The New Western Academic Crusaders and Fire-Fighters in the AIT-vs.-OIT War

 

The New Western Academic Crusaders and Fire-Fighters in the AIT-vs.-OIT War

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

Till the early nineteen-nineties, western academicians had a field day in the discussion on ancient (Vedic-Harappan) India: the AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory) had no serious rivals in theory or scholarship, except polemical Hindu opponents of the idea that the "Vedic Aryans" were "outsiders" who had brought in the Vedic language, religion and culture into India from "outside" somewhere around 1500 BCE or so, and that the Indian population before that date consisted of "non-Aryans" (i.e. people who spoke non-Indo-European languages).

The whole subject has been discussed in detail in chapter 8 "Misinterpretations of Rigvedic History" in my book "The Rigveda - A Historical Analysis" (TALAGERI 2000:335-424). Even prominent Hindu scholars had accepted the AIT blindly: there was a whole school of Brahmin scholars in Maharashtra (and probably in other parts of the country as well) who grabbed at the AIT eagerly as evidence that they (the Brahmins) were originally ethnically different from and superior to other-caste (particularly "lower-caste") Indians and were ethnically related to the British colonial rulers of India. There is an article by Madhav Deshpande (a colleague of Michael Witzel in his EJVS),  which deals with this phenomenon, "Aryan origins: arguments from the nineteenth-century Maharashtra" (DESHPANDE 2005). Even Lokmanya Tilak in his book "Arctic Home in the Vedas" (TILAK 1903) promoted the AIT aggressively, and Savarkar in his book "Hindutva" (SAVARKAR 1923) accepted it without question. Eminent scholars like F.E. Pargiter and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar strongly rejected the theory, but, at one point, they seemed to feel that maybe it was "proven" by linguists, and so made half-hearted attempts to reconcile with the theory. Eminent Hindu thinkers like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo wrote volumes of rhetoric against the AIT, but quotations can be cited from their writings showing that they had also subconsciously digested the essence of the theory.

However, in the early nineties, the blind acceptance, without questioning, of the theory suddenly ceased, and various detailed analyses of the linguistic, literary and archaeological arguments came to be published. The trickle, had started earlier with the books by K.D. Sethna around 1981. Sethna, however, chose to effect a compromise by proposing a long "belt of ancient Aryanism" stretching out from NW India to the Steppes to sidestep debates about any direction of migrations. The acceptance of the linguistic and literary facts and the proposal of a full-fledged new OIT ("Out-of-India theory") based on these started with my first book in 1991 (I know this sounds egoistic, but it is a fact, though not the subject of this article). But what really queered the pitch for the AIT scholars was the satellite imaging of the Harappan sites, which showed that the majority of the Harappan sites were situated on the banks of the now-dry Sarasvatī  (the Ghaggar-Hakra river complex) rather than on the banks of the Indus, and the geological dating which showed that this Sarasvatī  had started drying up by around 1900 BCE. The combination of these two facts with the literary evidence in the Rigveda, which showed that the Rigvedic civilization flourished on the banks of this river during its full-fledged flow, threw a very substantial spanner into the works of the AIT which required an "Aryan invasion" after 1500 BCE and a Rigveda composed after that by 1200-1000 BCE.

This started a full-fledged AIT-vs.-OIT war, although the western academics have successfully managed to keep it under wraps and project the case as if the OIT is just a wishful fad of a lunatic fringe among Hindus. Nevertheless the shifting of the OIT case from mere wishful rhetoric to deep research and analysis of the data, facts and evidence (in the fields of literary data, linguistics and archaeology) has really set the cat among the pigeons for the western academic historians. What gets their goat the most is that very important facts established by their own 200-year-old research, and explained as proving the AIT, are now found on deeper inspection to be actually disproving the AIT case and proving the OIT case: a very large number of such examples have been presented by me in my analysis of the linguistic data, such as the one-way borrowing of a huge number of very basic "Indo-Iranian" words in the Uralic languages (including apparently words referring to the Bactrian camel!) with no corresponding borrowings from Uralic to "Indo-Iranian", or the borrowing of words for "wine" and "taurus" from the Semitic languages by all the branches of IE languages to the west of the Semitic longitudes but not by the three branches to the east of these longitudes (Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Tocharian).

