagon, dogon, Sidamo dano, Hadiya dāneččo,
(Borelli) dané, Kambatta danieččoa,
(Leslau) zanō, Quabenna zanō, Tambaro
(Barelli) zanočo (Dologopolskiy 1973, 107; Leslau
198,125); Yaaku sogómei; SCush: *daxw-
(Ehret 1980, 166) > Dahalo dokomi, ḍokomi; Iraqw daṅw,
Gorowa, Alagwa, Burunge daw; SOm: Hamer donger, Bako dongor
(Fleming 1976, 318); NOm: Bambeši toŋgile,
Sezo toŋgili, Hozo taŋgil,
toŋgil; Nao, Maji dōr, Šakko
dorō; Kafa dangiyō, Moca dängao,
Šinaša dangeša, Anfillo dangeččo;
Zaise dongor, Wolaita, Gofa, Basketo, Caro dangarsā, Zala, Kullo dangarsa,
Doko dangars [….] Janjero zaknō, Kačama,
Koyra zākkā, Gofa (Fleming) zakkɨ, Ganjule zakka.
The possibilities that the same root existed in Beja is not excluded either.[….]
we have here a unique pan-Cushitic - Omotic isogloss" (BLAŽEK 1994:199).
Significantly,
even in Egypt, the earlier word 3bw is almost replaced by a new
word dnhr in Ptolemaic times. This word is clearly derived from
the Omotic words just noted (Zaise dongor, Wolaita, Gofa, Basketo,
Caro dangarsā, Zala, Kullo dangarsa, Doko dangars),
and this replacement takes place in tandem with the import of African elephants
from the south by the Ptolemies already described earlier.
So
what is the origin of the somewhat isolated East Cushitic form "*ʔarb-
'elephant'"? Significantly, this word emanated from the coastal areas
of the Horn of Africa, which guard the entrance from the Indian Ocean to the
Red Sea, and which have always been the first port of halt for ships from India
sailing into the Red Sea, and the place from where goods from the East have
always been downloaded for transport via the Nile to Egypt. We have
already seen earlier, in our examination of the Iberian evidence, that Indian
ivory was being exported by sea all the way to the southeastern coast of Iberia
as far back as 3000 BCE. And the ports on the Horn of Africa would
naturally be an early halt for these ships on their way through the Red Sea
into the Mediterranean.
The
Egyptian 3bw/abu is derived from the early East
Cushitic form "*ʔarb- 'elephant'": "the
original reading of the Egyptian word 'elephant' should be *r[a]baw or *ʔ[a]rbaw
[….] The proposed reading is fully compatible with East Cushitic
*ʔarb-" (BLAŽEK 2004:17), and
both are clearly derived from the PIE word *ḷbha-/*ṛbha-, like
the other early Indo-European words for "elephant": Vedic ibha-,
Hittite laḫpa-, Greek erepa/elepha-,
Latin ebur < *erbo/*erbu (with
metathesis of r, which would not have been possible if the
Latin word had been derived from the Egyptian word, which had lost the r
long before any Egyptian-Roman contacts), and (with the adjectival suffix -vanta/-manta)
the Germanic ulbandus and Slavic velibodŭ "camel".
2.
Secondly, Blažek derives Hittite laḫpa-
and
Greek erepa/elepha-, by two different, complicated and
circuitous, undocumented, and purely
hypothetical routes, from "North African" words for the elephant.
This
process runs into many difficulties:
a)
To begin with, as already pointed out earlier, this requires denying that the
Vedic word ibha- means "elephant" at all (and thereby
escaping the problem of having to demonstrate its African origin), denying that
the Germanic ulbandus and Slavic velibodŭ "camel" have any
relationship at all to any of the other words for
"elephant"/"ivory", and then deriving the three other words
(Hittite laḫpa-, Greek erepa/elepha-,
Latin ebur) from three different and unconnected sources, in
total defiance of the derivability of all these names from a common proto-form.
b)
Then, it requires finding African words for "elephant" which can,
however tenuously and dubiously, be cited as the proto-forms for the Hittite
and Greek words. To this end, Blažek takes the
Afro-Asiatic names for the elephant in the Berber languages of the Maghreb:
"Common Berber *Hiliw, pl. *Hiliwan 'elephant' (Prasse
1974:124-125): South = Tuareg: Ahaggar êlw, pl. êlwân (Foucauld),
Ayr iləw, pl. ilwan, Iullemiden eləw, pl. elwan
(Alojaly), Taitoq elw, pl. elwan (Masqueray), Ghat alu (R.
Basset); West = Zenaga idjit, pl. adjadan (R. Basset)"
(BLAŽEK 2004:15). These are in fact the
only African words which bear, in the forms *Hiliw, êlw, iləw,
eləw, elw, alu (also Kabyle ilu, etc.), any
resemblance to the Hittite and Greek forms, even if only in the initial l-element.
He then cites their plural forms *Hiliwan, êlwân, ilwan,
elwan, etc., to suggest similarity with the Greek form elephantas.
This leaves the middle and main element in the Hittite and Greek names, the
labial (p, ph), unexplained: unless the w
in the cited plural forms is shown to have changed into p/ph/b
in Hittite and Greek: "A hypothetical source of the Greek ὲλέφᾱντ should be sought either in the plural
*ʔiliban or in the determined form *ʔilib-Vn" (BLAŽEK 2004:18). Then he delves deeper into north-western
Africa, and cites examples from two of the Chadic languages of Chad and N.
Nigeria, to the south of the Maghreb, "West Chadic: Tangale labata;
East Chadic: Mokilko ʔlbi" (BLAŽEK 2004:15),
which actually contain the labial element, and the first also the ending
dental.
But,
unable to explain, even after citing these words, either the logistical route
or the linguistic process by which these Berber or Chadic words could have separately
entered Hittite and Greek, through different sources, he turns again to Egypt
for the Greek form: "Accepting
the presented arguments and regardless of the concrete etymology,
Egyptian ỉbḥt (attested only in the late language, but certainly
older) can reflect *ʔǝ3bḥat = *ʔǝlbḥat. This form, borrowed in
the East Mediterranean substratal language knowing only open syllables (judging
by the Linear B script), should be remodelled in *ʔǝlǝbhat
vel sim. And just this hypothetical reconstruction is well compatible
with Greek ὲλέφᾱς < ὲλέφᾱτ(-ς)" (BLAŽEK 2004:19).
Thus
he explains the Greek form to his own satisfaction. But this is at total variance
with his own equally (or more) "compatible" equation of
the Egyptian form (as the proto-form of the Latin word) with the East Cushitic
words: "The Egyptian 3 substitutes *r here. Hence the
original reading of the Egyptian word 'elephant' should be *r[a]baw or *ʔ[a]rbaw
[….] The proposed reading is fully compatible with East Cushitic
*ʔarb-" (BLAŽEK 2004:17)!
And
it still leaves the derivation of the Hittite word to some unspecified and unrecorded
hypothetical other source: "Hittite/Luwian
laḫpa could be borrowed from a source of the type labḥaw or labḥat"
(BLAŽEK 2004:19).
3.
As we have already seen, there is no evidence that the "North African"
elephant existed in the historical period; and, if it did, in some obscure
parts of the Maghreb, it certainly had no role to play in history. Strangely,
the only Berber word cited by Blažek which comes from
an area (southwestern Mauritania and Senegal) on the western
coast of Africa where elephants are known to have existed till they
became extinct in the 1980s, i.e. from the Zenaga language, is a totally
different word bearing no similarity with the other cited Berber words or the
Greek form: "West = Zenaga idjit, pl. adjadan (R. Basset)"
(BLAŽEK 2004:15).
4.
Also, there is no explanation why only two historically and linguistically distant
Indo-European languages (Hittite and Greek) should independently have borrowed
these *l-p forms for "ivory" from two different
sources. Why is it that none of the other non-Indo-European languages from the
civilizations of ancient West Asia, the Mediterranean area, or Egypt for that
matter, borrowed similar words for "ivory" or "elephant"
from the alleged African sources which were allegedly so prominent, ubiquitous
and well-represented that they separately gave us the Hittite and Greek
forms?
The
obvious explanation for the cited similarities is that it is the Greek word
which was the proto-form for the words for "elephant" in the Berber
languages (and perhaps in the two cited Chadic languages to their south).
The influence of Greek civilization over the areas of North Africa in the first
millennium BCE is well-known - even ancient Egypt came under the rule of the
Ptolemies of Greek origin - and none of the Berber words cited is known from
earlier periods, while the Greek Mycenaean word is known from long before.
Section III. The case for the "Syrian" elephant
in a Steppe Homeland.
Is it really necessary to look towards
either Africa or India to explain the PIE familiarity with elephants and ivory
in their alleged Steppe Homeland? Isn't there a place closer at hand which
could have been the source of knowledge of elephants and ivory to them in that
area?
According to most writers and
scholars, there was indeed a source of elephants closer at hand: in West
Asia, or in Syria to be precise (although this is not really cited by
Indo-Europeanists as the source for the PIE word): "The elephant was
still known in the 2nd millennium B.C. in West Syria" (BLAŽEK 1994:205); "Until the early
first millennium B.C.E. when it was hunted to extinction, a small species known
as the Syrian elephant roamed the northern Levant and provided ivory as well as
sport for the elite of the Near East" (MCINTOSH 2005:249); "the Syrian
elephant, known from pictorial and literary evidence to have existed in
historic times" (ADAMS 1998:49); "there is textual, artistic and isolated
osteological evidence for elephants in Syria well into the first millennium BC
" (MOOREY 1994:117)", etc.
The case can be examined under the following heads:
III A. The "Syrian" elephant.
III B. The Mitanni.
III C. The
West Asian names for the elephant.
III A. The "Syrian" elephant:
1. It must be noted that all the references stress the extinction
point of the presence of this "Syrian" elephant in Syria, and give
the impression that these elephants were an indigenous variety of elephant
which were always present in Syria till the point of time that they became
extinct. However, this is not so: in an area which is unique in the world in
having written records from at least the end of the fourth millennium BCE, there
is not a single mention of Syrian elephants until the 2nd millennium BCE,
and it is during this one millennium (the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE
and the first half of the 1st millennium BCE) that we suddenly get a flood of
references in the records from Mesopotamia to Egypt about the presence of these
elephants in Syria.
The first references from Egypt appear in the 16th century BCE: "In
the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries BC both Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III and
one of the latter's generals recorded hunting elephants in Syria, perhaps near
Apamea (Caubet and Poplin 1987:298). Soon thereafter, in a Syrian tribute scene
painted on the walls of the tomb of the vizier Rekhmire at Thebes, a very large
pair of elephant tusks and a small elephant more akin to the modern Indian than
to the African elephant, with tusks fully grown are depicted (Davies 1935:pl.
XII) [....] it seems likely that it was as babies that elephants were
given as gifts and that the tusks were a conceptual feature inserted by the
Egyptian artist (Winter 1973:264)" (MOOREY 1994:117).
The references from West Asia also start appearing from the second half
of the 2nd millennium BCE: "Tiglath-Pileser I (c.1114-1076 BC) and
other Assyrian kings down to Shalmaneser III (c. 858-824 BC) refer to the
hunting and killing of elephants in the Khabur region of modern Syria and on
the Euphrates in the area of modern Ana in Iraq, and to their trapping for
royal zoos (Barnett 1957:166; Mallowan 1966:419: Collon 1977:220). After this
the Assyrian records refer only to elephant tusks, hides and to ivory furniture"
(MOOREY 1994:117).
"Representations of the elephant in Syro-Palestine are rare. The
animal is shown on a cylinder seal and on a pottery cult object from Bethshan
in the late Bronze Age [...] A fragmentary elephant-shaped model or vessel was
found at Sinjirli in Hilani I, a building probably destroyed in the reign of
Asarhaddon (c.680-669 BC) [....] only part of the head with the small
ear of the Indian species, trunk, and one foot survive, with the foot of its
driver" (MOOREY 1994:118). Likewise: "Representations of the
elephant in Mesopotamia are very rare" (MOOREY 1994:119).
2. It is the same case in respect of the geological and archaeological
remains of elephants in Syria. Lafrenz, who frankly asserts her personal
inclination in favour of the existence of these elephants ["I see no
reason for assuming that Syrian elephants did not exist in the region before
the 2nd millennium" (LAFRENZ 2004:49)], admits that the
"Syrian" elephant is known, in both osteological and historical
record, only after 1800 BCE and up to around 700 BCE: "The
earliest osteological evidence for Syrian elephants are remains from Babylon
(c. 1800 BC) although it is unclear whether these remains are in fact from
the Syrian elephant and not the Asian elephant traded in from the east"
(LAFRENZ 2004:49). And: "the Al Mina 'tusks' [….] from the 8th century
B.C." indicate "the extinction of the Syrian elephant by this
time" (LAFRENZ 2004:55).
3. "Some scholars (e.g. Miller 1986)
believe the Syrian elephant may have been introduced into the region"
not only because of the "dearth of evidence for it before the
2nd millennium" (LAFRENZ 2004:49), but also because of "the
small size of the population described by the Egyptian and Assyrian historical
sources (cf. Krzyszkowska 1990:15; Miller 1986:29-30: Winter
1973:267-268; Hayward 1990:103; Collon 1977)" (LAFRENZ 2004:49), and
because (during its short history) it is restricted only to a small
geographical area in Syria and borderline areas of Turkey.
Further: "It has been argued that the 'Syrian' elephants had not
been in Syria since the migration of the Indian elephant from Africa in the
Pleistocene, but had been subsequently reintroduced as a stocked herd,
artificially transplanted from somewhere to the East (Winter 1973:266-7) [....]
Winter (1973) particularly has argued that the absence of ivory in the first
quarter of the second millennium BC as a recorded commodity in trade across
Syria, and down the Euphrates, when it was certainly being traded up the
gulf from the Indian subcontinent (Ratnagar 1981:111) may indicate the
absence of the elephant from Syria at that time. If this were so, it would have
been introduced sometime in the middle of the millennium since it first appears
in the Egyptian records of the earlier XVIIIth Dynasty."
(MOOREY 1994:117).
"The late Bronze Age Ulu Burun shipwreck also yielded a section
of elephant tusk [....] Collon (1977:222) reported that 'two of the
actual tusks (from Atchana) are still preserved in the Antakya Museum, however,
and they measure 1 m 60 cm in length [....] this is the average
length for the Indian elephant" (MOOREY 1994:118).
Therefore,
Moorey concedes: "The evidence for the existence of native elephants in Iran in
antiquity is tendentious and unconvincing... The so-called Syrian elephant
presents special problems" (MOOREY 1994:116), and Lafrenz discreetly
puts the matter as follows: "Suffice it to say for now that elephants
are known to have inhabited Syria during the Late Bronze Age, based on
osteological and historical evidence" (LAFRENZ 2004:49), all this
"osteological and historical evidence" being, of course, restricted
to the course of one single millennium and a small restricted area.
4.
What could be the reason for, or purpose behind, the sudden appearance of
elephants in Syria in the 2nd millennium BCE, and their newfound role in the activities
of the elites and royalty from Egypt to Mesopotamia? The answer lies in certain
elitist and royal practices in West Asia:
Arbuckle tells us: "Representing mastery over the
forces of nature as well as an opportunity to display the skills of a war
leader, royal hunts and the capture and display of dangerous and exotic
beasts have been regular parts of elite, particularly royal, practice in
Anatolia and Mesopotamia at least since the 3rd millennium (Coubet 2002: Foster
2002; Hamilakis 2003). Iconography, texts and faunal remains indicate that
elites regularly engaged in, and boasted of, the hunting of large game
including deer, wild boar, equids, and - occasionally - elephants, as well as
large carnivores including lions, leopards, and bears in the Bronze and Iron
Ages and used elaborate hunting expeditions to support claims to rulership (van
Buren 1939; Clutton-Brock 1992b:85; Collins 2002b; Foster 2002:285; Houlihan
2002)" (ARBUCKLE 2012:217).
"Archaeological
evidence confirming the presence of Syrian elephants (Elephas maximus)
between the Khabur river and Cilicia in the Late Bronze and Iron Age has only
recently emerged from excavations at Tell Sheikh Hamad, Kinet Höyük, and
Sirkeli Höyük (Vogler 1997; Ikram 2003; Becker 2008). If these remains represent
remnant wild populations, then their absence from pre-historic faunal
assemblages in the region is curious, perhaps suggesting that the 2nd
millennium elephant populations hunted by Neo-Assyrian kings were intentionally
stocked in order to provide truly elephantine prey for royal hunting
expeditions" (ARBUCKLE 2012:218).
Garrison
also details these elitist and royal sports in West Asia: "the banquet
stele of Assurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) [….] The animal hunts depicted on
the walls of several rooms of Assurnasirpal's North Palace are some of the most
well-known and often-illustrated sculptures from the ancient Near East. Both
these reliefs and texts from the Late Assyrian period make it clear that many,
if not most, of these hunts were staged affairs conducted in parks reserved for
such activity. It may be that some of the parks that were a focus of exotic
displays of flora also served as locations to house, display and kill wild
animals [….] A particularly evocative passage in Assurnasirpal's banquet
stele lists the following animals that he killed: lions, wild bulls, ostriches,
and elephants; the same passage notes the receipt of elephants as tribute and
Assurnasirpal's forming of herds of wild bulls, lions, ostriches and monkeys
(Grayson 1991a:no. A.O.101.30 84b-101)" (GARRISON 2012:41).
Three
points emerge from all this:
a)
Herding all manner of wild and exotic fauna in special reserved areas for
hunting as an elitist and royal sport
was the practice in West Asia right from the 3rd millennium BCE to the 1st
millennium BCE.
b)
These herded assemblages of fauna included "exotic" fauna like
ostriches, not native to the region.
c)
And elephants only appear into the picture well into the 2nd millennium BCE.
5.
But why do elephants appear into the picture in Syria only in the 2nd
millennium BCE? The answer is: because the Mitanni Indo-Aryans appear in
Syria only in the 2nd millennium BCE. And all the
references to the "Syrian" elephants in the "Egyptian and
Assyrian historical sources" refer to "Syrian" elephants only
in the Mitanni area, only in the Mitanni era and a small
period after that, and (at first) only in historical
contexts pertaining to the Mitanni.
What would one say if a group of Indian "scholars" gathered
together a huge amount of data on the widely spread cultivation of chillies,
potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, tobacco and pineapples in India from the
17th century onwards, their various local varieties, the different uses of most
of these ingredients in local dishes, and the trade and export of these plant
products from India (see the references to "Indian chillies" in the
literature of England of the period, e.g. in W. M. Thackeray's "Vanity
Fair"), and presented it as "evidence" that these were not
products originally introduced from the Americas (mainly) by the Portuguese,
but related "native" species and sub-species indigenous to
India (in spite of all the historical evidence to the contrary) since ancient
times? Amazingly, this is exactly what is being done, not only by amateur
writers in media articles and on the internet, but by a great many academic
scholars in academic papers, books and journals, in respect of the sudden
mysterious appearance of "native" elephants in Syria in the 2nd
millennium BCE (followed by their disappearance within a millennium)! These
"Syrian" elephants are suggestively referred to in countless academic
papers, books and journals as "native" elephants roaming Syria
"until the early first millennium BCE", presumably from
ancient times, on the basis of references from the second millennium BCE!
III B. The Mitanni.
The Mitanni kingdom in Syria of the second millennium BCE was a kingdom
with kings of Indo-Aryan origin ruling a (non-Indo-European language) Hurrian speaking
land: "from
1500/1480-1350/1340 B.C., the Mitanni controlled an area stretching from north-west
Iran, through north Iraq and the very north of Syria to the southwestern corner
of Anatolia (the western boundary in the vicinity of Maras, where the where the
bone samples hail for this present thesis). This region included the
city-states of Alalakh (Tell Atchana), Aleppo, Emar, Taide, Alshe, Ugarit (held
briefly), and the regions of Assyria (north Iraq) and Arrapha (Kirkuk region)
(Yener 2001; Kuhrt 1995:283-296). Two city-states which shall figure
prominently in the correlation of the ivory trade are Alalakh and Ugarit"
(LAFRENZ 2004:6).
The
chronology of the Mitanni kingdom is estimated to be from somewhere around 1500
BCE, but there could have been earlier colonies: "The first Aryans
[in West Asia] were the Mittanians and the isolated Aryan groups, mentioned
in Palestine and Syria by the time of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. The very first
mention could be a note in the Hattušili annals about Hanigalbat, the Mittanian
Western state, if it is not a later interpolation. If it is original, then
there had been a Mittanian state circa 1650 B.C. Next to come the 15th century
texts from Nuzi and Alalakh; and the Aryan names in Egyptian texts about
Palestine date from the same time [….] (BRENTJES 1981:145-46). In any case,
it is accepted that the Indo-Aryan speaking ancestors of the Mitanni people (or
kings) were present in West Asia centuries before their establishment of any
Mitanni colony or kingdom, and the Indo-Aryan elements in the religion and
names of the Kassites (whose recorded presence in West Asia dates from the
18th century BCE when they attacked Babylonia during the reign of Samsu-Iluna,
the son of Hammurabi) are attributed to proto-Mitanni influence (if the
proto-Kassites were not themselves a related branch of people).
In
fact, in this period, the history of West Asia seems to have been dominated by
Indo-European and Indo-Aryan-related groups: "Egypt's major competitors
in the Middle East around 1500 BC were Babylon (then ruled by the Kassites),
the Hittites in Anatolia, and the Hurrian-speaking kingdom of Mitanni in the
northern Levant, Syria and Assyria. According to Egyptian sources, the first
king to mount a large-scale and wide-ranging campaign northward was Thutmose I
(c. 1504-1492 BC) (Redford 1992:153-5). His troops reached the Euphrates in an
area the Egyptians called Nahrin and on the way back the king indulged in
hunting Syrian elephants in Niya" (HIKADE 2012:842). [Likewise:
"in the second mill. BC (the Egyptian pharao Tuthmose III hunted
elephants in the land of Niy, probably east of Aleppo) and even still in the
first millennium BC (the Assyrian king Tiglat-Pilesar I killed ten elephants in
the land Harran)" (BLAŽEK 2004:13)].
"Egypt
had expelled the Hyksos by the middle of the 16th century B.C. [….] A
large portion of Palestine came under Egyptian control, with the result that
Egypt shared a border for the first time with another major military power: the
Mitanni in the 15th century B.C. [….] Egypt formed an alliance with the
Mitanni in an attempt to curtail the growing presence of the Hittites to the
west, and a long period of peace followed under Amenophis III (ruled 1390-1352
B.C., low chronology) whose reign also signaled the beginning of the Amarna
period. The period is named after the site of Tell el-Amarna, where the next
pharaoh Akhenaten (1352-1336 B.C) based his distinctive social and religious
reforms" (LAFRENZ 2004:5).
All
the references to Syrian elephants in the Egyptian records contain direct or
indirect references to the Mitanni: "the wall painting in
western Thebes of the Vizier Rekhmire, who served under Thutmose III and his
successor and regent Amenhotep II. In this tomb, men from the Levant and
Syria bring various precious objects as tribute such as [….] and
a Syrian elephant (Davies 1944:pls.21-23)" (HIKADE 2012:843).
The Syrian
tribute scene depicts the Mitanni as these "men from
the Levant and Syria" sending tusks (and the elephant) as tribute.
Therefore it is clear that it was the Mitanni who
brought ivory and elephants into West Asia on a major scale. [Perhaps baby
elephants, which were easier to transport: " it seems likely that it
was as babies that elephants were given as gifts and that the tusks were a
conceptual feature inserted by the Egyptian artist (Winter 1973:264)"
(MOOREY 1994:117)]. This fits in perfectly with the fact that peacocks and the
peacock motif also appear prominently in West Asia along with the Mitanni. This was brilliantly presented in a
paper by Burchard Brentjes as far back as 1981, but the paper has, for obvious
reasons, been soundly neglected by most academic scholars discussing related
issues. As Brentjes points out: "there is not a single cultural
element of Central Asian, Eastern European or Caucasian origin in the
archaeological culture of the Mittanian area [….] But there is one
element novel to Iraq in Mittanian culture and art, which is later on observed
in Iranian culture until the Islamisation of Iran: the peacock, one of the two
elements of the 'Senmurv', the lion-peacock of the Sassanian art. The first clear
pictures showing peacocks in religious context in Mesopotamia are the Nuzi
cylinder seals of Mittanian time [7. Nos 92, 662, 676, 856, 857 a.o.]. There
are two types of peacocks: the griffin with a peacock head and the peacock
dancer, masked and standing beside the holy tree of life. The veneration of the
peacock could not have been brought by the Mittanians from Central Asia or
South-Eastern Europe; they must have taken it from the East, as peacocks are
the type-bird of India and peacock dancers are still to be seen all over India.
The earliest examples are known from the Harappan culture, from Mohenjo-daro
and Harappa: two birds sitting on either side of the first tree of life are
painted on ceramics. [….] The religious role of the peacock in India and
the Indian-influenced Buddhist art in China and Japan need not be
questioned" (BRENTJES 1981:145-46).
"The peacock was therefore
subordinated to Indra and connected with the thunderbolt, so that in some
Buddhist images Indra is sitting on a peacock throne. It is even possible to
trace the peacock as the 'animal of the battle' in Elam till the late 3rd
millennium B.C - if it is possible to identify two figured poles from Susa with
'peacock' symbols" (BRENTJES 1981:147).
"Yet
the development of the Andronovo culture did not start before 1650-1600 B.C. So
that we are forced to accept that the Indo-Aryans in what is now Iran,
especially Eastern Iran before 1600 B.C., were under the Indian influence for
such a long period that they could have taken over the peacock veneration. In
that case, they could not be part of the Andronovo culture, but should have
come to Iran centuries before" (BRENTJES 1981:147).
Note:
Brentjes is not an advocate of the OIT, he is only presenting some hard
facts - perhaps to be somehow incorporated by other scholars (even AIT ones) into
their narrative. His only point seems to be that, on chronological grounds
(since the developed Andronovo culture is dated by him from 1650 BCE), the
Indo-Aryans could not have been part of the Andronovo culture to the north of
Bactria, where they would still be on their way to India and still
basically unacquainted with Indian religious motifs. But that they must in fact
have been far to the south already in a much earlier era, and for "such
a long period" (even if they had not yet actually reached India in an
AIT narrative) that they were strongly influenced by India - even perhaps an
India not yet "invaded" and therefore still "non-Aryan" -
so that the Mitanni, parting from the other Indo-Aryans (still on the borders
of India) in "Eastern Iran" (Afghanistan) could have carried the
peacock motif with them to West Asia already by the early 2nd millennium BCE
(and to Elam even earlier, on their way westwards).
But
the evidence of the peacock is now confirmed by the evidence of the
"Syrian" elephant: denying the role of the Mitanni in introducing the
peacock and the elephant into West Asia on a major scale is like denying the
role of the Portuguese in introducing various American plants and plant
products into India.
Note added 22/7/2019: The fact that
the appearance of elephants and peacock motifs in Iraq and West Asia in general
coincides exactly with the presence and activities of the Mitanni in West Asia
is now confirmed by a third important factor: recent scientific studies have
confirmed that the Indian humped zebu cattle, domesticated in the Harappan area
since thousands of years, suddenly started appearing in West Asia around 2200
BCE, and by 2000 BCE there was largescale mixing of the Indian zebu cattle, bos
indicus, with the genetically distict western species of cattle, bos
taurus, in West Asia. Thus we have three very distinct animal species
native to India - the elephant, the peacock and the domesticated Indian zebu
cattle - appearing in West Asia exactly coinciding with the presence and activities
of the Mitanni in West Asia at the time, thus confirming that the Mitanni
people were migrants from India to West Asia:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6449/173
III
C: The West Asian names for the elephant:
As
we saw, there was no "Syrian" elephant native or indigenous to Syria:
the only elephants known to West Asia were Indian elephants and African elephants.
But
"Syrian" elephants were only a side-issue in our discussion. The main
issue was: did the Proto-Indo-Europeans get their common name for "ivory"/"elephant"
from non-Indian elephants? This, in effect, means African elephants.
But, whether African elephants or indigenous "Syrian" elephants, any
acquaintance of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with non-Indian elephants or
ivory (or, in any possible hypothetical, half-baked and far-fetched
modification of the case as an after-thought to all the points raised here,
even with Indian elephants in a non-Indian homeland), or, more
pertinently, with the name for elephants/ivory, if their
proto-IE Homeland was in the Steppes of South Russia, could only have
been through Egypt and West Asia (including the Aegean) via the Caucasus
region.
As
we saw, Blažek tries to derive the Greek and
Latin words separately from two totally different (and one of
them extremely dubiously reconstructed) reconstructions of a proto-Egyptian
form of the Egyptian word 3bw/abu, and yet has to
leave the Hittite word to a third hypothetical (undocumented and unnamed)
source. And all this after initially disqualifying the other Indo-European
words from the discussion (by rejecting that Vedic ibha- means
elephant, and totally rejecting any proto-connections between the old
Germanic-Slavic words for "camel" and the Greek word for
"elephant"). All this is untenable, and we will discuss here only
whether the cognate Indo-European forms and the reconstructed PIE forms for
"elephant" could be derived from a word transmitted from Africa (or,
far-fetchedly, from the east) through West Asia to the Steppes of South Russia:
1. In West Asia, the Egyptian word abu
is found as ab in the Biblical Hebrew of the Old Testament. The
reference in I Kings 10:22 (repeated in III Chronicles 9:21) goes: "once
every three years, the fleet of ships of Tarshish would come loaded with gold and
silver, ivory, apes and peacocks". The place to which this reference
(datable to around the 10th century BCE) alludes is obviously India:
a) It is the only place where one
could get all these products (particularly the peacock which is native to India
and parts of southeast Asia).
b) Many scholars have deduced that the
reference to "once every three years" also points towards
India: it would have taken roughly this period of time to travel to India by
sea and back in that period.
c) The three words in the references
which refer to "ivory, apes and peacocks" are shen-h-abb-im,
qoph-im and tukkiy-im. The first two words (abb
and qoph) have been identified with Sanskrit ibha
"elephant" and kapi "ape/monkey", and the
third (tukkiy) with the Tamil/Malayalam tokei
"Peacock", and the source of these three imports is therefore located
on the coast of south India or Sri Lanka.
Therefore the only reference to
the Egyptian word ab in West Asia, or anywhere outside the
Egyptian context, is in the Hebrew Old Testament (twice only) in a reference to
the export of ivory from India.
However, Blažek rejects this
identification of shen-h-abb-im as "tooth (of) the
elephant". He points out that the word ivory is found many times in
the Old Testament (e.g. it is found elsewhere in I Kings 10:18; 22:39; II
Chronicles 9:17; Solomon 5:14; 7:4; Ezekiel 27:6; 27:15; Amos 3:15: 6:4), but
in all the other references the word for ivory is merely shen
"tooth". So Blažek suggests that "The Hebrew šεnhabbȋm
is more probably corrupt for *šēn(wə)hābnȋm 'ivory and ebony' (West
1993:128; the source of ebony was Egyptian hbnj 'ebony(-tree)' (from the
5th dynasty) - see Spielberg 1907:131" (BLAŽEK 2004:14).
Ezekiel 27:15, for example, has the
phrase šen
w hebnīm "ivory and
ebony", but it is rather presumptuous to decide that the šεn habbȋm of I Kings 10:22 and II Chronicles 9:21 is
the same word in a "corrupted" form, against the testimony of
centuries of tradition. Ivory can be of different kinds, and hippopotamus ivory
is known to have been used in Egypt and Palestine on a large scale, so the
specification of "elephant tooth" in these two references would be in
line with the other products named along with it, all of which came from India.
In any case, if Blažek is right, this
means that the Egyptian word has no similar-sounding word (whether of Egyptian
or Indian origin) in West Asia at all for "elephant", since the
post-Biblical word in Hebrew (pīl) is different, so there can
be no way in which any form similar to the Egyptian word could have
"migrated" or "wandered" all the way to the Steppes of
South Russia, bypassing all the other areas on the way, and become (in some
linguistically unfathomable way) the PIE word which was carried away by so many
branches into their historical habitats.
2. There is a word for elephant which
was used in the Sumerian language: am-si. However:
a) The records make it clear that
there were no elephants in the Sumerian area or anywhere nearby, and that the
elephant was an import from the east.
b) The word am-si is
used also for camels (with or without a qualifier) and perhaps also for certain
other exotic animals: am indicates that the animal is a quadruped
and si indicates that it has a protuberance of some kind (hump, horn,
tusks, trunk).
c) The word am-si, at
any rate, is not the proto-form for the PIE word.
3. There is only one comparably
similar word in West Asia, and it means "ox". As Blažek admits: "Semitic
*ʔalp- continuing in Akkadian alpu 'ox, cattle', Phoenician ʔlp,
Ugaritic alp 'ox', Hebrew ʔέlεp, [….] 'ox [….]', Empire Aramaic ʔlpʔ
'ox', Soqotri ʔalf 'heifer'
[….] Masson 1967:82 mentions that none of the quoted words was used for
'elephant' or even 'ivory'" (BLAŽEK 2004:13). And
linguistically also, it cannot yield any proto-form for the different
Indo-European words.
4.
There is a common West Asian word for "elephant", though: "Arabic
fīl 'elephant' is related to its counterparts in other Semitic
languages: Syrian pīlā, Postbiblical Hebrew pīl, Akkadian (Old
Babylonian, Middle Assyrian) pīru(m), pīlu id." (BLAŽEK 2004:17). In fact, this word is
also found in various Iranian languages: Old Persian pīru-,
Middle and New Persian pīl, Sogdian pyδ,
Khwarezmian pyz. It is also found in the later Sanskrit lexicon
as pīlu, and in Armenian as p'igh. In fact,
incredibly, it is even found in Old Norse and Icelandic as fill.
As
all serious scholars are unanimous that there were no elephants in Mesopotamia
(and only falter in this conviction when talking about the "Syrian"
elephants already referred to, which seem to have been invisible through most
of their alleged "indigenous" presence in Syria) and that the
Mesopotamians received their ivory and elephants from foreign lands, there is
the strong likelihood that this word was also imported from outside. There are
various possibilities:
a)
Did they receive this word from Africa? There is one isolated word in a Central
Chadic language of Nigeria which can be compared to the common Semitic word:
"CChad: Margi (Meek) pir 'elephant' (Illich-Svtyich 1966,26:
Sem+Margi)" (BLAŽEK 1994:196), and
Blažek also draws attention to the
similarity. However, there is no earthly way in which this isolated word from
Nigeria could have been exported to West Asia and have given birth to so many
forms - not even if we connect together some other possibly similar African
words in the same area: "'elephant' in CChad: Zulgo mbele,
Mada mbile, Hurzo, Moreme, Gwendele mbelele, Uldene,
Muyang mbele" (BLAŽEK 1994:197).
b) There is also a theory that this Semitic
word is derived from the Berber forms of North Africa, preceded by the Late
Egyptian/Coptic definite article: "Lokotsch 1927:48 […. derives the
Arabic-etc. forms] from 'Hamitic', concretely Tuareg elu, plus
prefixed Egyptian article p-!" (BLAŽEK 2004:12). This "idea of the
prefixed (late) Egyptian article p- was first formulated by Hommel
(1879:381)" (BLAŽEK 2004:17).
This is an extremely far-fetched derivation:
that a Berber word should be combined with a Late Egyptian/Coptic definite
article by people in West Asia, including the Mesopotamians, and be widely used
as a word for "elephant", without there being any intermediate form
in Egyptian records, is rightly rejected by most scholars - if seriously
considered at all.
Even more ridiculous is the attempt to derive
the common PIE form from the Arabic word fīl preceded by the
Arabic definite article al-: i.e. al-fīl!
Among many other things, this definite article al- is found only
in Arabic: Late Egyptian/Coptic had pi-, Hebrew had ha-,
Amharic and Akkadian had no definite article at all, Aramaic had a suffixed -a'/-ā,
and South Arabian dialects (in Yemen, etc.) had a suffixed -n/-hn.
And the Arabic al- is found only after the 5th century BCE!
c) Finally, there is the eastern connection.
Where did the ivory/elephant in Mesopotamia come from? The evidence is very
clear:
"By
the late Early Dynastic era, as references to ivory figurines in the
pre-Sargonic texts (RTC 19, DP 490) from Lagash attest, ivory objects had begun
to reach southern Mesopotamia (Heimpel 1987:54). While these, in theory,
could have come from either Africa or the Indus region, it is generally
believed that the ivory was of Indian origin for the earliest representation
of an elephant in Mesopotamia, occuring on a cylinder seal from Tell Asmar in
the Diyala region of late Old Akkadian date (van Buren 1939:77; Frankfort 1955:
Pl. 161.642) (Fig.XII.5), is definitely of the Indian as opposed to the African
country.
Third millennium representations of elephants
in Mesopotamia are, however, extremely rare and aside from the Tell Asmar
seal just mentioned none of the other elephants can be taken as confirmed
(cf. Moorey 1994:119) [….] ivory was certainly reaching the
area. A text from the time of Gudea and Ur-Baba (RTC 221), which is a list of
items dedicated to a temple (?) preserves the earliest attestation of ivory (zu-am-si)
arriving in Mesopotamia in raw form, listing two pieces of ivory by length and
thickness (Heimpel 1987:78). The evidence of ivory import continues to grow
during the succeeding Ur III period. Most of our information comes from Ur, at
this time the main gateway for goods entering the region from the south and
east [….] in contrast to the pre-Sargonic texts mentioning the import of
finished goods in ivory, the craftsmen of Ur were in receipt of sizable
quantities of raw ivory, which they then fashioned themselves into
objects" (POTTS 1997:260-261).
After
giving the details of these imports of ivory, Potts concludes: "From
all the foregoing D. Collon has concluded that the ivory used in Mesopotamia
always came from the Indian elephant (Elaphas maximus) and that the animals
themselves were imported intermittently as well (Collon 1977:222). From the
discussion of watercraft in Chapter V it may seem unlikely that elephants were
ever brought by sea from the Indus region, and indeed an examination of the
imports of elephants in the Seleucid era, when they were used militarily,
confirms that elephants always arrived in Mesopotamia by land, generally
travelling from India via Bactria and the overland route through Iran (later
known as the Great Khorassan Road) [….] In fact, when the Seleucids lost
Bactria around 240 BC, no more elephants seem to have been obtained from the
region.
There is a fundamental difference, however,
between the desire for exotic objects of ivory in late third- and early
second-millennium Mesopotamia, and a wish to actually keep elephants in
captivity. Indeed, for the Seleucids the elephant was an important instrument
of war, and they used elephants in all of their major military campaigns. Their
initial stock of five hundred war elephants had been received by Seleucus I
(305-285 BC) as a gift from the Mauryan king Chandragupta in exchange for
bringing the war between them to an end" (POTTS 1997:260-261).