The academicians, who have been writing in support of the AIT for decades, and have an even longer academic "heritage" of such writings behind them, find themselves between the devil and the deep sea: on the one hand their egos, the established academic vested interests, and the now-entrenched Hinduphobic nature of western academia, will not allow them to accept the truth, and on the other hand they dare not even try to openly contest it for fear of exposing themselves, or being forced willy-nilly to accept the truth, or else inadvertently bring into the academic debate (and the public eye) the new and clinching research that they want to suppress. So stonewalling is the only avenue left for them.

Scholars who make the mistake of trying to engage with me realize that they have probably bitten off more than they can chew, and waste no time in backing out of the debate before it is too late. For one such example, see my blog article "Two Papers by the Renowned Indologist P.E.Dumont". It was written in June 2015, and sent on 5/7/2015 to a western scholar Christophe Vielle, a member of the Indology List, who had sent me these two papers by P.E.Dumont and asked me to write my views on those papers so that we could have a discussion on those papers as a prelude to discussing the AIT/OIT. Koenraad Elst had introduced us, after telling me that some members on the Indology List (whose members had otherwise carefully avoided any debate with me till then) were interested in having a debate on the AIT/OIT. However, after I sent the article, there was a deafening silence, and Vielle backed out of any further contact. Later, Koenraad told me in a mail that they were expecting me to make some glaring mistakes in my article which they could use against me, but after reading the article they wisely beat a retreat. I suspect they expected a different reaction to the paper on the Babylonian rituals, where I would "expose" myself. However, they found the article unanswerable.

So generally, these academicians leave the dirty field work of fighting in the trenches to the efficient leftist corps in the media (at least as strong within the Indian media as within the western media) and in Indian academia, who can carry on the Goebbelsian work of spreading the lies much more efficiently and effectively, and safely and profitably, than these academicians.

However, the scholars are not completely out of the picture. They have produced a great many academic crusaders and (now that the OIT case is setting the records straight with the data that they, the western academicians, themselves presented through the last two centuries) fire-fighters to try to turn the tide or salvage the remains. I have dealt in excruciating detail with many of these crusaders and fire-fighters in my various books and blogs, and I am presenting some of the more important examples here in this article, which will have the following three sections, plus an appendix for anyone wanting further data:

I. Witzel and Joseph: The Sarasvatī  and the Gaṅgā.

II. Johanna Nichols: The Epicenter of the Indo-European Spread.

III. W.E.Clark: The Mitanni Evidence.

Appendix: The Evidence for the Ghaggar-Hakra.

 

I have already dealt with the first two topics in my earlier writings, so there will be quite a bit of copy-pasting there. The third topic, however, is a new attempt at fire-fighting which was brought to my notice in the comments section of one of my recent articles, and is in fact the reason why I decided to write this article in the first place.

 

I. Witzel and Joseph: The Sarasvatī  and the Gaṅgā

IA. The Sarasvatī :

As pointed out, the importance of the Sarasvatī  river in Vedic history (and now, from the satellite imagery, also in the Harappan civilizational history) alerted the western academicians supporting the AIT to the fact that the identification of the Vedic Sarasvatī  with the Ghaggar-Hakra river-complex, which had started drying up by 1900 BCE, was lethal to the AIT case. It was not impossible, but not very easy either, for western academicians to suddenly execute an about-turn on this issue, but, as pointed out above, the fighters in the trenches, the leftist media persons and the powerful and openly anti-Hindu "eminent historians" like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib in the Indian universities, were ideal for propagating the new view, and they have been doing so on a war-footing in the last few decades.