If
the ivory and elephants came into Mesopotamia from the east, the name also must
obviously have come from the east. And the word is indeed found in all the
Iranian languages (Old, Middle and New Persian, Old Khwarezmian, Old Sogdian,
and most modern languages from Pashto to Armenian, though Armenian is of course
not an Iranian language, only an Iranian-influenced one - as well as in the Sanskrit
lexicon, though admittedly not in the Vedic texts). The only logical conclusion
is that this is a word which originated in the Indo-Iranian area, and more
particularly among the proto-Iranians, in the north-west of India.
In
any case, the one fact which emerges from all this is that there is no
way at all that the African elephant or its ivory, much less an
African word for "ivory"/elephant", could possibly have
"migrated" or "wandered" from Africa, through Egypt and
West Asia, and over the Caucasian mountains into the Steppes of South Russia,
in a pre-PIE or PIE era, to contribute a common PIE word for
"ivory"/elephant" which was carried by all the earliest attested
Indo-European languages (Vedic, Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Latin, etc.) into
their historical habitats.
Section IV. The case for the Indian elephant in an Indian
Homeland.
The case for the Indian elephant having provided the common PIE name for
"elephant"/"ivory" in a PIE Homeland situated in India
is invincible.
The case can be examined under the following heads:
IV A. The Trail of Elephants and Ivory from India.
IV B. The Trail of the Name from India.
IV A. The Trail of Elephants and Ivory from India:
There is a clear trail of elephants and ivory leading from India to the
west by land:
1. Pre-5000 BCE: "An elephant tusk from level IIA at
Mehrgarh in Pakistan, c.5500 BC, grooved by artisans, is the earliest evidence
for the working of an Asian elephant's tusks (Jarrige 1984:24)"
(MOOREY 1994:116).
2. 4000-3000 BCE: "Asian elephants were domesticated at
least as far back as 3500 B.C.E. by the Harappan people of the Indus Valley"
(CHAIKLIN 2010:534).
3. 3000 BCE: "A seal and a gaming piece of elephant ivory
from Mundigak (III) in Afghanistan, c.3000 BC, are the earliest ivory artefacts
so far discovered outside India (Jarrige and Tosi 1981:39)" (MOOREY
1994:116).
4.
Early post-2500 BCE: "By the late Early Dynastic era, as
references to ivory figurines in the pre-Sargonic texts (RTC 19, DP 490) from
Lagash attest, ivory objects had begun to reach southern Mesopotamia
(Heimpel 1987:54). While these, in theory, could have come from either Africa
or the Indus region, it is generally believed that the ivory was of Indian
origin for the earliest representation of an elephant in Mesopotamia,
occuring on a cylinder seal from Tell Asmar in the Diyala region of late Old
Akkadian date (van Buren 1939:77; Frankfort 1955: Pl. 161.642) (Fig.XII.5), is
definitely of the Indian as opposed to the African country. Third
millennium representations of elephants in Mesopotamia are, however, extremely
rare and aside from the Tell Asmar seal just mentioned none of the
other elephants can be taken as confirmed (cf. Moorey 1994:119) [… but
...] ivory was certainly reaching the area" (POTTS 1997:260).
4.
Late pre-2000 BCE: "A text from the time of Gudea and Ur-Baba
(RTC 221), which is a list of items dedicated to a temple (?) preserves the
earliest attestation of ivory (zu-am-si) arriving in Mesopotamia in raw
form, listing two pieces of ivory by length and thickness (Heimpel 1987:78). The
evidence of ivory import continues to grow during the succeeding Ur III period.
Most of our information comes from Ur, at this time the main gateway for goods
entering the region from the south and east [….] in contrast to the
pre-Sargonic texts mentioning the import of finished goods in ivory, the
craftsmen of Ur were in receipt of sizable quantities of raw ivory,
which they then fashioned themselves into objects" (POTTS
1997:260-261).
"At this time (c. 2150-2000
BC) ivory from Meluḥḥa is mentioned only in connection with ivory bird
figurines (Oppenheim 1954:11, 15n, 24). Otherwise, in the body of texts from Ur
dating to about 2000 BC ivory is attributed to Dilmun (Bahrain), where it
had presumably been shipped up the Gulf from the Indus, where ivory was
plentiful on the sites of the Harappan period, both as tusks and as objects
(Ratnagar 1981:113)" (MOOREY 1994:118).
5. 2000 BCE on: By this time, there is now evidence for "an
ivory industry in Anatolia in the 'Assyrian Colony Period' (c. 2000-1750 BC) (Barnett
1982:32 ff; including a sawn tusk section at Acem-höyük); carved ivory in
Middle Bronze Age 'royal' tombs at Ebla (Matthiae 1979: figs. 69 ff) and carved
ivories in Palestine and Jordan at the time (Barnett 1982), even if some of it
is hippopotamus ivory" (MOOREY 1994:117).
"In the Aegean, elephant ivory is first securely attested in LBA
I (c. 1600-1450 BC) with quantities increasing in LBA II-III (1450-1200 BC; see
Krzyszkowska 1988:228-33)" (KRZYSZKOWSKA 2000:324).
As we saw earlier, the trail by sea leads much further westwards in an older
era than the trail by land: the examination of "ivory objects from the
Iberian peninsula dated from the Chalcolithic at about 3000 BC [....] brought
in by sea" (SCHUHMACHER ET AL 2009:984) excavated from the metropolis
of Los Millares in the south-east of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea "revealed
a majority of Asian ivory (Elephas maximus)", but African ivory
is not found here "before the Early Bronze Age (end of the third
and first half of the second millennium BC)" (SCHUHMACHER ET AL
2009:992).
IV B. The Trail of the Name from India:
As in the case of the actual elephant/ivory, the trail of the name for
the elephant/ivory can also be traced from India:
The original pre-Rigvedic word, as we saw earlier, can be
reconstructed as *ḷbha-/*ṛbha-. This word comes, like the word ṛbhu-, "from the root rabh,
to grasp, thus means 'handy', 'dexterous'" (MACDONELL 1897:133). This
root (due to r/l alternation in the Vedic language) has two forms
in the Rigveda, √rabh and
√labh, both meaning the same thing: √rabh: "to
take hold of, grasp, clasp, embrace" (MONIER-WILLIAMS 1899:867) and √labh:
"to take, seize, catch" (MONIER-WILLIAMS 1899:896). The Rigveda
name ibha- for the elephant thus has substantially the same semantic
meaning as the word hastin.
The original PIE form of the word: a) started out with the meaning
"elephant", b) increasingly came to be used specifically for
"ivory", and c) developed a new form for "elephant" from
the secondary word "ivory" with the adjectival suffix -vanta/-manta/-vat.
So Rigvedic ibha-, Hittite laḫpa-, Latin ebur,
Myc. Greek erepa- and Greek elephas/elephantas, are all directly
derived from the original PIE form.
As I have shown in my books, the first
IE dialect to leave the Indian Homeland was Anatolian (Hittite),
which migrated northwards from Afghanistan into Central Asia, and after
inhabiting the western parts of Central Asia (i.e. Turkmenistan) for a long
time, expanded westwards and southwards around the Caspian Sea into
northeastern Turkey and into the pages of history. The second dialect to
migrate northwards was Tocharian, which settled down in the eastern
parts of Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan) and adjoining areas through most
of its existence. Later, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic
and Slavic, in that order, migrated northwards into Central Asia,
and, over a period of time, migrated all the way northwards and westwards
into Europe in the First Great IE Migration. The Second Great IE migration took
place later via a southern route westwards from Afghanistan, taking the Albanian,
Greek, Armenian and Iranian dialects all the way to
southeastern Europe.
The Hittite, Italic and Greek
dialects took the PIE name for "elephant"/"ivory" all the
way to their historical habitats. As it would naturally be more likely that
these migrating tribes could have taken some ivory objects rather than actual
elephants with them through their migrations, they have all preserved the word
with the meaning "ivory". The Greek dialect, migrating through
a southern route, through areas which were slowly becoming acquainted with the
Indian elephant, also preserved the meaning "elephant".
Two of the north-westwards migrating
dialects, Germanic and Slavic, which inhabited the areas of
northern Central Asia for a period of time before moving on, transferred the
name of the "elephant" to the other big mammal inhabiting that
region, the Bactrian camel, and (it being possible that they even took some of
those camels along with them during the earlier parts of their westward migrations
across Eurasia) carried those words (later Gothic ulbandus, Old Icelandic
ulfalde, Old English olfend, Old Church Slavic velibodŭ)
with them into their historical habitats.
The word ṛbha-, carried (as we
have seen) by ships exporting ivory as far to the west as the southeast of
Spain and as early as the end of the fourth millennium BCE, was borrowed by the
languages of the people on the Horn of Africa, which must have been one of the
early stopovers for these ships, in the form "East Cushitic *ʔarb-
'elephant'", and this word was carried along the Nile into Egypt as
the proto-form of Egyptian 3bw "elephant".
The
word ibha- was already acquiring an archaic status, and, in the areas of
present day Pakistan and Afghanistan, a new word pīru/pīlu (from
the root pīl-, "to obstruct", no. 521 in Panini's Dhātupāṭha)
came into use particularly among the proto-Iranian sections of the area (the
word is found only as one of the words for the "elephant", pīlu,
in Sanskrit lexicons and in post-Vedic Sanskrit texts), and the word survives
in most of these Iranian languages: Old Persian pīru-, Middle and New
Persian pīl, Sogdian pyδ, Khwarezmian pyz, as well as in
Armenian p'igh. Along with the Indian elephant, the word travelled into
Mesopotamia: Akkadian (Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian) pīru (m),
pīlu (n). It replaced the older Sumerian word am-si with bilam.
It also replaced the older (Biblical) Hebrew abb with pīl. It
became fīl in Arabic. The Old Norse/Icelandic word fill is rather
difficult: it is explained as a word which may have been borrowed by the
Vikings (from Arabs?) during the course of their travels, but that is a bit
far-fetched, and it could equally well be one more IE survival, from a period
of time when the earlier name of the elephant was transferred to the Bactrian
camel.
The
trail of the elephant and its ivory, as well as of the earliest names for
"elephant"/"ivory" in the different oldest attested
Indo-European languages, as well as in the ancient civilizations of western
Asia and the Mediterranean, is clearly traceable to India and the pre-Vedic,
early Vedic, late Vedic and post-Vedic periods of Indian history. Let us return
once more to the geographical environment of the Rigveda, in respect of its
flora and fauna, to understand the fundamental nature of the evidence.
Section V. The Flora and Fauna of the Rigveda vis-à-vis
the PIE world.
As we saw, the Rigveda refers to the
elephant right from the period of the oldest book, Book 6.
To begin with, I will repeat what is
given at the beginning of Section I of this article: one thing that must be
constantly kept in mind is the early chronology and antiquity (both in
terms of date as well as of PIE history) of words and references found in the
non-redacted portions of the Old Books of the Rigveda.
In my earlier blog article "The
Recorded History of the Indo-European Migrations - Part 2, The chronology and
geography of the Rigveda", I have shown that the overwhelming mass of names, name types,
words and metres common to the Rigveda, the Avesta and the Mitanni records are
found as follows:
1. In not a single one of the 280
Old Hymns and 2351 verses in the Old Books 6,3,7,4,2: i.e. in 0 %
of the hymns and verses.
2. In 15 of the 62 Redacted Old
Hymns and 23 of the 890 Redacted verses in the Old Books 6,3,7,4,2:
i.e. in 24.19 % of the hymns but only 2.58 % of the verses.
3. In 425 of the 686 New Hymns and 3692 of the 7311 verses
in the New Books 5,1,8,9,10: i.e. in 61.95 % of the hymns and 50.50
% of the verses, and in all subsequent Vedic and Sanskrit texts.
In short, unless positive proof to the contrary can be produced in
respect of any particular word or reference, words found in the
non-redacted portions of the Old Books (2,3,4,6,7) of the Rigveda:
1. can go back beyond 2500 BCE at the least in terms of
absolute chronology, and
2. represent a period anterior to the period of
"Indo-Iranian" and Mitanni unity, and at least,
as demonstrated in Part 3 of my above article, contemporary to the period
of "South Indo-European" (i.e.
Indo-Aryan-Iranian-Greek-Armenian-Albanian) unity.
In this section, we will examine the geographical evidence in the
Rigveda, in
respect of its flora and fauna, under
the following heads:
V A. The Flora and Fauna of the Old
Books vis-à-vis the New Books.
V B. PIE Flora and Fauna of the North-west
and beyond.
V C. Soma, Honey, Wine and Aurochs,
Horses and Cows.
V A. The Flora and Fauna of the
Old Books vis-à-vis the New Books:
We have already seen that the elephant
is found in the Old Books of the Rigveda, i.e. in a period a) beyond 2500 BCE at the
least, b) anterior to the period
of "Indo-Iranian" and Mitanni unity, and even c) at least contemporary
to the period of "South Indo-European" (i.e.
Indo-Aryan-Iranian-Greek-Armenian-Albanian) unity.
A look at some important Rigvedic fauna of the Old Books vis-a-vis the
New Books is very enlightening. First of all, take the following eastern
animals which are native to the eastern interior areas of India but not
native to the north-west (i.e.
Afghanistan and beyond): the elephant (ibha-, vāraṇa, hastin),
the Indian bison (gaura), the peacock (mayūra), the buffalo (mahiṣa,
anūpa) and the spotted deer or chital (pṛṣatī/pṛṣadaśva).
Old Books:
II.22.1; 34.3,4; 36.2.
III.26.4,6; 45.1; 46.2.
IV.4.1; 16.14; 18.11; 21.8; 58.2.
VI.8.4; 17.11; 20.8.
VII.40.3; 44.5; 69.6; 98.1.
New Books:
I.16.5; 37.2; 39.6;
64.7,8; 84.17; 85.4,5; 87.4; 89.7; 95.9;
121.2; 140.2; 141.3; 164.41; 186.8; 191.14.
V.42.15; 55.6; 57.3; 58.6; 60.2; 78.2.
VIII.1.25; 4.3; 7.28; 12.8; 33.8; 35.7;
45.24; 69.15; 77.10; 87.14.
IX.33.1; 57.3; 69.3; 73.2; 82.3; 86.25,40;
87.7; 92.6; 95.4; 96.6,18,19; 97.41,57; 113.3.
X.5.2; 8.1; 27.23; 28.10; 40.4; 45.3;
49.4; 51.6; 54.4; 60.3; 65.8; 106.2; 128.8;
140.6; 189.2.
References to these eastern or Indian animals are found in every
single book of the Rigveda (and only the two underlined references in
the Old Books are in Redacted Hymns). Further, as we noted above, these
references in the Old Books pertain to a
period: a) beyond 2500 BCE at the least,
b) and they are anterior to the period of "Indo-Iranian" and
Mitanni unity, and even c) at least contemporary
to the period of "South Indo-European" (i.e.
Indo-Aryan-Iranian-Greek-Armenian-Albanian) unity. Therefore all these
eastern animals (and, as we saw in part 2 of this article, so also the eastern
rivers, eastern places, and eastern lake) are familiar to the Indo-Aryans in
the era before the common "Indo-Iranian" culture of the
New Books of the Rigveda.
And the references to
these eastern animals are not casual ones. It is clear that the animals and
their environment form an intimate part of the idiomatic lore and traditional
imagery of the Rigveda: the spotted deer, for example, are the official steeds
of the chariots of the Maruts; and the name of the buffalo (like that of the
bull, boar and lion) serves as an epithet, applied to various Gods, signifying
great strength and power. The Gods approaching the place of sacrifice to
drink the libations evoke the image of thirsty bisons converging on a watering
place in the forest. The outspread tails or manes of Indra's horses evoke
the image of the outspread plumes of the peacock's tail. The references to the
elephant have already been discussed earlier.
Compare these with the references to certain animals which are
originally native only to the north-west of India (Kashmir and areas to its
west, the NWFP and Afghanistan), at least in the context of Rigvedic
geography (for that matter, wild mountain goats are found in the eastern
Himalayas, and the Nilgiri Tahr is found as far south as in the Nilgiri hills
of Tamilnadu; and wild boars are also found in the south and east): the
mountain goat (chāga), the sheep (meṣa) and lamb (urā),
the Bactrian camel (uṣṭra), the Afghan horse (mathra), the ass (gardabha,
rāsabha) and the wild boar (varāha, sūkara). Most of the
names of these north-western animals, unlike the names of the eastern animals
that we just saw above, are found in the Avesta as well: maēša (sheep), ura
(lamb), uštra (camel) and varāza/hūkara (boar). [The
Avestan name for the ass (xara) is found only later in the Sutras (khara),
but there is an unexpected Central Asian equivalent for Rigvedic gardabha
in Tocharian kercapo]. All these are found in the Rigveda as follows:
Old Books:
III.53.5.23.
VII.55.4.
New Books:
I.29.5; 34.9; 43.6; 51.1; 52.1; 61.7;
88.5; 114.5; 116.2,16; 117.17,18; 121.11; 138.2;
162.3,21; 181.5.
VIII.2.40; 5.37; 6.48; 34.3; 46.22,23; 56.3;
66.8; 77.10; 85.7; 95.3; 97.12.
IX.8.5; 86.47; 97.7; 107.11.
X.27.17; 28.4; 67.7; 86.4; 91.14; 99.6;
106.5.
These north-western animals are found mentioned only in the New Books
and only in two Redacted Hymns in the Old Books, and therefore clearly
represent animals of the north-west which were unfamiliar to the Vedic
Aryans until they moved out into the north-west from their original areas in
the east.
It will be noticed that while the word meṣa for sheep has its
cognate only in Iranian (e.g. Avestan maēša) among the IE
branches, there is an "older" Vedic word for sheep common to Vedic
and other IE languages: ávi- (Latin ouis, Greek ówis,
oîs, Lithuanaian avìs, Old Church Slavic ovĭca, Anatolian ḫawa,
ḫawi, English ewe). This word is "older" in the sense
that it is found in languages which represent an "older" connection
preceding the "Indo-Iranian" phase, and it is a word not found in
Iranian. So, does this represent an older, "pre-Rigvedic", contact
with the north-west? The following is the distribution of the word ávi-,
with the meaning "sheep", in the Rigveda:
Old Books:
IV. 2.5.
New Books:
V. 61.5.
I.126.7.
X.26.6; 90.10.
It will be seen that, like the rivers of Afghanistan, the
sheep of Afghanistan are completely missing in the three Oldest Books
(6,3,7) and make their first appearance in the Rigveda only in Book 4,
which represents the westernmost thrust of Indo-Aryan expansion during the
period of Sudās' descendants Sahadeva and Somaka and the battle "beyond
the Sarayu" (IV.30.18) in Afghanistan. That the sheep in
the Rigveda are indeed the sheep of Afghanistan is confirmed by the reference
in I.126.7, which directly calls them "gandhārīṇām avikā":
the sheep of Gandhara.
Further, the word ávi-, and its derived words ávya-, ávyaya-,
and avyáya-, all signifying "woollen filters" (for filtering
the Soma juice), are distributed as
follows in the Rigveda (again, the words are totally missing in the three Oldest
Books):
Old Books:
II.36.1
New Books:
I.135.6
VIII.2.2; 97.2
IX.6.1,5; 7.6; 12.4; 13.1,6; 16.6,8; 20.1;
28.1; 36.4; 37.3; 38.1; 45.5; 49.4; 50.2,3;
52.2; 61.17; 62.8; 63.10,19; 64.5,25; 66.9,11,28;
67.4,5,20; 68.7; 69.34,9; 70.7,8; 74.9; 75.4;
78.1; 82.1; 85.5; 86.3,8,11,13,25,31,34,48; 91.1,2;
92.4; 96.13; 97.3,4,12,16,19,31,40,56; 98.2,3; 99.5;
100.4; 101.16; 103.2,3; 106.10,11; 107.2,10,17,22,68;
108.5; 109.7,16; 110.10.
The word ávi- (with its derived forms) is thus more regularly
used for the "woollen filters" (for filtering the Soma juice) than
for the actual sheep. The Rigveda also has the regular PIE word for
"wool" (with cognates in most of the IE branches), ūrṇa-/ūrṇā-,
as follows:
Old Books:
VI.15.16.
IV. 22.2.
New Books:
V.5.4; 52.9.
VIII.56.3.
X.18.10; 75.8.
Again, the word ūrṇa-/ūrṇā-, (like the sheep and rivers of
Afghanistan) first appears in Book 4. It is found only once, in a Redacted
Hymn, in the three Oldest Books. So for all practical purposes, all the
above words for "sheep" and "wool" (like, in fact, the
names of the rivers, lake, places and mountains of Afghanistan, as well as the
earlier examined "Indo-Iranian" word meṣa) are missing in the
three Oldest Books (6.3,7).
What is the logic by which "old" PIE words like ávi-
and ūrṇa-/ ūrṇā-, with cognates in other (than Iranian)
IE branches, appear only in the New Books or, at best, first appear only in
Book 4 which represents the westernmost thrust of Indo-Aryan expansion during
the period of Sudās' descendants Sahadeva and Somaka and the battle "beyond
the Sarayu" (IV.30.18) in Afghanistan? We will examine
this in next sub-section V B on the "PIE Flora and Fauna of the North-west
and Beyond".
Meanwhile, it may be noted there are many other purely native Indo-Aryan
(i.e. IE) names for many Indian animals in the Rigveda: e.g. siṁha
(lion), śiṁśumāra (Gangetic or river dolphin), sālāvṛka (hyaena),
kusumbhaka (scorpion), etc. There
are also some animal names which, in the Rigveda (or in the names of its
composer ṛṣi-s), appear only in or as personal names of particular persons
rather than in references to the animals themselves (though they appear as
animals in the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda): kaśyapa (tortoise), kapi
(monkey), vyāghra (tiger), pṛdāku (leopard). Other such purely
Indo-Aryan names which appear in the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda include śārdūla (tiger), khaḍga (rhinoceros), ajagara (python), nākra
(crocodile), kṛkalāsa (chameleon), nakula (mongoose), jahakā
(hedgehog), śalyaka (porcupine), kūrma (tortoise), jatū (bat), etc.
[Note: it is not intended to provide here a list of all animals
named in the Rigveda: this would include the names for many of the animals
common to India as well as Europe: the
wolf, bear, lynx, fox/jackal, deer/elk, bull, cow, hare, squirrel, mouse,
duck/swan, dog, cat, horse, mule, bull/cow, snake, fishes, various birds and
insects, etc., some of which can have multiple names in the Rigveda and the
other Samhitas (e.g "deer"/ "antelope": ruru, eṇi,
ṛśya, hariṇa, etc.). Generally, we will
discuss animal names relevant to the AIT/OIT debate. But the following Indo-Aryan
names of some birds, in the Rigveda (where specified) or at least in the
Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, may be noted: cakravāka (brahminy duck. II.39.3),
ulūka (owl, VII.104.22;
X.165.4), anyavāpa (cuckoo), kṛkavāku (cock), kapota
(pigeon, I.30.4; X.165.1-5), kapiñjala/tittiri
(partridge); kalaviṅka (sparrow), kaṅka/krauñca (crane), cāṣa (wagtail, X.97.13), śyena/suparṇa (eagle, multiple references), gṛdhra
(vulture, many references), śuka (parrot), etc.].
Most significant of all is the
important role in the Rigveda, and later the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, of some
plants and trees native to India and extremely important to this day in Indian
religion or commerce, all of which are found in these texts with purely
Indo-Aryan names: in the Rigveda we have śiṁśapa
(dalbergia sissoo, the sissoo or shisham or North Indian rosewood tree,
one of the most important Indian timbers to this day) and khadira (acacia
catechu, the heartwood tree) both mentioned in III.53.19 as
used in the manufacture of chariots; and śalmalī
(salmalia malabaricum, the silk-cotton tree) and kiṁṣuka
(butea monosperma, the flame-of-the forest) both mentioned in X.85.20
as used in the manufacture of chariot wheels. Śalmalī
is mentioned elsewhere also in VII.50.3, and as śimbala
in III.53.22, and the flame-of-the forest is mentioned again in X.97.5
as the parṇa tree. The two important medicinal species vibhīdaka
(terminalia bellerica, the belleric myrobalan or behra, one of the three
ingredients in the famous Ayurvedic tonic or medicine triphala churna) and
araṭva (terminalia arjuna, the arjuna tree) are mentioned in VII.86.6
and X.34.1, and in VIII.46.27, respectively. The aśvattha
or pippala tree (ficus religiosa, the sacred fig tree, the peepal)
is mentioned in I.135.8; 164.20; X.97.5. The
urvāruka (cucumis sativus, the cucumber, a very important Indian
vegetable) is mentioned in VII.59.12. The vetasa (calamus
rotang or rattan/cane, used in cane furniture) plant is mentioned in IV.58.5.
Six sacred grasses, darbha, muñja, śarya,
sairya, kuśara
and vairiṇa, are mentioned in I.191.3.
The Yajurveda and Atharvaveda mention
many more important Indian plants and trees with purely Indo-Aryan names: for
example, ikṣu (saccharum officinale, the sugarcane
plant), bilva (aegle marmelos, the bael fruit plant), nyagrodha
(ficus benghalensis, the banyan tree), śamī
(prosopis cineraria, the shami tree), plakṣa
(ficus infectora, the white fig tree), and pippalī (piper
longum, long pepper, an important spice), not to mention a very long
list of Indian medicinal herbs mentioned in the Atharvaveda, clearly the ancient
heritage of a long period of local medicinal traditions. In short, the flora
and fauna of the eastern interior of India form the heart of the Rigveda
(and this is amplified by the data in the subsequent Samhitas: the Yajurveda
and Atharvaveda), while the flora and fauna of the northwest make only a
very late appearance on the Rigvedic horizon.
V
B. PIE Flora and Fauna of the North-west and Beyond:
Al this brings into focus the utter
disconnect between the data analyzed above and the case which has been
presented by western Indologists all these years (or rather for the last more
than a century): e.g. (to take a random quote) Dyens talks about "some clues
regarding where the Proto-Indo-European languages had been spoken: the
Indo-European languages and words for certain flora and fauna (bears and beech
trees are well-known examples). By plotting on a map the natural environment of
these diagnostic flora and fauna, philologists established that the
Indo-European Homeland was a fairly primitive place in the temperate zone"
(DYENS 1988:4). This refrain, about the reconstructed PIE flora and fauna depicting
a "temperate zone" area, on the grounds that the reconstructed list
includes only "temperate zone" flora and fauna and not tropical ones
or peculiarly Indian ones, has been a recurring argument in spite of the fact
that even many prominent western Indologists and scholars from the earliest
days, who basically accepted the AIT, rejected it as illogical and plain stupid
(Weber 1857, Keith 1933, Dolgopolsky 1987, etc). As they reasonably pointed out,
any people travelling from one particular area to a new and distant one would
naturally (over the course of centuries) forget about the flora and fauna of
their original area if those were not present in the new area. The point is
that the reconstructed flora and fauna are found in both India and Europe, so
it cannot in itself indicate that the movement was from India to Europe or from
Europe to India. If the names of typical Indian flora and fauna are missing in
the IE languages of Europe, so are the names of typical European flora and
fauna missing in the IE (Indo-Aryan) languages of India.
In the particular example quoted
above, for example, the reference to "bears and beech trees"
as being typical examples of the flora and fauna which establish the Homeland
in the "temperate zone", illustrates the circularity and bias behind
the arguments:
1. Beech trees are found only in
Europe. The cognate words for "beech", from the reconstructed PIE
form *bhaHk'o-, are found only in the five European branches (Italic,
Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic), and even among them, the Baltic and Slavic
forms seem to be borrowed from Germanic (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:534). Greek and
Albanian have different words for "beech", and the forms which seem
to be derived from *bhaHk'o- mean "oak". The word
is totally missing in Anatolian, Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and Indo-Aryan.
And yet, a "beech argument" is being discussed since over a century,
claiming that a common proto-form for "beech" proves a
"temperate zone" European Homeland!
2. Bears are treated as indicators of
a "temperate zone" Homeland in the Steppes.
In actual fact, there are eight
species of bear in the world. Three of them are restricted to places outside
the historical IE areas: ursus americanus (the American black bear, to
North America), tremarctos ornatus (the spectacled bear, to South
America) and ailuropoda melanoleuca (the panda bear, to Tibet and
China). A fourth species, ursus maritimus (the polar bear) is restricted
to the arctic areas, but this does include Scandinavia. One species, ursus
arctos (the old world brown bear) is found all over the historical IE world
(including Europe, the Steppes of South Russia, Anatolia, and India). The
three other bears, ursus thibetanus (the Himalayan black bear), helarctos
malayanus (the Malayan sun bear), and melursus ursinus (the sloth
bear) are all found in parts of India: the third, in fact, only in India (and
Sri Lanka). So India has four species of bears, and the
"temperate zone" Steppe region has only one! Further,
the common PIE root *h2ṛetk- from which the common words for
bear are derived (PIE *h2ṛtkos-, Vedic ṛkṣa-,
Avestan arəšə-, Greek arktos, Latin ursus,
Old Irish art, Armenian ar, Hittite hartagga) "is
otherwise seen only in Skt. rakṣas- 'destruction, damage, night demon'" (MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:138)!
Unfortunately, such fake arguments about
"temperate zone" flora and fauna are made even today by prominent
participants in the debate, even as they exhibit full awareness of the fakeness
of the arguments. Michael Witzel, for example, tells us: “Generally, the PIE plants and animals are
those of the temperate climate” (WITZEL 2005:372), and argues that “we do not
find any typical Old Indian words beyond South Asia, neither in the closely
related Old Iranian, nor in Eastern or Western IE […] In an OIT scenario, one would expect ‘emigrant’ Indian words such as
those for lion, tiger, elephant, leopard, lotus, bamboo, or some local Indian
trees, even if some of them would have been preserved, not for the original
item, but for a similar one (e.g. English [red] squirrel > North American
[gray] squirrel)” (WITZEL 2005:364-365). He reiterates this argument later:
“the search for Indian plant names in
the west, such as lotus, bamboo, Indian trees (aśvattha, bilva, jambu, etc.), comes up with nothing.
Such names are simply not to be found, also not in a new meaning” (WITZEL
2005:373).
Note the multiple
fraudulence in the argument:
1. Witzel
argues that the absence of names of Indian flora and fauna in IE languages
outside India disproves an Indian Homeland (which, as we saw in this article,
is not strictly correct since names for many typical Indian animals like the
elephant, tiger leopard, lion, ape, etc. are found outside India). But
he clearly knows why the logic behind his argument (even if it is accepted as
factual) is fake, since, shortly afterwards, he rejects the counter-argument
that the names of “most of the IE plants
and animals are not found in India”
by arguing that this is because their names “have simply not been used any longer and have died out” (WITZEL
2005:374). So clearly, to paraphrase his own words, “most of the Indian plants and animals are not found in Iran or Europe”
and so their names “have simply not been
used any longer and have died out”
2. To compound
his fake argument with a lie, he further argues that “The hypothetical emigrants
from the subcontinent would have taken with them a host of ‘Indian’ words ― as
the gypsies (Roma, Sinti) indeed have done." (WITZEL 2005:364-365).
But he does not give the gypsy (Roma, Sinti) words for typical Indian flora and
fauna (demanded by him for the languages of Europe and Iran) "such as lotus, bamboo, Indian trees (aśvattha, bilva, jambu, etc.)"
or "such as those for lion, tiger,
elephant, leopard, lotus, bamboo, or some local Indian trees, even if some of
them would have been preserved, not for the original item, but for a similar
one", since he is aware that in actual fact these names are "simply not to be found, also not in a new
meaning" in these languages as well! Instead, clearly fully
conscious of the fact that he is lying, he tries to substantiate his claim with
ludicrous examples: “The Gypsies, after
all, have kept a large IA vocabulary alive, over the past 1000 years or so,
during their wanderings all over the Near East, North Africa and Europe (e.g. phral ‘brother’, pani ‘water’, karal ‘he
does’)” (WITZEL 2005:366)!
Witzel
further argues that many of these "temperate zone" words, in spite of
not being typical of the Rigvedic area, are found in Sanskrit, and some
more (though missing in Sanskrit) are found in Iranian: “It is theoretically possible
that these words belonged to the supposed
original IE/IA vocabulary of the northwestern Himalayas.
Even if we take into account that the Panjab has cool winters with some frost
and that the adjoining Afghani and Himalayan mountains have a long winter
season, neither snow nor birch are typical for the Panjab or the Indian plains.
Therefore, words such as those for ‘wolf’ and ‘snow’ rather indicate linguistic
memories of a colder climate than an export of words, such as that for the high
altitude Kashmirian birch tree, to Iran, Central Asia and Europe” (WITZEL
2005:373). His
point is that many of the common PIE words represent things which are not
typical "for the Panjab or
the Indian plains" (i.e. the Vedic area), and they are found not just in European
languages but even in Iranian languages, so how does this fit in with the
Indian Homeland theory? According to him, it fits in with the AIT in which the
"incoming Indo-Iranians" retained European or Steppe words till the
borders of India and the Indo-Aryans only lost them after entering India.
But the main trouble with Witzel is that he is, all the time,
answering an OIT theory which would make the Vedic/Sanskrit language, of "the Panjab or the Indian plains", the
ancestor of all the IE languages of the world.
But that (linguistically unsound) theory is not our theory, and
nor does it accord with the recorded data. The recorded data shows that the
Vedic Aryans, living in Haryana and further east, spoke a Pūru dialect (Vedic); while the speakers of the
ancestral forms of the other IE branches spoke various Anu and Druhyu languages
and dialects which were spoken in areas further west and northwest, and had
words (many of them in common with each other) for northwestern flora and fauna
(and doubtless many other items of vocabulary) peculiar to their areas but
missing in Vedic.
The proof
for this, in fact, is that many of these words are missing in the Rigveda or
its earlier parts, and only entered the Vedic language (or subsequent Sanskrit)
as the Vedic Indo-Aryans expanded northwestwards. More western words along the
same trajectory, in areas in which the Indo-Aryans never expanded (or expanded
only superficially) may reasonably be found in many other IE branches (including
Iranian) but not found at all in either Vedic, later Sanskrit or the
still later Indian languages.
The
chronology of appearance or occurrence of the names of flora and fauna follows
a distinct pattern:
1. Flora
and fauna peculiar to the interior of India (elephant, chital/spotted deer,
Indian bison, buffalo, peacock, lion, brahminy duck, arjuna tree, silk-cotton
tree) are found right from the Old Books (6,3,7,4,2). These flora and fauna would
not be likely to be found among the Anu-s and Druhyu-s of the northwest to
begin with, and would certainly stand very little chance of being retained by
the (Anu and Druhyu) languages and dialects after centuries of migrations and
settlement in distant areas where these flora and fauna are totally unknown:
note that even the Indo-Aryan Gypsy/Sinti/Romany lost the words for
these flora and fauna within a thousand years.
2.
Peculiarly "common Indo-Iranian" words for northwestern flora and
fauna appear later only in the New Books (5,1,8,9,10), or even later: meṣa/maēša (sheep), urā/ura
(lamb), uṣṭra/uštra (camel), varāha/varāza and sūkara/hūkara (boar), kaśyapa/kassiapa
(turtle), khara/xara (ass), jahāka/dužuka
(hedgehog), etc. These words represent the common northwestern vocabulary of
the New Books (or later) and the Avesta (or Iranian in general).
3. The much flaunted "temperate
zone" PIE words for flora and fauna of the northwest only appear in the
Rigveda in the New
Books (5,1,8,9,10), or even later:
a) As we
saw, "old" PIE words like ávi- and ūrṇa-/ ūrṇā-,
with cognates in most other IE branches, are missing in the three
Oldest Books and appear only in the New Books or, at best, first appear only in
Book 4 which represents the westernmost thrust of Indo-Aryan expansion during
the period of Sudās' descendants Sahadeva and Somaka and the battle "beyond
the Sarayu" (IV.30.18) in Afghanistan.
b) Witzel refers to the wolf and ice as "linguistic memories of a colder climate". As wolves are
found over most of India, this is an extremely stupid statement. As for ice
(and snow): ice
and snow appear in the Rigveda only in the New Books. The word hima, in
10 verses in the Rigveda (I.34.1; 64.14; 116.8; 119.6;
II.33.2; V.54.15; VI.48.8;
VIII.73.3; X.37.10; 68.10), means
"winter" (and winter is an all-India phenomenon, e.g. the derived
Marathi word for "winter" is hivāḷā, although notably the only reference in the
three Oldest Books is in a Redacted Hymn), and it is only in the very late
reference in X.121.4 (a reference to the snow-covered mountains
of the Himalayas or the northwest) that it means "snow", and in
another reference in a New Book, in VIII.32.26, it could possibly
refer to a weapon made of ice. Further, far from depicting "memories"
of a cold climate, in 4 of the references, the verses seem to talk about winter
offering relief from the burning heat of the Indian summer.
c)
The word bhūrja for
"birch", which Witzel refers to, is missing in the Rigveda, and
appears for the first time in the Yajurveda. Significantly, the name is well
represented in the Dardic, Nuristani and Iranian languages of the extreme north
and northwest: "in the Dardic languages of mountainous northwestern
India we have Phalura brhuǰ, Dameli brūš, Gawar-Bati
bluz 'birch' (Mayrhofer
1963:11.514-15); Waigali bruǰ 'birch'
(Morgenstierne 1954:238), Khotanese Saka
braṁja 'birch', bruṁjə 'birchbark',
Wakhi (Pamir Iranian) furz, Sanglechi
barež,
Shugni baruǰ 'birch', Os. bærz/bærzæ 'birch', Pashto barǰ 'birchbark
band', Tajik burz, burs 'juniper' (with semantic transfer)" (GAMKRELIDZE
1995:531-532). Again and again, we have this evidence of northwestern words entering
the Rigveda in its later parts (or in later texts) as the Vedic Indo-Aryans
expanded northwestwards.
4. The
Avesta has a vocabulary starting from the period of the New Books of the
Rigveda (as we have seen in detail in my earlier
blog article "The Recorded History of the Indo-European Migrations -
Part 2, The chronology and geography of the Rigveda"). But the Avesta
represents an even later chronological stage than the New Books, since by the
time of composition of the Avesta the proto-Iranians have moved out into
Afghanistan and are in contact with more western areas and with more western IE
words: i.e. with Anu words developed in common with the other Anu groups
(Greek, Armenian, Albanian to the west) and even local words developed in
common with, or adopted from, the Druhyu groups (Slavic, Baltic, Germanic,
Celtic, Italic, to the north). The development of common Iranian-Druhyu words (missing
in Indo-Aryan) took place in the snowy mountainous regions of Afghanistan
and Central Asia, and some of the words clearly reflect this situation:
Av. bərəz- "hill,
mountain" with cognates in Slavic, Germanic and Celtic.