After they set the ball rolling, the debate hotted up in the early 1990s, and after that there have been floods of articles and papers by supporters of the AIT to try and salvage the situation. A search of the academic world and the media and internet will reveal a (very much recent) massive and cacophonic propaganda campaign trying to establish that the Sarasvatī  of the Rigveda is in Afghanistan.

[As Michel Danino points out: "Scholars such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and the late RS Sharma started questioning this identification in the 1980s. What prompted this rather late reaction? It was a new development: A study of the evolution of the pattern of Harappan settlements in the Saraswati basin now revealed that in its central part — roughly southwest Haryana, southern Punjab and northern Rajasthan — most or all Harappan sites were abandoned sometime around 1900 BCE, a period coinciding with the end of the urban phase of the Indus civilisation. Clearly, the river system collapsed — which archaeologists now saw as a factor contributing to the end of the brilliant Indus civilisation.

Why was this a problem? We must remember that the Saraswati is lavishly praised both as a river and a Goddess in the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns which mainstream Indology says was composed by Indo-Aryans shortly after their migration to India around 1500 BCE. However, by that time, the Saraswati had been reduced to a minor seasonal stream: How could the said Aryans praise it as a ‘mighty river’, the ‘best of rivers’, ‘mother of waters’, etc? There is a chronological impossibility. Hence, the objectors asserted, the Ghaggar-Hakra was not, after all, the Saraswati extolled in the Rig Veda. While some (Rajesh Kochhar) tried to relocate the river in Afghanistan, others (Irfan Habib) decided that the Saraswati was not a particular river but “the river in the abstract, the River Goddess”; but both theses ran against the Rig Veda’s own testimony that the river flowed between the Yamuna and the Sutlej." (DANINO:2010/2012)].

The dirtiest and most unscrupulous part of this campaign is the attempt to portray the false picture that an almost universal earlier consensus that the Vedic Sarasvatī was in Afghanistan is now being sought to be replaced by "migration denialists" with a new idea that the present-day Ghaggar-Hakra is the Vedic Sarasvatī.

Tony Joseph, in his much hyped book, insinuates that the identification of the Vedic Sarasvatī  with the Ghaggar-Hakra is a new ploy of  some "migration denialists" (i.e. anti-AIT Hindus), whose "one of their main arguments is built around identifying the mighty river Sarasvatī  mentioned in the Rigveda with the rain-fed, mostly dry, seasonal river Ghaggar that originates in the foothills of the Shivalik Hills and flows through flows through Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan before going across to Cholistan and then Sindh, both in Pakistan. The river is mostly known as Ghaggar in India, and Hakra after that." (JOSEPH 2018:223)  He quotes Michael Witzel as his western academic scholarly witness that this identification is wrong.

The Witzel he is quoting on the Sarasvatī  is of course the new avatar of Witzel after his realization of the lethal nature of the Sarasvatī  evidence, and this new view was first enunciated by him in his response to my second book "The Rigveda - A Historical Evidence" (TALAGERI 2000): "the Haryana River Sarasvatī (mod. Sarsuti) is not found in the old parts of book 6. Incidentally, it is entirely unclear that the physical river Sarasvatī is meant in some of these spurious hymns: in 6.49.7 the Sarasvatī is a woman and in 50.12 a deity, not necessarily the river (Witzel 1984). (At 52.6, however it is a river, and in 61.1-7 both a river and a deity -- which can be located anywhere from the Arachosian Sarasvatī to the Night time sky, with no clear localization)." (WITZEL 2001b: §7).

 

So what is the reality: which is the original scholarly consensus about the identity of the Rigvedic Sarasvatī , and which is the new revisionist view concocted especially for the AIT-vs.-OIT debate?

A look at the 200 years of Indological research on the subject shows that the original scholarly consensus about the identity of the Rigvedic Sarasvatī  was that it was identical with the Ghaggar-Hakra of Haryana and further south:

The first western scholar to propose that the Ghaggar-Hakra was the Vedic Saraswati was the French geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin in 1855 in his very massive and detailed book "Geography of India’s North-West According to the Vedic Hymns".