Av. snaēzaiti "snows" (verb) with cognates in Germanic,
Celtic and Italic (and also Greek).
Av. aēxa "frost, ice" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic
and Germanic.
Oss. tajyn "thaw, melt" (verb) with cognates in Slavic,
Germanic, Celtic and Italic (and also Greek and Armenian).
Av. udra "otter" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic and
Germanic.
Av. bawra-/bawri- "beaver" with cognates in
Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Celtic and Italic.
Oss. wyzyn "hedgehog" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic
and Germanic (and also Greek and Armenian).
Oss. læsæg "salmon" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic and
Germanic (and also Armenian).
Av. θβərəsa- "boar" with cognates in Celtic.
Av. pərəsa- "piglet" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic,
Germanic, Celtic and Italic.
Pehl. wabz- "wasp" with cognates in Slavic, Baltic,
Germanic, Celtic and Italic.
Av. staora- "steer" with cognates in Germanic.
[Witzel
repeatedly cites the name of the non-Indian beaver (Old English bebr, beofor, Latin fiber,
Lithuanian bēbrus, Russian bobr, bebr, and Avestan baβri)
with the name of the Indian mongoose (Sanskrit babhru) as evidence for the AIT (WITZEL 2005:374). But the common
non-Indian word, in the OIT scenario, developed in the region of Afghanistan and Central
Asia, among the European dialects and proto-Iranian. And there is
no case for any movement of the name into
India: the word babhru occurs in the Rigveda, and in Mitanni IA, but as a name
for a particular horse-colour. In the east, the colour word (in much later
Sanskrit) was separately used as
a name for the mongoose, but this cannot be as part of an Aryan movement into
India in an AIT scenario, because in that case, the Aryans would have
remembered the Rigvedic word babhru
(which, seeing that it is also found in the Mitanni IA language, supposed, in
the AIT scenario, to have separated from Vedic in Central Asia itself before the separation of the proto-Iranians,
makes the meaning quite old and consistent) rather than a long-forgotten
non-Indian use of the word in a distant land before an immigration already
forgotten even in the Rigveda. And, as Gamkrelidze points out, after a short
discussion: “It is notable that the
Indo-Iranian languages are split by this isogloss: Sanskrit shows the more
archaic situation, while Avestan displays the innovation” (GAMKRELIDZE
1995:448).]
That the mountainous region of Afghanistan and Central Asia was a
central part of the PIE Homeland is indicated in detail by Gamkrelidze and
Ivanov (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:525-531), who point out the primary position of the
oak tree, oak forests, high mountain oaks struck by lightning and the presence
of a tempestuous "all-powerful thunder-deity who bore the name of the
mountain oak" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:529) in the reconstructed environment
of the PIE Homeland. They actually place the Homeland much further west, in
Anatolia to be exact, but they point out that the landscape indicated by the
data stretches over the area "including the Transcaucasus, Iran and
Afghanistan" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:529). The oak tree is of great
importance in this reconstructed environment: Gamkrelidze examines the oak tree
first among the common PIE trees, and points out that the reconstructed common
PIE form (*t'e/orw-, *t're/ou-) for "tree/wood" (Skt. dru-/
druma-/ dāru-/ taru-) has cognates in eight branches
(Anatolian, Tocharian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Greek), but
in three historically diverse branches (Celtic, Albanian and Greek) the name
for "oak" is derived from this reconstructed form (Greek has both the
words, "tree" as well as "oak", derived from the same
proto-form). The Armenian and Italic branches preserve the word for "wood"
in the adjective "hard" as applied to wood, thus the word originally
meant "tree/wood" in all the branches, but is
specifically applied to the oak in three branches.
[Note: the original word for "tree" (*t'e/orw-,
*t're/ou-) remained "tree/wood" in nine of the twelve IE
branches. In three other branches, the meaning became "oak", one
of them being Celtic. The same root gave birth to the word Dru-hyu,
the Rigvedic/Puranic name of the speakers of the five European branches - Slavic,
Baltic, Germanic, Celtic and Italic - in "the mountainous region
inhabited by these ancient Indo-European tribes" in Afghanistan and
Central Asia, as well as to the connected word dru-i/dru-id, the
name of the priestly classes of these tribes (still retained by the Celts
in Ireland)].
5. But there is another reconstructed word (*pherkhou-)
meaning "oak/oak forest/forest/mountain forest" (but never
"wood"): the word means "oak" in Italic, Celtic and
Indo-Aryan (Skt. parkaṭī-, actually a name of the white fig tree, but
Punjabi pargāi refers to the holly oak, quercus ilex), and the
word has a transferred meaning to "fir/pine/tree/forest" in Germanic:
the Germanic, e.g. English, word for "forest" is itself derived from
this word. The reconstructed PIE word is derived from the root *pheru-
"cliff/mountain/rock" (found in Sanskrit and Hittite) from which we
also get the Sanskrit parvata- "mountain". The name of a
common PIE thunder-god is derived from the same two words (with a suffix,
as *pherkhou/n- and *pheru/n-):
Indo-Aryan (Vedic) Parjanya, Baltic Perkūnas, Slavic Perun, Germanic Fjǫrgyn (mother
of the thunder-god Thor). As Gamkrelidze points out: "The connection
between the Proto-Indo-European thunder-god *pher(kho)u-n-
and terms for 'mountain oak, 'oak forest on mountain-top', 'mountain', 'cliff',
*pher(kho)u-, can be explained if we assume the ancient
mythological pattern of lightning striking great oaks on mountain-tops. This
view must reflect some recurrent feature of the mountainous region inhabited by
the ancient Indo-European tribes" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:528).
So does all this prove that the Rigveda contains "linguistic
memories" of "the mountainous region inhabited by the ancient Indo-European
tribes" in Afghanistan and Central Asia, or much further beyond? On
the contrary:
1. The oak, by any name, is totally missing in the Rigveda and in fact
in any Vedic text. The word parkaṭī-, when it does appear in much later
Classical Sanskrit texts, means the Indian white fig tree, ficus infectora,
already mentioned in the Atharvaveda with the name plakṣa-. The name is however found in Punjab in much later
times as pargāī, one of the many names of a species of oak tree, the
holly oak (quercus ilex), a tree native to the Mediterranean, and
therefore clearly a name imported at a very late date from the west.
2. There are clearly two "thunder-gods" in the Rigveda: Indra
and Parjanya. The name Indra has its origin in the word indu-
"drop", and therefore he is a thunder-god associated with the actual
rain-drops, and (apart from the fact that he is basically restricted to the
Indo-Aryan branch) is clearly a god of the monsoon region of Haryana and its
interior areas. The name Parjanya (apart from the fact that it has
equivalents in three other European branches) has its origins, as we saw, in
the oak-forests of the north-western mountains.
Indologists and AIT scholars, with their inverted logic, classify Parjanya
as the original PIE and therefore also Vedic thunder-god because he is
found in Slavic, Baltic and Germanic mythology as well, and Indra as a
"new" thunder-god who increasingly replaced the original PIE
thunder-god in India. The facts, however, indicate the opposite picture:
a) Indra is the most important deity in the Rigveda, and has over 250
hymns addressed to him or glorifying him (out of a total of 1028 hymns in
the Rigveda). Parjanya has only 3 hymns addressed to him or glorifying
him. Even more significantly, while Indra is present in every part of the
text, old and new, and is mentioned (by this name alone, not counting
his other numerous special epithets) 2415 times in 538 hymns,
Parjanya is mentioned only 36 times in the following 25 hymns:
Old Books (6,3,7,4,2):
IV.57.8.
VI.49.6; 50.12; 52,6,16; 75.15.
VII.35.10; 101.5; 102.1,2; 103.1.
New Books (5,1,8,9,10):
V.53.6; 63.4,6; 83.1-5,9.
I.38.9,14; 164.51.
VIII.6.1; 21.8; 102.5.
IX.2.9; 22.2; 82.3; 113.3.
X.65.9; 66.6,10; 98.1,8; 169.2.
It will be seen that all the references except one (VII.35.10)
are in New Books or in Redacted Hymns (underlined), and include the
notoriously late hymns towards the end of Books 4,6 and 7 (there being no
reference to Parjanya at all in Books 2 and 3). The sole exception (VII.35.10)
is clearly just a case of a late added name in a long list of deities in a Viśvedeva ("all-gods") hymn.
This proves that Parjanya is a deity of the northwest who entered the
Rigveda in the period of the New Books, as the Vedic Indo-Aryans expanded
northwestwards into the mountainous areas from the monsoon area in Haryana and
east. As the deity is found only in Slavic, Baltic and Germanic, it also
confirms the presence of (at least the remnants of) the ancestral Slavic,
Baltic and Germanic dialects in Central Asia during the period of the New Books
of the Rigveda.
b)
Further, while Indra is otherwise found only in Indo-Aryan (and, by
opposition, as a demon in the rival Iranian tradition recorded in the Avesta),
he is also represented in Hittite mythology in the name of the goddess Inara
who helps the (unnamed) rain god to kill the Great Serpent who was interfering
with the rainfall. Hittite (Anatolian) was linguistically the first IE branch
to separate from the other branches in any hypothetical Homeland; and the
presence of Inara in Hittite mythology confirms either the greater
antiquity of Indra (to Parjanya), or the presence of the
proto-Hittites in Central Asia at the time of the north-westward expansion of
the Vedic Aryans, or both.
An
examination of the flora and fauna (and related climatic, topographical and
cultural entities like ice and snow, mountainous areas and Parjanya) thus
unambiguously shows that words from the northwest enter the Rigveda only in the
period of the New Books as the Indo-Aryans expanded westwards, with the
Iranians expanding further westwards ahead of them, and the other Anu and the Druhyu
(or European) dialects expanding to the farthest areas having totally new flora
and fauna.
V C. Soma, Honey, Wine and Aurochs,
Horses and Cows:
The true
picture of Vedic flora and fauna vis-à-vis PIE flora and fauna, as we saw, is
one of a movement from the monsoon areas of India into the mountainous regions
of the northwest. But, in the long history of Indology and the
"Aryan" debate, there are many specific items of flora and fauna
which have played, or rather been made to play, an important part in the
debate. They have been repeatedly cited by AIT enthusiasts as evidence of
the "Aryans" entering India from the west.
[Before
going further, let me reiterate once more the one basic fact we must keep in
mind while examining the data: the division of the Books of the Rigveda into
Old and New and the fact that the two sets of books practically belong to two
different epochs (bridged by the Redacted Hymns in the Old Books). In
addition to this, we have: a) the fact that the culture of the New Books
started many hundreds of years before the first arrival of the Mitanni
Indo-Aryans in West Asia in the 18th century BCE; b) the fact that roots of the
Old Books are completely eastern, and there is a east-to-west expansion depicted
in the chronological sequence of the Rigvedic data; and c) the fact that we
arrive at a minimum date of around 3000 BCE for the period of the Old
Books. All this is explained in detail in my books and in my earlier blog: "The Recorded History of the
Indo-European Migrations - Part 2, The chronology and geography of the Rigveda".
The evidence is so total and final that most western Indologists, linguists and
historians don't dare to even dream of trying to disprove the data and
conclusions presented by me: they realize that their safest bet is to act as if
my books don't exist and to continue on with their make-believe Indological
cottage industry game. But we will see again below why the Rigvedic data is so
powerful (and to the Indologists, so much to be feared, avoided or denied).]
In citing this evidence, there are
two fallacious principles adopted by Indologists and other protagonists of the
AIT in deriving historical conclusions from the Rigvedic data:
The first fallacious
principle is that any datable item of flora,
fauna, culture or technology that we see in the Rigveda automatically dates the
entire text terminus a quo (i.e. as the earliest date of the text).
One typical argument (the basis of a
major e-mail debate in 2003, with Witzel and Farmer taking the AIT offensive
against some Indian writers) was that since spoked-wheels were invented in the
second half of the third millennium BCE, and the Rigveda "everywhere"
refers to spoked-wheels, it proved that the Rigveda was composed a long time
after the invention of spoked wheels. The Indian side was left with no answers,
except the wishful plea that spoked-wheels "must have been invented long
before 3500 BCE, only the archaeological evidence has not yet turned up".
However, when I pointed out that spokes in the Rigveda are mentioned only in
the New Books, and are totally missing in the Old Books, and that this
proved that the Old Books were far anterior to 2500 BCE, the tables were turned
on Witzel and Farmer. It was then they who had to resort to wishful
pleas, urging that any references in the Old Books to "fast" moving
vehicles be treated by inference as references to spoked-wheeled vehicles (as
if references to "flying vehicles" in the Rigveda were also to be
treated as references to aeroplanes)!
The second fallacious
principle (which we will be examining in detail
here) is that any item of flora, fauna, culture or technology that we see in
the Rigveda shows the specific (external) area from which (or through which)
the Vedic Aryans "came" to India.
Thus, Soma, honey and horses show that
the Vedic Aryans "came" from the western areas to which these items
are native. We will examine each of these three items, as well as the evidence
of cows, wine and the aurochs (i.e. wild European cattle):
[Incidentally, we have seen above how
the Vedic Aryans used Indian timbers in the manufacture of different parts of
the chariot: śiṁśapa
(dalbergia sissoo, the sissoo or shisham or North Indian rosewood tree),
khadira (acacia catechu, the heartwood tree), śalmalī
(salmalia malabaricum, the silk-cotton tree) and kiṁṣuka
(butea monosperma, the flame-of-the forest). On the other hand, in the case of the “Egyptian war
chariot”, Tarr points out that “the
timbers in question were not of Egyptian origin but ‘came from the north’.
[…] The timbers used were holm-oak for
the axle and the spokes, elm for the pole, ash for the felloes, the chassis and
the dashboard, hornbeam for the yoke and birch bark for wrapping and for
joining the spokes with the felloes and the hub […] The wooden material of the Egyptian chariots came from the Caucasus”
(TARR 1969:74). Further, as we also saw earlier on, the ivory and other
materials used by the ancient Egyptians for their artefacts came mostly from
the interior of Africa. Yet no-one would dream of using any of this as an
argument that the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians came from the Caucasus or
from the interior of Africa. In the case of the Vedic Aryans, however, the
Indologists have no compunctions or inhibitions in making claims of this kind
using such "logic"].
1. SOMA:
According to the scholars, the Soma
plant was a species of ephedra found in the extreme northwestern parts of the
Himalayas extending to Central Asia and beyond. Species of ephedra found
further eastwards (in the Himalayas) were not capable of yielding the kind of
juice described in the Rigveda. Hence, the fact that the ritual use of Soma
formed such an integral part of the Rigvedic religion in every period of the
text (and that this feature is shared with the Iranians) proves that the Vedic
Aryans entered India from the northwest, bringing the Soma plant and cult with
them.
However,
the evidence in the Rigveda shows that:
1.
The Soma plant and its rituals were originally introduced to the Vedic Aryans
and their priests in the east in very early times by the Bhṛgu-s, priests of
the Anu Iranians from the Soma-growing areas to their northwest.
2.
The actual Soma-growing areas were distant and unknown to the Vedic Aryans in
the Old Books of the Rigveda, and became known to them only later after
they expanded westwards.
3.
The expansion of the Vedic Aryans (and, by a chain of events, the dispersion
of the Indo-Europeans) into the west and northwest was a direct consequence
of their quest for Soma.
The evidence in detail:
1. The special priests of
the Vedic Aryans (i.e. of the Bharatas) were the Aṅgiras-as, Vasiṣṭha-s and
Viśvāmitra-s. These priests, however, are not specially associated
with the Soma plant and ritual. The priests very specially associated with
Soma are the Kaśyapa-s and Bhṛgu-s.
The Kaśyapa-s are very
closely associated with Soma: 70.60% of the verses composed by them are
dedicated to Soma Pavamāna, and the āprī-sūkta of the Kaśyapa -s is the
only āprī-sūkta dedicated to Soma (all the other nine āprī-sūkta-s are
dedicated to Agni). But while the Kaśyapa-s are exclusive Soma
priests, the fact is that they entered the Rigveda at a late stage: they
became exclusive Soma priests in the period following the expansion of
the Vedic Aryans into the Soma-growing areas.
As we have repeatedly
seen, the Bhṛgu-s, except for one branch consisting of Jamadagni and his
descendants, are associated with the proto-Iranians living to their north and
northwest. The identification of the Bhṛgu-s with Soma is deeper, older and
more significant: it is clear that the use of the Soma plant originated among
the Bhṛgu-s, and it is they who introduced the plant and its rituals to the
Vedic Aryans and their priests:
a. The word Soma, which occurs
thousands of times in the hymns of the Rigveda, is found in the name of only one
composer ṛṣi: Somāhuti Bhārgava.
b. The word pavamāna, which occurs
more than a hundred times in the Soma Pavamāna Maṇḍala (Book 9), is found only
once outside Book 9: in VIII.101.14 attributed to Jamadagni
Bhārgava.
c. Both the Rigveda and the Avesta are
unanimous in identifying Bhṛgu-s as the earliest preparers of Soma: as
Macdonell puts it: "The RV and the Avesta even agree in the names of
ancient preparers of Soma; Vivasvat and Trita Aptya on the one hand, and
Vivanhvant, Athwya and Thrita on the other" (MACDONELL 1897:114).
According to the Avesta, the first preparer of Soma was Vīuuaŋvhaṇt (Vivasvat), the second was Āθβiia (Aptya) and the third was
Θrita (Trita). Vivasvat in the Rigveda
is the name of the father of two persons: Yama and Manu. In the Avesta
also, Vīuuaŋvhaṇt is the father of Yima. Both
Vivasvat and Yama Vaivasvata are identified in the Rigveda as Bhṛgu-s (see the
references to the Bhṛgu group of ṛṣi-s in TALAGERI 2000:31-32), and Manu
Vaivasvata is identified in the anukramaṇī-s of VIII.29 with Kaśyapa.
Trita Āptya is not clearly identified with any family in the Rigveda, but it is
significant that he is described by the Gṛtsamadas (Kevala Bhṛgu-s) in II.11-19
as belonging to "our party" (Griffith's translation).
d. Almost all the hymns to Soma in
Book 9 are composed by ṛṣi-s belonging to the Middle and Late Periods of the
Rigveda (though there are fictitious ascriptions to older composers in the
"saptaṛṣi" hymns); however the hymns attributed to the Bhṛgu-s
include twelve hymns which are ascribed (even if possibly composed or redacted
by their descendants) to remote ancestral Bhṛgu-s of the pre-Rigvedic period,
who are already ancient and mythical even in the oldest Books: Vena Bhārgava (IX.85),
Uśanā Kāvya (IX.87-89) and Kavī Bhārgava (IX.47-49, 75-79). The
oldest Soma hymns in the Rigveda therefore appear to be composed exclusively by
Bhṛgu-s.
e. The Rigveda clearly indicates
that it was the Bhṛgu-s who introduced Soma to the Vedic Aryans, and to their
Gods and priests. According to at least three references (I.116.12;
117.22; 119.9), the location or abode of Soma was a secret; and this secret
was revealed to the Aśvins by Dadhyanc, an ancient Bhṛgu ṛṣi, already mythical
in the Rigveda, and older than even Kavi Bhārgava and Uśanā Kāvya.
Dadhyanc is the son of Atharvaṇa, and grandson of the eponymous Bhṛgu.
f. Even the
symbolism inherent in the eagle who brought Soma to the Vedic Aryans probably
represents this role of the Bhṛgu-s: according to Macdonell, "the term
eagle is connected with Agni Vaidyuta or lightning (TB 3, 10, 51;
cp. 12.12)" (MACDONELL 1897:112) and likewise, "BERGAIGNE thinks there can hardly be a doubt that bhṛgu
was originally a name of fire, while KUHN and BARTH agree in the opinion that
the form of fire it represents is lightning" (MACDONELL 1897:140) (see
also Griffith's footnote to IV.7.4).
2. Soma is regarded as
growing in distant areas: this area is so distant that it is constantly
identified with the heavens (IV.26.6; 27.3, 4; VIII.100.8;
IX.63.27; 66.30; 77.2; 86.24, etc.):
a. The only specific thing known
about the place of origin of Soma is that it grows on mountains (I.93.6;
III.48.2; V.43.4; 85.2; IX.18.1;
62.4; 85.10; 95.4; 98.9, etc.). Nothing more
specific is mentioned in the Family Books (2-7).
b. The area of Soma is clearly not
part of the Vedic area (nor is there even the slightest hint anywhere in the
Rigveda that it ever was): it is constantly referred to as being far
away (IV.26.6; IX.68.6; X.11.4; 144.4).
This area is also known as the "dwelling of Tvaṣṭṛ" (IV.18.3);
and this is what the scholars have to say about Tvaṣṭṛ: "Tvaṣṭṛ is one of the obscurest members
of the Vedic pantheon. The obscurity of the concept
is explained [….] (by) HILLEBRANDT (who) thinks Tvaṣṭṛ was derived from a mythical
circle outside the range of the Vedic tribes" (MACDONELL 1897:117).
c. Soma is mythically (and
repeatedly) reported to be brought by an eagle to the Vedic people, and even to
their Gods, from its place of origin:
I.80.2; 93.6.
III.43.7.
IV.18.13; 26.4-7; 27.3,
4.
V.45.9.
VI.20.6.
VIII.82.9; 100.8.
IX.68.6; 77.2; 86.24;
87.6.
X.11.4; 99.8; 144.4,
5.
That this place of origin
is alien to the Vedic people is clear from the fact that this eagle is reported
to have to hurry (IV.26.5) to escape the guardians of Soma, who
are described as attacking the eagle (IV.27.3) to prevent it from
taking the Soma away.
"Tvaṣṭṛ is especially the guardian of
Soma, which is called 'the mead of Tvaṣṭṛ' (I.117.22)"
(MACDONELL 1897:116), and Indra is
described as conquering Tvaṣṭṛ
in order to obtain the Soma.
In his footnote to 1.43.8,
Griffith refers to "the people of the hills who interfere with the
gathering of the Soma plant which is to be sought there".
d. The Family Books are generally
ignorant about the exact details of the Soma-growing areas. Whatever
specific information is there is in the non-family New Books (1,8,9,10):
The prime Soma-growing areas are identified in VIII.64.11 as the
areas near the Suṣomā and Arjīkīyā rivers
(the Sohān and Hāro), northeastern tributaries of the Indus, in the extreme
north of the Punjab and northwest of Kashmir, and near Śaryaṇāvān (a lake in the vicinity
of these two rivers). In VIII.7.29, the reference is to the
Suṣoma and Arjīka (in the masculine
gender, signifying mountains; while the rivers of these names are in the
feminine gender), clearly the mountains which gave rise to the two aforesaid
rivers, and again Śaryaṇāvān, which also
appears in X.35.2 as a mountainous area, perhaps referring to the
mountains surrounding the lake of the same name.
In another place (X.34.1),
the best Soma is said to be growing on the Mūjavat
mountains: the Mūjavat tribes are identified
(Atharvaveda V-XXII-5, 7, 8, 14) with the Gandhārī-s, i.e. in adjacent parts of
Afghanistan.
That Gandhārī (Afghanistan) in the Rigveda is associated
with Soma is clear from the specific role assigned in the Rigveda to the
Gandharva or gandharva-s (mythical beings associated in the Rigveda with that region).
In the words of Macdonell: "Gandharva is, moreover, in the RV often
associated (chiefly in the ninth book) with Soma. He guards the place of
Soma and protects the races of the gods (9.83.4; cp. 1.22.14). Observing all
the forms of Soma, he stands on the vault of heaven (9.85.12). Together with
Parjanya and the daughters of the sun, the Gandharvas cherish Soma (9.113.3).
Through Gandharva's mouth the gods drink their draught (AV.7.73.3). The MS
(3.8.10) states that the Gandharvas kept the Soma for the gods [….] It is probably as a jealous guardian of Soma that Gandharva in the
RV appears as a hostile being, who is pierced by Indra in the regions of air
(8.66.5) or whom Indra is invoked to overcome (8.1.11) [….] Soma is
further said to have dwelt among the Gandharvas [….]" (MACDONELL
1897:136-137).
All these names are found
mentioned only in the non-family New Books (1,8,9,10), with a single
reference (to gandharva-s) in Book 3 in a Redacted Hymn described in the
Aitareya Brahmana (VI.18) as a late interpolated hymn in Book 3:
III.38.6.
I.22.14; 84.14; 126.7;
163.2.
VIII.1.11; 6.39; 7.29;
64.11; 77.5.
IX.65.22,23; 83.4; 85.12;
113.1-3.
X.10.4; 11.2; 34.1;
35.2; 75.5; 85.40,41; 123.4,7; 136.6; 139.4-6;
177.2.
e. While Soma was well known to the
Vedic Aryans as a product of the distant north-western areas, imported through
the Anu-s and other people further northwest, its use became more widespread
and ritually important only in the period of the New Books, so much so that a
whole separate book (Book 9) was compiled to accommodate the hymns composed for
it. However, with the passage of time (i.e. in post-Vedic times), the
importance of the Soma ritual was slowly lost in Indian religion as the focus
shifted eastwards and new rituals and philosophies of more eastern people
supplanted the Soma ritual. However, the importance of the Soma plant and
ritual continued in its original territories and among its original adherents: the
ephedra plant is known as haoma/homa (or derived words) in the
Iranian languages (Persian, Pashto, Baluchi, as well as most of the Dardic and
Nuristani languages of the extreme north/northwest) and as soma-lata
even in parts of the Indian Himalayas (including in Nepal), and is used to this
day in Zoroastrian ritual.
3. The expansion of the
Vedic Aryans into the west and northwest was a direct consequence of their
quest for Soma:
The westward movement
commenced with the crossing of the Śutudrī and Vipāś by Viśvāmitra and the Bharatas
under Sudās, described in hymn III.33; and the fifth verse of the hymn
clarifies both the direction and purpose of this crossing.
Griffith translates III.33.5
(in which Viśvāmitra addresses the rivers) as: "Linger
a little at my friendly bidding; rest, Holy Ones, a moment in your journey"; but he clarifies in his
footnote: "At my friendly bidding: according to the Scholiasts,
Yāska and Sāyaṇa, the meaning of me vācase somyāya is 'to my speech
importing the Soma'; that is, the object of my address is that I may cross over
and gather the Soma-plant".
This crossing, and the
successful foray into the northwest, appears to have whetted the appetite of
Sudās and the Bharatas for conquest and expansion: shortly afterwards, the Viśvāmitras perform a horse
ceremony for Sudās, described in III.53.11: "Come forward
Kuśika-s, and be attentive; let loose Sudās' horses to win him
riches. East, west, and north, let the king slay the foeman, then at
earth's choicest place [vara
ā pṛthivyā = Kurukṣetra] perform his worship"
(GRIFFITH).
While some expansion took
place towards the east as well (Kīkaṭa in III.53.14), the main
thrust of the expansion is clearly towards the west and northwest: the first
major battle in this long drawn out western war is the dāśarājña on the Paruṣṇī, and the final one in Afghanistan beyond the Sarayu.
While Sudās was still the
leader of the Bharatas in the battle on the Paruṣṇī, the battle beyond the Sarayu
appears to have taken place under the leadership of his remote descendant
Sahadeva in the Middle Period of the Rigveda.
Sahadeva's son (referred
to by his priest Vāmadeva in IV.15.7-10), who also appears to
have been a participant in the above battle beyond the Sarayu, may have been
named Soma-ka in commemoration of earlier conquests of the Soma-growing areas
of Afghanistan by his father Sahadeva.
The evidence in the
Rigveda thus clearly shows that the Soma plant and rituals were brought
to the Vedic Aryans from the Soma-growing areas of the northwest by the Bhṛgu-s,
priests of the Anu-s (the proto-Iranians) from those areas, and the Vedic
Aryans themselves became acquainted with the actual Soma-growing areas only in
the period of the New Books after they expanded into those areas.
2. HONEY:
Honey occupies a very
important place in the Rigveda, and the word has cognates in every language,
showing it was a central part of PIE culture and religion in any assumed
Homeland. According to many scholars, honey and beekeeping developed in Egypt
and the Mediterranean area and spread as far east as Iran. Therefore, the
important position of honey in the reconstructed PIE culture shows that the
PIEs lived somewhere near this beekeeping region, or passed through this area
in prehistoric times. Parpola, for example, tells us (quoting another scholar
Hadjú) that the honey bee "was unknown in Asia until very recent
times, with the exception of Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet
and China [….] On the other hand, the bee is found west of the Urals in eastern
Europe" (PARPOLA 2005:112). He further informs us: "Apis
mellifera is native to the region comprising Africa, Arabia and the Near
East up to Iran, and Europe up to the Urals in the east and to southern Sweden
and Estonia in the north; its spread further north was limited by arctic cold, while
its spread to the east was limited by mountains, deserts and other barriers.
Another important limiting factor was that the cool, temperate deciduous
forests of Europe extend only as far east as the Urals and do not grow in Siberia
(see later). The distribution of Apis mellifera was confined to this
area until c. AD 1600, when it started being transported to other
regions" (PARPOLA 2005:112).
[Incidentally, the Finnish scholar Parpola is a strong proponent of the theory that the Indo-Iranians, before
"migrating" eastwards to their historical habitats, were inhabitants
of a far western region to the southeast of the Uralic, or more properly the
Finno-Ugric, people. He regularly, including in the above article, cites the evidence
of the huge number of Indo-Iranian, Iranian or Indo-Aryan loans in Finno-Ugric
to this effect. This is a diversion from the main topic, but I must point out
here the utter untenability of this lame-brained logic: there are genuinely huge
numbers of very important ancient Indo-Iranian/Iranian/Indo-Aryan words
borrowed into Finno-Ugric, but decades of desperate efforts have failed to
locate any Finno-Ugric words borrowed into the Indo-Iranian languages of the
east. Except to extremely motivated scholars with a disdain for data and
logic, this cannot indicate that the Indo-Iranians of the east
came from the west, but only that certain Indo-Iranian groups (now lost to
history, like the Mitanni Indo-Aryans) must have migrated westwards into the
Finno-Ugric areas from the east in ancient times. Indian languages have large
numbers of words borrowed from Arabic/Persian (during the centuries of Islamic
rule in India), the Austric and Sino-Tibetan languages of southeast Asia and
northern Asia have large numbers of Sanskrit borrowings, the Konkani dialects
of Goa have large numbers of Portuguese borrowings (many, like balde
"bucket" and paõ "bread", have spread to other
Indian languages), English (following the Norman invasion of England) has many
French borrowings, the Tamil dialect of Pondicherry has many French borrowings,
many languages in former British colonies have large numbers of English
borrowings. The reverse rarely takes place (except where colonialists move back
to their home areas with words borrowed from the colonies, as in English, and
write literature popularizing those words). So the evidence in fact strongly
disproves the idea that the Indo-Iranians came from the west, and
shows that the presence of Indo-Iranian words in Finno-Ugric (matched by the
absence of Finno-Ugric words in Indo-Iranian) shows a situation of Indo-Iranian
migrants to, and not from, the Finno-Ugric areas].
Gamkrelidze, likewise,
tells us: "there can be no doubt that beekeeping and the word for 'bee'
are Proto-Indo-European, in view of the word for 'honey' in Indo-European, the
developed beekeeping economy among the Indo-Europeans, and the religious
significance of the bee in all the ancient Indo-European traditions"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:516-517), and traces this to the Mediterranean area: "It
is in the Mediterranean area that the transition from primitive beekeeping to
more evolved types first takes place. Here we find the second stage,
sylvestrian beekeeping, where bees are kept in the forest, in specially carved
hollows in trees or in hollow logs set up in forest apiaries; we also find the
third stage, domestic apiculture, where domestic bees are kept in manufactured
hives near the homeland" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:522). Finally, he tells us
about the word for "honey": "The word entered East Asia
together with honey and beekeeping, brought in by Indo-European tribes who
migrated eastwards" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:524).
However, here are the actual
facts and evidence:
1. The Wikipedia entry on
"Honey Bee" tells us: "Honey bees appear to have their
centre of origin in South and Southeast Asia (including the Phillipines),
as all the extant species except Apis mellifera are native to that
region. Notably, living representatives of the earliest lineages to diverge (Apis
florea and Apis andreniformes) have their center of origin there".
The scholars discussing
the evidence tell us about the geographical range of the western bee, Apis
mellifera, about "the transition from primitive beekeeping to more
evolved types" involving this species in Egypt and the Mediterranean
area, and about the importance of honey in the PIE branches, and conclude that the
different branches of PIEs took these "evolved types" of
beekeeping from the Mediterranean to their historical areas. However:
a. There is absolutely no
evidence that the honey central to early PIE culture, or Vedic culture, was the
honey from Apis mellifera. After telling us all about the history of
Mediterranean beekeeping, Parpola discreetly tells us: "Another species
of cavity-nesting honey bee, Apis cerana, is native to Asia east and
south of Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Korea and Japan" (PARPOLA
2005:123). The largest honey bees are the Species of Apis dorsata found
in India and further east.
b. These eastern honey bees have
been a source of honey in India from ancient times, and honey gathering is an
ancient traditional occupation even in the remotest tribal and hill areas in
the interior of the country: ancient Mesolithic rock paintings dated 8000-6000
BCE in Bhimbetka and Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh depict honey gathering: "The
collection of honey is depicted in three paintings at Pachmarhi and one at
Bhimbetka. A painting in the Jambudwip shelter at Pachmarhi shows a man driving
out bees and a woman approaching the beehive with a pot. Both are standing on
ladders. In a second Pachmarhi painting at Imlikhoh shelter a woman is driving
away the bees. In a third painting at Sonbhadra shelter two men climbing a
scaffold are surrounded by bees. The painting at Bhimbetka shows a man touching
a beehive with a round-ended stick. The man holds a basket on his back and
appears to be suspended by a rope. There are three men below him, including one
standing on the shoulders of another man" (MATHPAL 1985:182). These rock paintings
represent the oldest representation of honey gathering in the whole of Asia,
and are only comparable to similar rock paintings of similar age in Spain and
Australia.
2. The linguistic
evidence in fact disproves any connection of the PIE honey culture (as distinct
from the honey culture of certain specific historical IE branches, as we will
see) with the domestic apiculture developed in Egypt and the Mediterranean
area:
a. While there is a common PIE word
for "honey", there is no common PIE word for "bee",
"bee-hive", "beeswax" and "beekeeping/apiculture",
all of which would have been expected in a culture which practiced evolved domestic
apiculture.
This is also the case
regarding the evidence from the Rigveda, which is the oldest IE language
record in existence: honey (madhu-, sāragha-) is important
right from the Oldest Books of the Rigveda, the Old Books pre-date the New
Books, and the culture of the New Books represents a period centuries older
than the period of the first appearance of the Mitanni Indo-Aryans (as well as
the Hittites) in West Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE. But
the Rigveda has only a few references to bees (called makṣ/makṣikā),
and none whatsoever to bee-hives, beeswax or anything which would indicate the
existence of any evolved forms of beekeeping/apiculture.
b. The actual linguistic evidence
of the PIE words for honey is even more devastating: the common reconstructed
PIE word for "honey" is *medhu-. It is found with
two distinct meanings: firstly "honey", and secondly
"mead/wine/any intoxicating drink" from the primitive practice of
making mead from honey. It is found with both the meanings in five
branches: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Tocharian, Slavic and Baltic. It is found with
only the secondary meaning "mead/wine/any intoxicating drink" in three
branches: Greek, Germanic and Celtic, where a new PIE formation *melith-
has replaced the primary word *medhu- as the word for
"honey". In the remaining four branches, Anatolian (Hittite),
Armenian, Albanian and Italic, the word *medhu- is completely
lost, but even here, *melith- only signifies
"honey", and there are new words for "mead/wine/any intoxicating
drink".
This evidence is
startling: the branches having only the word *medhu- include
the Early branch Tocharian, the European branches Slavic and Baltic, and the
Last branches Indo-Aryan and Iranian. The branches having only the word *melith-
include the Early branch Anatolian, the European branch Italic, and the Last
branches Armenian and Albanian. In short, this isogloss cuts across all the
different chronological groups of IE branches. So what is the common factor?
The answer is very clear: it
is an east-west division:
i) All the five
more eastern branches from each of the three groups (Early, European and Last),
i.e. Tocharian, Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian, have retained the
original word *medhu- and have not acquired the new
word *melith-.
ii) All the other seven
more western branches from the three groups have acquired the new word *melith-:
of these, of the five of them closest to the Egyptian and Mediterranean
world, four (Anatolian, Armenian, Albanian and Italic) have completely lost
the original word *medhu-, and one (the more archaic Greek)
has retained the word *medhu- for "mead/wine/any
intoxicating drink" while replacing it with the new word *melith-
for "honey" due to the strong influence of the beekeeping culture of
the Egyptian-Mediterranean region.
iii) Likewise, the
remaining two western branches (Germanic and Celtic), at a little distance from
the direct influence of Egypt and the Mediterranean, have also retained the
word *medhu- for "mead/wine/any intoxicating drink"
while replacing it with the new word *melith- for
"honey".
iv) But, notably, all the
five European branches (Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic) have borrowed
the word for "bee" (reconstructed *bhe(i)-) from
the Egyptian word bj.t. Three branches further south-east, Greek,
Armenian and Albanian, derive words for "bee" from the word *melith-,
honey. "The Hittite word for 'bee' is unknown; texts use the Sumerogram
NIM.LÀL." (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:516, fn.81), so the Hittite word could
have been something similar. So only the three eastern branches (Indo-Aryan,
Iranian and Tocharian) definitely do not derive their words for "bee"
directly from the Egyptian form or from the word *melith-.
[Note 1: Incidentally,
as in the case of the Indo-Iranian words in Finno-Ugric languages, the academic
scholars apply a kind of brazen anti-logic in their pronouncements. Gamkrelidze
tells us that the PIE word *medhu- is derived from the
Semitic word *mVtķ "sweet": "In contrast to the native
Indo-European word for bee honey, *meli(th)-, the Semitic loan
*medhu- began to be used in Indo-European to mean 'sweet
intoxicating beverage'" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:771). As we saw:
1. The word that he claims
to be a "Semitic loan" is found for both "honey" and
"intoxicating beverage" in the five branches (Indo-Aryan, Iranian,
Tocharian, Baltic and Slavic) whose early historical habitats were
completely out of the area of Semitic influence, while out of the five
branches (Italic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian and Hittite) totally within the
area of Semitic influence, this "Semitic loan" is completely
missing in four of them, and is found (for "intoxicating
beverage") in only one (Greek). Simultaneously, the word he claims to be a
"native Indo-European word" is totally missing in the
first group of five branches which were out of the area of Semitic influence,
but found only in the other seven branches which were within the sphere
of Semitic influence!