After that, this identification has been fully endorsed by almost every single eminent Indologist, geologist and archaeologist in the last over 160 years. A partial representative list, first of the western scholars down the ages, and then the Indian (and Pakistani) ones: Max Müller, Keith and Macdonell, Monier-Williams, Pischel, Edward Thomas, George Raverty, Geldner, Hopkins, R.D.Oldham, C.F.Oldham, Wilson, Renou, Benfey, Muir, Lassen, Stein, Jane McIntosh, Wilhelmy, Mortimer Wheeler, Bridget and Raymond Allchin, Gregory Possehl, JM Kenoyer, Jean-Marie Casal, Kenneth Kennedy, Rosen, Southworth, Pargiter, Gowen, Burrow, Basham, Shamsul Islam Siddiqui, AH Dani, BB Lal, SP Gupta, VN Misra, Dilip Chakrabarti, M. Israil Khan, S.R.Rao, K.S.Valdiya, A.D.Pusalker, H.C.Raychaudhary, D.C.Sircar, Ashok Aklujkar, and many many more.

A few scholars (Bergaigne, Lommel, Lüder), on the basis of the present-day poor condition of the Ghaggar-Hakra, had expressed doubts, and concluded that the Rigvedic river may have been "a celestial river" and not an earthly one, and on the same grounds Roth suggested that it could be another name for the Indus. Roth's suggestion was partially accepted by Zimmer, Griffith, Hillebrandt and Ludwig, and yet all these scholars, Roth included, accepted that in many hymns of the Rigveda, it did indeed refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra!

Only a few scholars, such as Brunnhofer, Hertel and Hüsing held that the Rigvedic Sarasvatī  was in Afghanistan or even in Iran: but since these scholars located the whole of the text (even the Gaṅgā and Yamunā!) in Afghanistan and Iran, and this identification of the Sarasvatī  was only a part of their whole scenario, their writings on this point were outright rejected by all the other Indologists.

Some of the Indologists, to fit the name into the AIT scenario, did suggest that the name of the Sarasvatī  in the Rigveda (although it did refer to the Sarasvatī  of Haryana) represented a memory of an older Sarasvatī  in Afghanistan through which the invading/migrating Indo-Aryans entered India. But even they did not suggest that the Rigvedic Sarasvatī  itself was the river of Afghanistan. And this is what George Erdosy (like many other Indologists) has to say about this:

“As for Burrow’s thesis (Burrow 1973) that some place names reflect the names of geographical features to the west, and thus preserve an ancestral home, they once again rather rely on an assumption of Arya migrations than prove it. […] His cited equivalence of Sanskrit Saraswati and Avestan Haraxvaiti is a case in point. Burrow accepts that it is the latter term that is borrowed, undergoing the usual change of s- > h in the process, but suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran, then it was brought into India at the time of the migrations, while its original bearer had its name modified by the speakers of Avestan who assumed control of the areas vacated by proto-Indoaryans. It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion” (ERDOSY 1989:41-42).

 

Tony Joseph persistently cites Michael Witzel as an authority (and Witzel enthusiastically endorses this book). Here is what Witzel himself had to say on this matter before the full implications, for the AIT, of the identification were made clear by me in my books:

 

In this paper on Rigvedic history written in 1995, Witzel categorically tells us “Sarasvatī = Sarsuti; Ghaggar-Hakra” (WITZEL 1995b:318). He concludes the paper/article with a summary of the “Geographical Data in the Rigveda” in detailed charts covering ten pages (WITZEL 1995b:343-352), giving the geographical data classified into columns as per five areas (which he classifies as West, Northwest, Panjab, Kurukṣetra, East) from west to east.

In these charts, he specifically locates every single reference (mentioned by him) to the Sarasvatī in Books 6, 3 and 7 exclusively in Kurukṣetra: VI.61.3,10 (WITZEL 1995b:343, 349), III.23.4 (WITZEL 1995b:343, 347), VII.36.6 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349), VII.95.2 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349) and VII.96.1,2 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349). Further, wherever, in the main body of the article, he gives geographical areas in sequence from west to east in these three Books, the Sarasvatī is inevitably to the east of the Punjab (WITZEL 1995b:318, 320).