2. Further, in the history
of bees, honey and mankind, the early primitive stages of honey gathering had
an equal place for honey and mead (the intoxicating beverage prepared from honey).
It was only with the evolution of domestic apiculture on a major scale that
honey became an important commercial product and the manufacture of mead
eventually became insignificant or even non-existent. The word *medhu-,
meaning both "honey" and "mead", found in the five branches
historically spoken in areas far from the influence of the Semitic areas
of domestic apiculture, clearly represents the "native Indo-European
word". The word *melith-, meaning only
"honey", found only in that sense in the seven branches historically
influenced by Semitic apiculture, in four of which (spoken right in Semitic
territory or in its immediate border areas) any cognate word for
"intoxicating beverage" has been completely lost, clearly represents
the "Semitic loan". That "honey-mead" was the
original position, and "only honey" the new position, is proved by
the fact that the westernmost Iranian language Ossetic, deep in the sphere of
influence of Semitic domestic apiculture, retained the word *medhu-
and did not acquire the word *melith-, but, nevertheless:
"The Ossetic reflex of *medhu-, Oss.myd, means only
'honey'" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:520,fn 84).]
[Note 2: The PIE
word *medhu- was also historically borrowed into ancient
Chinese (from Tocharian) and into the Finno-Ugric languages (from Indo-Aryan
migrants). In the cock and bull stories of AIT writers, the Finno-Ugric
languages borrowed all these words somewhere near South Russia from the ancestral
speakers of Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian: in short, as far away as in South
Russia and as long ago as in remote pre-Vedic times, the putative
"Indo-Iranians" already had words like ārya, dāsa, *medhu-
(but not *melith-), and even a name for the Bactrian camel!]
That the western branches
alone reflect the influence of this Egyptian- Mediterranean-West Asian
beekeeping culture proves one very fundamental principle in IE
migrations: migrations of branches took place from the east to the west,
hence important words from the central areas (the West-Asia-Anatolia-Caucasus
region) are found in the western branches (which passed across the longitudes
of these central areas or settled down there), but are missing in the branches
to the east of the central areas (since these eastern branches, being in the
east from the beginning, never crossed these central areas during their
formative stages).
We will now immediately
see two more instances of the validity of this principle:
3. WINE AND AUROCHS:
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, in
their bid to claim proto-Semitic influence on PIE in its early stages, list
seventeen potential "loanwords" from Semitic. Mallory and Adams
(pointing out the limited dialectal distribution of many of these words in the
IE branches) reduce the list to four: "The more significant
Semitic-Indo-European comparisons are Proto-Indo-European *medhu-
'honey': Proto-Semitic *mVtk- 'sweet'; Proto-Indo-European *tauros
'wild bull, aurochs': Proto-Semitic *ṯawr 'bull, ox';
Proto-Indo-European *septṁ 'seven': Proto-Semitic *sab'atum; and
Proto-Indo-European *wóinom 'wine: Proto-Semitic *wayn 'wine'"
(MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:82-83).
Two of these comparisons clearly
represent coincidental similarities. We have already dealt with the comparison
between "Proto-Indo-European *medhu- 'honey': Proto-Semitic *mVtk-
'sweet'". The second one, "Proto-Indo-European *septṁ
'seven': Proto-Semitic *sab'atum" is equally untenable: that
either of the two families should have borrowed the word for "seven"
from the other is incomprehensible. Especially when those advocating this
"comparison" would reject a much more credible comparison of the very
first four numerals in Proto-Indo-European (*sem, *dwōu/*dwai,
*tri and *qwetwor: note Tocharian sas/se
'one', Romanian patru 'four', Welsh pedwar 'four') and
Proto-Austronesian (*esa, *dewha, *telu and *pati/*epati:
note Malay sa/satu 'one', dua 'two', tiga 'three', epat
'four') as far-fetched or coincidental.
But the other two words
certainly offer very fair instances of Semitic words borrowed into
Indo-European languages. But into Proto-Indo-European in its
formative stages in its Homeland? Let us see the facts of the case:
The Proto-Semitic word *ṯawr
'bull, ox' is represented in all the major Semitic languages: Akkadian šȗru,
Ugaritic ṯr, Hebrew šȏr, Syriac tawrā, Arabic ṯawr,
South Arabic ṯwr. In Indo-European, it is found in Italic (Latin taurus),
Celtic (Gaulish tarvos, Irish tarb), Germanic (Old Icelandic ƥjórr),
Baltic (Lithuanian taũras), Slavic (Old Slavic turǔ), Albanian (tarok)
and Greek (taȗros). The Hittite word for "bull" is not known
since it is represented by a Sumerian ideogram whose Hittite reading is not
known (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:483), and Armenian has borrowed a Caucasian form (tsul)
for bull. In short, here we again have a distinct case of the Semitic influence
being found only in the western branches: this Semitic loan for
"bull" or "aurochs" is completely missing in the three
eastern branches Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Tocharian. Again it illustrates
the phenomenon of migration of IE branches from east to west.
The evidence of the words
for "wine" is even more devastating for the AIT. The word is either a
"Semitic loan" word, or "an ancient Near Eastern
migratory word" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:559) found in both in the Semitic (*wayn-,
Akkadian īnu, Ugaritic yn, Hebrew yayin, Hamitic Egyptian wnš) and South Caucasian (*ɣwino- "wine", Georgian ɣwino,
Mingrelian ɣwin-, Laz ɣ(w)in, Svan ɣwinel, and *wenaq-
"vineyard", Old Georgian venaq, Mingrelian-Laz binex-
Svan wenäq) languages. Gamkrelidze also refers to "the
considerable development of viticulture and wine-making in the Transcaucasus"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:560 fn 64), even as he suggests that the PIEs could also have
originally developed this word in the West Asian-Transcaucasus region.
Whether an original
Semitic or Caucasian word, or an original development in PIE, the geography of
the word is undoubtedly the West Asian-Transcaucasus region. And again:
1. The word is completely
missing in the three eastern branches Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Tocharian,
but is found in all the other nine western branches.
2. Furthermore, the word
for wine is found in the nine western branches in three grades (GAMKRELIDZE
1995:557-558): *wi(o)no- with zero grade vocalism, *weino- with
e-grade vocalism, and *woino- with o-grade vocalism, exactly
corresponding to the three chronological groups of IE branches:
a. The Early branch which migrated
to the west, Anatolian, has words derived from *wi(o)no-: Hittite wiyana-, Luwian winiyant,
Hieratic Luwian wiana-.
b. The five European branches have
words derived from *weino-: Italic (Latin uīnum), Celtic (Old
Irish fīn, Welsh gwin), Germanic (German wine, English wine),
Baltic (Lithuanian vynas, Latvian vĩns), Slavic (Russian vino,
Polish wino).
c. The three Last branches which
migrated to the west have words derived from *woino-: Greek (Mycenaean
Greek wo-no, Homeric Greek oȋnos), Albanian (vēnë), Armenian (gini).
Different forms of the word were adopted into the three different groups
of IE branches as they migrated westwards, while the branches which remained
in the east remained unaffected.
4. HORSES:
And now we come to that animal which most advocates of the Steppe
Homeland (with no justification whatsoever, as we will see) think is the
clinching weapon in their arsenal: the
horse. There have been so many absurd allegations, claims and theories from
both sides on this issue that we must first note what is actually factual in
the matter. There are basically only three indisputable facts:
1. The horse is known to the PIEs, and cognate words are found for the
horse in almost every single branch: PIE *ekhwos, Anatolian (Hieratic
Luwian) á-sù-wa, Tocharian yuk/yakwe, Indo-Aryan (Vedic) áśva, Iranian (Avestan) aspa-, Armenian ēš
"donkey", Greek (Mycenaean) iqo, (Homeric) híppos,
Germanic (Old English) eoh, (Gothic) aihwa, Celtic (Old Irish) ech,
(Gaulish) epo-, Italic (Latin) equus and Baltic (Lithuanian) ešva.
Ironically, it is missing only in the one branch actually spoken in the
Steppes, Slavic, and the Albanian word has also not survived in the records.
But this proves that the horse was very well known to the PIEs in their
Homeland, before 3000 BCE, when different branches started dispersing from that
Homeland.
2. The horse was known to the Vedic people throughout the period of
composition of the text.
3. The horse is not native to India, but is native to a large
area spread out over northern Eurasia from the Steppes of South Russia in the
west to Central Asia in the east.
The first two facts are not generally disputed, but the third one is
disputed by opponents of the AIT, some of whom suggest that the horse referred
to in the Rigveda is not the northern horse of the Steppes, but an indigenous
species: notably the Siwalik horse equus siwalensis, a sturdy species of
horse indigenous to a large part of northern India in ancient times, but
believed to have become extinct around 8000 BCE or so. The fact that the
Rigveda I.162.18 and the Shatapatha Brahmana 13.5 describe the
horse being sacrificed as having 34 ribs (when the true horse has 36 ribs, but
some varieties of the Siwalik horse are supposed to have had 34 ribs) is taken
as added evidence of the presence of the Siwalik horse in India in Vedic times,
the lack of fossil evidence being explained as irrelevant since (as we will
see) fossil evidence of the true horse is also absent in India during later periods
when, and in areas where, it is known that they were abundantly present.
Further, it is possible that the word *ekhwos originally
referred to any equid species in general (including the onager or
hemione, one of the fastest mammals known, a wild ass abundantly present
in ancient north India and still native to arid regions in Kutch and Ladakh),
as indeed the word "equid" as used today does. Also, sometimes in the
Rigveda, the word áśva is sometimes used for
mounted animals other than the horse which are used as vehicles for riding: in IV.37.4,
the phrase "fat áśva" may be a
reference to an elephant, and, in many verses, the phrase "spotted áśva", as vehicles of the Maruts are accepted as
definitely referring to spotted deer: I.87.4; 89.7; 186.8;
II.34.4; III.26.6; V.42.15;
VII.40.3 (although, of course, this could also be a poetical transfer
of a word originally meaning "horse" to the spotted deer). However,
we will leave aside all these interesting arguments (the references to 34 ribs
certainly warrant an explanation) and only concentrate on the evidence as
pertaining to the true horse "of the Steppes" which was not native to
India.
From the three facts
regarding horses noted above, the supporters of the AIT draw the following
conclusion: the horse was not present or known in India before the arrival of
the "Aryans", since no bones of the horse have been found in the
Harappan sites and there is no representation of the horse in the Harappan
seals. Hence the Harappan civilization must be "non-Aryan", and it
was the "Aryans" who brought the horse into India from their Homeland
in the Steppes of South Russia. Hock, for example, puts it as follows: “While disagreeing on minor details, those
familiar with Indo-European linguistic paleontology and with the archeological
evidence in Eurasia agree that the use of the domesticated horse spread out of
the steppes of the Ukraine, and so did the horse-drawn two-wheeled battle
chariot, as well as the great significance of the horse in early Indo-European
culture and religion. Indo-Europeanists and specialists in general Eurasian
archeology are therefore convinced, too, that these features spread into India
along with the migration of Indo-Aryan speakers.” (HOCK 1999a:12-13).
This conclusion represents
one of the most fraudulent propositions in the whole
"Aryan" debate:
1. The horse was not
present in India, but it was present in Central Asia to the north of
Afghanistan since the earliest times. As of date, the evidence of the first
fully domesticated horses in the world, more than a thousand years earlier than
formerly believed, comes from the Botai culture in Kazakhstan: by 3500 BCE, the
Botai culture was a fully horse breeding culture where horses were bred,
milked, and ridden (examination of the teeth and jaw-bones found on the sites have
confirmed that bridles and bits were being used). But, even closer to home,
strong evidence has been found that horses were domesticated, or at least tamed
and kept amidst human settlements at even earlier dates, in Uzbekistan to the
north of Afghanistan: see LASOTA-MOSKALEWSKA
2009 (A Problem of the Earliest Horse Domestication. Data from the Neolithic
Camp Ayakagytma 'The Site', Uzbekistan, Central Asia. pp. 14-21 in
Archaeologia Baltica Volume 11, Klaipeda University, Lithuania, 2009). The team of archaeologists and archaeozoologists who scientifically
examined the material on the site, some 130 km. north of Bukhara city, point
out that there are "two clearly separated phases: an Early Neolithic,
14c dated to ca 8000-7400 cal. BP, and Middle Neolith one, 14c dated to ca 6000-5000
cal. BP" (with a 1500 year gap caused by flooding at the site), and
there is "a rich collection of animal remains, connected directly with the
Neolithic settlements. Among the bone and tooth fragments, the horse remains
played a very important role. Already in the earliest horizons a share of the
pieces identified as belonging to the Equidae family reached 30.0-40.0 %
(Table 1). In comparison with other Eurasian Neolithic sites, such numbers are
rather unique" (LASOTA-MOSKALEWSKA 2009:14-15). On the basis of
various factors: "the extremely high share of the Equidae
remains, sometimes exceeding 40% [….] the height in withers [….] the
width of the sole surfaces measured on the basis of the hoof prints [which]
indicate that the animal who left them was much larger than an average wild
individual, but fit well to the size of horses domesticated for a long time [….]
[and] the presence [along with the horse remains on the site] of the
other fully domesticated species of mammals: cattle, sheep/goat,pig and dog
[….] leads us to the more than probable conclusion that the horse was
domesticated since the very beginnings of the Central Asian lowlands Neolithic,
which is dated to a turn of the ninth and eighth millennium cal. BP. At the
same time, it would be the earliest date for horse domestication that we have
today" (LASOTA-MOSKALEWSKA 2009:19-20).
So, the horse did not come with invading "Aryans" who left the
Steppes of South Russia around 3000 BCE. Horses, whether fully domesticated, or
in various stages of semi-domestication, were already abundantly present in
human settlements to the immediate north of Afghanistan as far back as 6000 BCE.
Further, the Indian Homeland was not
confined to the interiors of India. The recorded evidence shows us that by
pre-Rigvedic times, the Indo-European groups, the Druhyu-s and Anu-s, had
already spread out from the interior of India into the areas of Central
Asia to the north of Afghanistan. The period of the Old Books of the Rigveda goes
back beyond 3000 BCE, and by that time, Central Asia was already home to the
proto-Anatolians, the proto-Tocharians and the vanguard of the proto-European
Druhyu groups. The horse-domesticating, or at least horse-rich, areas of
Central Asia were already part of the heartland of the Druhyu-s who formed the
northern continuum of the expanded Druhyu-Anu-Pūru Homeland in 3000 BCE. Therefore, the development or adoption of a
common PIE name for the horse, one of the most magnificent animals of the time
(whether in the wild or in domestication) was natural and inevitable.
2. The claim that horses were unknown since horse bones are not
found in the Harappan sites is also a blatant lie. Horse bones have been
found in Indus sites and further in the interior of India in periods prior
to the alleged "Aryan invasion of India" after 1500 BCE. As Bryant
points out: "The report claiming the earliest date for the domesticated
horse in India, ca. 4500 B.C.E., comes from a find from Bagor, Rajasthan, at
the base of the Aravalli Hills (Ghosh 1989a, 4). In Rana Ghundai, Baluchistan,
excavated by E. J. Ross, equine teeth were reported from a pre-Harappan level
(Guha and Chatterjee 1946, 315–316). Interestingly, equine bones have been
reported from Mahagara, near Allahabad, where six sample absolute carbon 14
tests have given dates ranging from 2265 B.C.E. to 1480 B.C.E. (Sharma et al.
1980, 220–221). Even more significantly, horse bones from the Neolithic site
Hallur in Karnataka (1500–1300 B.C.E.) have also been identified by the
archaeozoologist K. R. Alur (1971, 123). [.......] In the Indus Valley
and its environs, Sewell and Guha, as early as 1931, had reported the existence
of the true horse, Equus caballus Linn from Mohenjo-Daro itself, and
Bholanath (1963) reported the same from Harappa, Ropar, and Lothal. Even
Mortimer Wheeler identified a horse figurine and accepted that “it is likely
enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of
the Indus caravan” (92). Another early evidence of the horse in the Indus
Valley was reported by Mackay, in 1938, who identified a clay model of the
animal at Mohenjo-Daro. Piggott (1952, 126, 130) reports a horse figurine from
Periano Ghundai in the Indus Valley, dated somewhere between Early Dynastic and
Akkadian times. Bones from Harappa, previously thought to have belonged to the
domestic ass, have been reportedly critically re-examined and attributed to a
small horse (Sharma 1992–93, 31). Additional evidence of the horse in the form
of bones, teeth, or figurines has been reported in other Indus sites such as
Kalibangan (Sharma 1992–93, 31); Lothal (Rao 1979), Surkotada (Sharma 1974),
and Malvan (Sharma 1992–93, 32). Other later sites include the Swat Valley
(Stacul 1969); Gumla (Sankalia 1974, 330); Pirak (Jarrige 1985); Kuntasi
(Sharma 1995, 24); and Rangpur (Rao 1979, 219)." (BRYANT
2001:169-170). Also, horse bones (Dhawalikar), as well as a terracotta figurine
of a horse, have been found at Kayatha in the Chambal Valley in Madhya Pradesh
in all the chalcolithic levels, dated 2450-2000 BCE. Also, there is a very
distinctive horse figure in a "chess set" found at Lothal. Further, one of the finds (the one in
Surkotada in the Kutch region of Gujarat) has been certified by the topmost horse
specialist archaeologist of the time: "the material involved had been
excavated in Surkotada in 1974 by J. P Joshi, and A. K. Sharma subsequently
reported the identification of horse bones from all levels of this site (circa
2100–1700 B.C.E.). In addition to bones from Equus asinus and Equus
hemionus khur, Sharma reported the existence of incisor and molar teeth,
various phalanges, and other bones from Equus caballus Linn (Sharma
1974, 76) [....] Twenty years later, at the podium during the inauguration of
the Indian Archaeological Society's annual meeting, it was announced that
Sandor Bökönyi, a Hungarian archaeologist and one of the world's leading horse
specialists, who happened to be passing through Delhi after a conference, had
verified that the bones were, indeed, of the domesticated Equus caballus:
“The occurrence of true horse (Equus caballus L.) was evidenced by the
enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form
of incisors and phalanges. Since no wild horses lived in India in
post-pleistocene times, the domestic nature of the Surkotada horses is
undoubtful" (reproduced in Gupta 1993b, 162; and Lal 1997, 285)" (BRYANT
2001:170-171).
The AIT scholars resort to any one of two tactics: complete
silence, or flat denial. Hock tries a middle path, and admits: "The question whether the archeological
evidence supports the view that domesticated horses were a feature of the
Harappan civilization is still being debated; see the summary of arguments in
CHENGAPPA, 1998", but continues on
to: "Significantly,
however, to my knowledge no archeological evidence from Harappan India has been
presented that would indicate anything comparable to the cultural and
religious significance of the horse or the important role of the horse-drawn
two-wheeled chariot which can be observed in the traditions of the early
Indo-European peoples, including the Vedic āryas. On balance, then, the
‘equine’ evidence at this point is more compatible with migration into India
than with outward migration” (HOCK 1999a:12-13).