He does locate some of the references to the Sarasvatī, in three of the other Books (2, 8 and 10), to the West (i.e. Afghanistan): II.41.6 (WITZEL 1995b:343, 346), VIII.21.17-18 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 350) and X.64.9 (WITZEL 1995b:345, 352). In doing so, he creates an uncalled for dual entity in the Rigveda (to use his favourite phrase, "Occam's razor applies"): a Sarasvatī in Kurukṣetra as well as a Sarasvatī in Afghanistan. Even then, it may be noted that the references to the Sarasvatī in Kurukṣetra appear exclusively in the earlier Books, and the alleged references to the Sarasvatī in Afghanistan appear exclusively in the later Books!

But note what he actually has to say about each of these three references:

1. He places a doubtful question mark after his location of the Sarasvatī of Book 2 in the West (Afghanistan), in both the places where he locates it there on his charts: “Sarasvatī? 2.41.6” (WITZEL 1995b:343, 346); and, in the main text of his article, he uses the word “probably” when suggesting, without any particular reason to do so, that the Sarasvatī of this Book, in II.3.8 at least, could refer to “the Avestan Haraxvaiti rather than […] to the modern Ghaggar-Hakra in the Panjab” (WITZEL 1995b:331).

Then he vaguely admits, in a footnote, that “since Gārtsamāda Śaunaka is made a Bhārgava, he could be later than Book 6” (WITZEL 1995b:316): that is, since Gṛtsamada, the ṛṣi of Book 2, was originally a descendant of Śunahotra Āngiras of Book 6, Book 2 could be later than Book 6. Since the earlier Sarasvatī of Book 6 is placed by Witzel himself in Kurukṣetra, the later Sarasvatī of Book 2 could hardly be the river of Afghanistan.

Moreover the references to the Sarasvatī in Book 2 are clearly associated with Kurukṣetra and not with Afghanistan: in II.3.8, which Witzel, above, suggests could refer to the river of Afghanistan rather than the Ghaggar-Hakra of Kurukṣetra, the Sarasvatī is actually mentioned alongwith the other two great goddesses of Kurukṣetra, Iḷā and Bhāratī, and, the previous verse II.3.7 refers to “the three high places” of these three goddesses “at the centre of the earth”. And Witzel himself points out, in the course of his description of Kurukṣetra, that it “became the heartland of the Bharatas well into the Vedic period. it is here that 3.53.11 places the centre of the earth” (WITZEL 1995b:339).

2. Likewise, Witzel’s location of the Sarasvatī of Book 8 in Afghanistan is neutralized by the fact that he locates the same verses, VIII.21.17-18, on the same page (WITZEL 1995:350), once in Iran (i.e. “eastern Iran” = Afghanistan) and once also in Kurukṣetra. And, for what it is worth, the location in Afghanistan is followed by a speculative question mark, but the location in Kurukṣetra is not.

3. That leaves only Witzel’s speculative location of the reference to the Sarasvatī in Book 10 in Afghanistan. Book 10 is undoubtedly the latest Book in the Rigveda, and there is no logical reason why it should be supposed that the Sarasvatī referred to in X.64.9 should be a different one from the Sarasvatī referred to in the rest of the Rigveda. Also note, the crucial reference (in the nadī sūkta) which specifically places the Sarasvatī in Kurukṣetra (X.75.5) in the vicinity of the Gaṅgā  and Yamunā, is in the same latest book of the Rigveda.

So what are we to conclude from these sweeping facts: was Tony Joseph not aware that he was deliberately telling an outright lie in claiming that the identity of the Vedic Sarasvatī  with the Ghaggar-Hakra is the new invention of "some migration denialists" against an earlier consensus identifying it with the Afghan river?