But,
according to the AIT (and Hock himself), the horse and the "horse-drawn two-wheeled battle chariot" came from the Steppes of Ukraine and South Russia with the
"Aryans", who settled down for a long period in the BMAC area in
Central Asia for a period of time where they developed the common
"Indo-Iranian" culture and borrowed local "BMAC" words, and
then moved into the Punjab after 1500 BCE where they composed the Rigveda by
1200 BCE, and then moved further eastwards into the Gangetic plains where they
composed the Yajurveda, and then later spread out all over northern India. Is
any of this scenario supported by "archeological
evidence [....] that would indicate anything comparable to
the cultural and religious significance of the horse or the important role of
the horse-drawn two-wheeled chariot which can be observed in the traditions of
the early Indo-European peoples, including the Vedic āryas"? Note:
a. No archaeologist has yet been
able to produce any archaeological trail of horse bones (or chariots) from the
Ukraine to the BMAC, from the BMAC to the Punjab, and from the Punjab to the
other eastern parts of northern India, in sequence with the accepted areas and
time-frames of the AIT.
b. Bryant notes: "Another observation that needs to be
pointed out is that a number of scholars are prepared to consider that the
Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), which will be discussed in the
next chapter, is an Indo-Aryan culture. The horse has been evidenced in this
culture in the form of representations in grave goods. However, no horse
bones have been found despite the availability of a large number of animal
bones. This again underscores the point that lack of horse bones does not
equal the absence of horse. Nor, at least in the opinion of those who subscribe
to the Indo-Aryan identification of the BMAC, does this lack equal the absence
of Indo-Aryans. Therefore, anyone prepared to associate the BMAC culture with
the Indo-Aryans cannot then turn around and reject such an identification for
the Indus Valley on the grounds of lack of horse bones in the latter"
(BRYANT 2001:173-174). [The BMAC culture had horses, of course, and they were
"Aryans": not "Aryans" on their way to India, but Anu-s and
Druhyu-s who had earlier emigrated from India to the northwest].
c. Not a single specimen of the
Vedic chariot (which Hock tells us was brought all the way from the Ukrainian
Steppes by the "Aryans") has yet been discovered by any archaeologist
anywhere in India. The earliest stone carvings depicting the chariot are found
from the Mauryan period, after 350 BCE.
d. In fact, the occurence of horse
bones in the Punjab and Haryana from 1500 BCE till at least 500 BCE is almost
nil. [Any stray finds reported (for example a sole reported finding of horse
bones in Bhagwanpura/Bhagpur in northeastern Haryana around 1000 BCE) certainly
cannot "indicate anything
comparable to the cultural and religious significance of the horse or the
important role of the horse-drawn two-wheeled chariot which can be observed in
the traditions of the early Indo-European peoples, including the Vedic āryas", and does not represent any notable change in the situation
after 1200 BCE. Further, note that the earliest horse bone findings accepted by
the AIT naysayers are in the southern (Kutch) and eastern (northeast Haryana)
corners of northwest India: any "Aryan horse bones" in the stretch
from the BMAC area to the Greater Punjab area seem to be invisible].
Note
also what the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Vol. 9, p.348,
has to say in the course of a description of Indian archaeology: “Curiously, however, it is precisely in
those regions that used iron, and were associated with the horse, that
the Indo-Aryan languages did not spread. Even today, these are the regions of
the Dravidian language group”.
Witzel, for example, even while claiming that "linguistic and textual studies confirm the
presence of an outside, Indo-Aryan speaking element, whose language and
spiritual culture has definitely been introduced, along with the horse and
the spoked wheel chariot, via the BMAC area into northwestern South Asia", immediately admits that: "However, much of present-day
Archaeology denies that. [....] So far, clear archaeological evidence has
just not been found” (WITZEL 2000a:§15).
Therefore, unless one is willing to accept that no such people as
the "Vedic Aryans", and no such things as the Vedic chariot and Vedic
horse, ever existed, it must be accepted that the whole set of arguments
concerning (the alleged absence of) horse bones in the Harappan civilization
are fake, fraudulent and irrelevant. Insisting on the "Aryan"
presence in the BMAC and the Punjab areas in the concerned periods in spite
of the absence of horse bones, and denying their presence in the Harappan areas
and period on the grounds of (the alleged) absence of horse bones
amounts to extreme special pleading.
3. The Linguistic evidence clearly completely disproves any idea
that the horse was unknown to the non-Indo-European language speaking people of
India before "Aryans" brought it all the way from the Ukrainian
Steppes and introduced it to them. The evidence shows that the horse, whether
as a magnificent exotic wild beast from beyond the northwest or as an already
domesticated animal, was individually and separately known to the
"non-Aryans" of India: as I pointed out in my first book: “Sanskrit has many words for the horse: aśva, arvant or arvvā, haya, vājin, sapti, turanga, kilvī, pracelaka and ghoṭaka, to name the most prominent
among them. And yet, the Dravidian languages show no trace of having borrowed
any of these words; they have their own words kudirai, parī and mā […] The Santali and
Mundari languages, however, have preserved the original Kol-Munda word sādom. Not only has no linguist ever
claimed that the Dravidian and Kol-Munda words for ‘horse’ are borrowed from
‘Aryan’ words, but in fact some linguists have even sought to establish that
Sanskrit ghoṭaka, from which all
modern Indo-Aryan words are derived, is borrowed from the Kol-Munda languages!”
(TALAGERI 1993:160).
The
above point is “echoed” by none other than Michael Witzel: “Dravidian and Indo-Aryan (IE) words for
domesticated animals are quite different from each other, for example, Drav.
DEDR 500 Tam. ivuḷi, Brah. (h)ullī,
1711 Tam. kutirai, etc. DEDR 3963
Tam. pari ‘runner’, 4870 Tam. mā ‘animal’ (horse, elephant), Tel. māvu ‘horse’, cf. Nahali māv ‘horse’ […]; they have no relation with IA aśva
‘horse’ and various words for ‘runner’ (arvant,
vājin, etc.).” Further, he adds: “Obviously, use of horses is not linked to
speakers of an IA language” (WITZEL 2000a: §15). So, clearly, horses were
not introduced to the "non-Aryans" of India by "invading
Aryans". [In an article in an Indian newspaper, as part of a political
media campaign in 2002, Witzel, however, alleges that the words in the
"non-Aryan" languages of India are borrowed from different West
Asian, and even Chinese, sources. He naturally does not explain the mode by
which those words landed into these "non-Aryan" Indian languages and
became so central to them. But, in any case, it still means that the horse was
known to the non-Indo-European language speakers of India by means other than
through an introduction by "Aryans"].
4.
The literary evidence in the Rigveda clearly shows that the horse was a
well-known and respected animal right from the period of the Old Books. Naturally,
this exotic, rare and much-prized animal from the (then) areas of the Anu-s and
Druhyu-s in Central Asia could not possibly have been unknown to the
Vedic Aryans in 3000 BCE: but the horse clearly became commoner and more important
only with the invention of the spoked wheels in the period of the New Books:
a. The
word ara- for "spoke" is found only in the New Books
(5,1,8,9,10):
V.13.6;
58.5.
I.32.15;
141.9; 164.11,12,13,48.
VIII.20.14;
77.3.
X.78.4.
b.
Likewise, names with aśva and ratha
appear only within the New Books:
V.27.4,5,6;
33.9; 36.6; 52.1; 61.5,10; 79.2.
I.36.18;
100.16,17; 112.10,15; 116.6,16; 117.17,18; 122.7,13.
VIII.1.30,32;
9.10; 23.16,23,24; 24.14,22,23,28,29; 26.9,11; 35.19,20,21;
36.7; 37.7; 38.8; 46.21,33; 68.15,16.
IX.65.7.
X.49.6;
60.5; 61.21.
c. And also
in the names of composers of the following hymns:
V.47,
52-61, 81-82.
I.100.
VIII.14-15,
23-26, 35-38, 46.
IX.32.
X.102,134.
d. The
Bhṛgu ṛṣi,
Dadhyañc, who introduced the secrets of the northwest to Indra, is supposed to
have the head of a horse (I.116.12; 117.22; 119.9),
and the Bhṛgu-s (IV.16.20) and the Anu-s (V.31.4)
are credited with inventing the chariot for Indra. This may show the direction
of movement of innovations concerning the horse and the chariot (but obviously
it does not show the movements of the Vedic Aryans themselves).
The
horse, though not native to India, was definitely known to the PIEs in
their homeland, but this fits in perfectly well with the Indian Homeland scenario
recorded in the Indian texts.
5. COWS:
Finally, we come to that animal which is most central to the
Indo-European ethos: much more central than the horse: i.e. the cow. In
spite of all the rhetoric about "Aryans" and their horses, it is the
cow which is central to the identity of the "pastoral Aryans", but,
unlike the other flora and fauna discussed so far, the cow rarely seems to form
a central point of discussion in faunal debates on the location of the Homeland
(by advocates of the South Russian Steppes theory), for obvious reasons, as we
will see. The cow/bull/cattle is probably the only animal (other than the dog,
domesticated from prehistoric times) which has a form of the reconstructed PIE
name in every single branch: PIE *gwṓus, Indo-Aryan Skt. gáuh, Iranian Av. gāuš,
Armenian kov, Greek boûs, Albanian ka, Anatolian Hier.Luw. wawa-,
Tocharian keu, Italic Latin bōs, Celtic Old Irish bō,
Germanic German kuh, Baltic Lithuanian guovs, Slavic OCS govēždi.
Gamkrelidze, an advocate of the Anatolian Homeland
theory, points out that "the economic function of the cow as a dairy
animal can be reconstructed for a period of great antiquity"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:485), and further that "The presence of cows and
bulls among domestic animals goes back to an ancient period well before the
domestication of the wild horse. Evidence of domesticated bulls and cows is
found by the beginning of the Neolithic" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:489). But
then follows some misdirection to fit in with his Anatolian Homeland theory.
Gamkrelidze tells us: "There are two major centers of cattle
domestication in Eurasia: a European zone where the ancestral wild cow was the
huge European bison (Bos Primigenius Boj.), and a western Asian area
where the ancestral wild cows were distinct species [....] the western
Asian area is considered the center of first domestication of wild cattle" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:489-490). He repeatedly
proceeds to refer to these as "the two centers of domestication"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:490). Then, he adds the clincher: "Indo-European
dialects preserve words from a common base *thauro-, - originally
'wild cow, wild bull' in Indo-European - a Near Eastern migratory term, which
shows that the speakers of these dialects were acquainted with the wild cows
found specifically in the Near East" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:491).
The above contains many glaring misrepresentations,
which will become clear when we see the actual facts, all of which point
unanimously to an Indian Homeland:
1.
There are indeed "two centers of domestication" of the
cow (i.e. of domestic cattle), and they are not the subject of any controversy.
The wikipedia article on "Cattle" unambiguously tells us: "Archeozoological and genetic data
indicate that cattle were first domesticated from wild aurochs (Bos
primigenius) approximately 10,500 years ago. There were two major areas of
domestication: one in the area that is now Turkey, giving rise to the taurine
line, and a second in the area that is now Pakistan, resulting in the
indicine line
[….] European cattle are largely descended from the taurine lineage". All other academic sources regularly point out that "the
Indus Valley Civilization" was one of the two centers of domestication
of cattle. [So much for the glaring difference between the "urban
Harappans" and "pastoral Aryans"].
2.
The Rigveda is an extremely cow-centered text. Not only is the cow mentioned
many more times than any other animal (including the horse), but the word go-/gau-
in the Rigveda is replete with many naturalistic and mystic meanings (where it represents
the rays of the sun, the earth, the stars, and many other more mystic things
not within the scope of this article) showing it to be a central feature of the
Rigvedic religion and socio-economic environment. But even more linguistically
important is that the Sanskrit language contains every single common IE word
associated with cows and cattle, except, significantly, the "Near
Eastern migratory term" referred to by Gamkrelidze (the implications
of the absence of which, in the three eastern branches, definitely shows
that "the speakers of these dialects were not acquainted with
the wild cows found specifically in the Near East" (GAMKRELIDZE
1995:491 paraphrased) as already discussed earlier). Mallory tells us there are
three different words for "cow" in the IE languages, *gwṓus, *h1eĝh, and *wokéha-. The first,
as we saw, is found in all the twelve branches. As for the other words for cow,
bull, cattle, they are found in Indo-Aryan + different
other branches:
a. *h1eĝh "cow": Skt. ahī-, Armenian ezn,
Celtic (Old Irish) ag.
b. *wokéha- "cow": Skt. vaśā-,
Italic (Latin) vacca.
c. *phekhu- "livestock": Skt. paśu-,
Iranian (Avestan) pasu-, Italic (Latin) pecū,
Germanic (Old English) feoh, Baltic (Lithuanian) pēkus.
d. *uk(w)sēn "ox": Skt. ukṣan-, Iranian (Avestan) uxšan, Tocharian okso, Germanic (English) ox, Celtic (Old
Irish) oss.
e. *wṛs-en "bull": Skt. vṛṣṇí-, Iranian (Avestan) varəšna-.
f. *usr- "cow/bull": Skt. usra/usrā,
Germanic ūro (from ūrochso).
g. *domhoyos
"young bull": Skt. damya-,
Celtic (Old Irish) dam, Albanian dem, Greek damálēs.
This last is particularly significant. Gamkrelidze points out the
following: "that speakers of Proto-Indo-European were among those who
domesticated wild cattle is also shown by the presence in Indo-European of
another term for 'bull', derived from the verb *t'emH- 'tame, subdue: bridle:
force': OIr dam 'bull', Ved. damya- 'young bull to be tamed', Alb. dem 'young
bull', (Mayrhofer 1963:II.35), Gr. damálēs,
'young bull to be tamed', damálē 'heifer'"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:491). The weight of the
evidence, however, shows that this "taming" took place in the area of
the Vedic people, and not in West Asia as Gamkrelidze tries to suggest.
Further, the following two words also illustrate the developed
role of dairying in the PIE world: a) Skt. goṣṭhá- and Celtiberian (an
extinct Celtic language spoken in Spain) boustom, "cattle-shed";
and b) a common PIE word for "udder": Skt. ūdhar-, Greek oŭthar,
Latin ūber, Germanic (English) udder. Again, Indo-Aryan is the
common factor.
3. The Vedic Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches, with their earliest
recorded history located in northwestern India, have preserved the original
verb "to milk": Ved. duh-/dugh- and Iranian dox-.
This verb is lost in all the other branches, but the fact that this is the
original verb is proved by the occurrence of the root in a very basic family
relationship name indicative of the centrality of the dairying culture in the
PIE world: "The dialect words for 'daughter' are an important set that
go back to this root: Skt. duhitár- 'daughter', Avest. dugədar,
Arm. dustr, Gk. thugátēr [....] Engl. daughter,
OPruss. duckti, Russ. doč', Toch B. tkácer"
(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:486, fn.41). The word has long been believed to signify
"milkmaid", indicating that milking the cow was an important part of
the duties of the daughter of the house in a typical PIE household.
The Vedic Indo-Aryan branch also derives its basic word for
"milk" from this root: dugdhá-. Iranian, however, uses two
other words: Avestan xšvīd- (modern Persian šīr) and Avestan paēman,
(modern Persian pīnū, "sour milk"). Both these words have
their counterparts in Vedic: kṣīr- and payas-, both also meaning
"milk". The words have counterparts in other branches as well (Albanian hirrë "whey", Baltic Lithuanian svíestas
"butter", píenas "milk"). Another Vedic word ghṛta
"cream, butter, ghee" is found as gert "milk" in
Celtic Irish. And Vedic dádhi (gen. dadhnás) "yogurt/curds,
sour milk" is found as dadan "milk" in Baltic Old
Prussian and djathë "cheese" in Albanian.
However, there is another very widespread word for the
verb "to milk", found in eight branches: PIE *melk'-,
Tocharian mālklune, Celtic Irish bligim, Italic (Latin) mulgeō,
Germanic (English) to milk, Baltic (Lithuanian) mélžti, Slavic (Old Russian) mlĕsti,
Greek amélgo, Albanian mjel. Four of
them also derive the noun "milk" from this root: Tocharian malke/malkwer,
Celtic Old Irish melg/mlicht/blicht, Germanic (English) milk,
Slavic (OCS) mlĕko, (Russian) moloko. From this
circumstance, Gamkrelidze treats this root as the original word for
"milk", and writes: "It is noteworthy that Indo-Iranian
replaces both the original verb 'milk', *melk'-, and the original noun 'milk'.
This may have had to do with specific details of the evolution of dairying
among the cattle-breeding Indo-Iranian tribes after their separation from the
other Indo-European tribes" (GAMKRELIDZE
1995:486). But the idea that this was the original word is disproved by the
fact that:
a) it is totally missing in the Indo-Aryan (apart
from the Iranian) branch which retains every major common word associated
with cattle-breeding and dairying, and which is situated in the heart of
one of the two primary centres of cattle-domestication in the world (as
Gamkrelidze puts it: "In Sanskrit and Old Iranian we already find a
highly developed terminology associated with the dairying function of cows"
GAMKRELIDZE 1995:485, fn.35), and it would be strange that they should
completely have forgotten the original word for "milking/milk" (if it
were *melk'-),
b) it is also totally missing in the Anatolian
(Hittite) branch, and
c) the Indian root duh-, which is also the root
for the word for "daughter" (as the "milkmaid" in the
typical pastoral PIE family), proves to be older and more primitive and
deep-rooted.
So, clearly, PIE *melk'- is a new word
developed among the PIEs in their secondary Homeland in and around Central Asia
after they migrated out from the northwest.
There is also another word for "milk" found
in Greek gála-
(gen. gálaktos), Italic (Latin) lac (gen. lactis), both
meaning "milk" (note: the word galaxy "the milky
way"), and Hittite galattar "a pleasant-tasting plant
juice" (note Greek gála- is also
"plant sap", as is Latin lac herbārum). This is another word
which may have developed separately in Central Asia. [Pure speculation:
could it be connected with Sanskrit go-rasa "milk" from go-
"cow" and rasa "plant sap/juice"?]
In any case, to sum up, a comparison of the flora and fauna in
Indo-Aryan with the flora and fauna in PIE and the various Indo-European branches
points towards India as the original Homeland, and shows a changing landscape
of flora and fauna as the IE branches migrated north-westwards into Afghanistan
and Central Asia and then further westwards and north-westwards into their
historical areas. The elephant, with which we started, symbolizes the original
Indian ethos of the PIE environment.
Note added 22/7/2019: Inspite of the persistent
AIT stand that "pastoral" migrants from the Steppes brought the
Indo-Aryan languages into the "urbanite" Harappan areas, no-one has been able to show the presence of the
western cattle, bos taurus, which would necessarily have been the
species of domesticated cattle that "pastoralists" from the Steppes
would have brought into India. The Indian cattle in the area before and since Harappan
times have been the Indian zebu humped cattle native to that area itself. On
the contrary, very recent scientific studies have confirmed that the Indian
humped zebu cattle, bos indicus, domesticated in the Harappan area since thousands of years,
suddenly started appearing in West Asia around 2200 BCE, and by 2000 BCE there
was largescale mixing of the Indian zebu cattle, bos indicus, with the
genetically distinct western species of cattle, bos taurus, in West
Asia. Thus we have three very distinct animal species native to India - the
elephant, the peacock and the domesticated Indian zebu cattle -
appearing in West Asia exactly coinciding with the presence and activities of
the Mitanni in West Asia at the time, thus confirming that the Mitanni people
were migrants from India to West Asia around 2200 BCE:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6449/173
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