 

Further, see what Witzel said earlier in two different articles written in 1995:

“[…] since the Sarasvatī, which dries up progressively after the mid-2nd millennium B.C. (Erdosy 1989), is still described as a mighty stream in the Ṛgveda, the earliest hymns in the latter must have been composed by c.1500 B.C.” (WITZEL 1995a:98).

“Prominent in book 7: it flows from the mountains to the sea (7.59.2) ― which would put the battle of ten kings prior to 1500 BC or so, due to the now well documented dessication of the Sarasvatī (Yash Pal et al. 1984) […]. Two hymns (7.95-96) are composed solely in praise of the Sarasvatī.” (WITZEL 1995b:335, fn 82).

Here, Witzel not only identified the Sarasvatī of the Rigveda with the Sarasvatī of Kurukṣetra which dried up progressively after 1500 BCE (i.e. The Ghaggar-Hakra), but noted that it “flows from the mountains to the sea” (a description now often sought to be transferred to the Harahvaiti of Afghanistan, with the Hamun-i-Hilmand lake now sought to be identified as the “sea” described in the verse).

Of course, he did not say "the Vedic people are the Harappans". But then he later realized that this would be the implication of this for the AIT, and went into damage control mode. Now note the mutual admiration society he has formed with Tony Joseph. It is clearly this desperate bid to deny the identity of the Vedic Sarasvatī  with the Ghaggar-Hakra that is new and revisionist, and is clearly a conscious attempt at scholarly fraud.

[For further details of the evidence for the Ghaggar-Hakra identity, see the appendix: The Evidence for the Ghaggar-Hakra].

IB. The Gaṅgā:

At this point, it will be appropriate to note also the opportunistic about turn by Witzel in respect of the position of the Gaṅgā in Rigvedic chronology and history.

The importance of the Gaṅgā  (along with that of the neighbouring Yamunā) lies in the fact that while the Indus and its western tributaries are completely missing in the three oldest Books of the Rigveda (6, 3 and 7), the Gaṅgā  and the Yamunā and other rivers east of the Sarasvatī, apart from the Sarasvatī itself, are very prominent in these Books.

The Gaṅgā  is referred to in the Rigveda by two names: Gaṅgā  and Jahnāvī (in later times, Jāhnavī). The verses which refer to the Gaṅgā  are VI.45.31 and X.75.5, and the verses which refer to the Jahnāvī are III.58.6 and I.116.19 respectively.

Not only is the Gaṅgā , the easternmost river in the Rigveda, found mentioned in the two oldest Books of the Rigveda (6 and 3), but the nature of the references makes it clear that the river is an old familiar feature of the Rigvedic landscape: VI.45.31 speaks familiarly about the wide bushes on the banks of the Gaṅgā , and III.58.6 refers to the (banks of) the Jahnāvī as the “ancient home” of the Vedic Gods.

Witzel, in his “review” of TALAGERI 2000, rejects outright the identity of the Jahnāvī with the Gaṅgā , and tells us: “Jahnāvī was the wife or a female relation of Jahnu or otherwise connected to him or his clan”, and adds: “To turn the word Jahnāvī into a name for the Ganges can be done only by retro-fitting the RV evidence to Epic-Purāṇic concepts or to Talagerian conceits of a Gangetic (Uttar Pradesh) homeland of the RV and of the Aryans/Indo-Europeans (T., 1993) In short, Jahnāvī ‘Ganges’ is not found in the RV” (WITZEL 2001b:§4). He repeats this in 2005: “That Jahnāvī refers to a river, the Ganges (Witzel 2001a), is an Epic/Purāṇic conceit. The word can simply be derived from that of the Jahnu clan” (WITZEL 2005:386, fn 79), and identification of it with the Gaṅgā  “is clearly based on post-Vedic identifications” (WITZEL 2005:355).

But Jahnāvī is typically a Rigvedic form of the post-Vedic Jāhnavī, and it does not require any “Epic/Purāṇic concepts” to recognize it as the name of a river: a river is a geographical feature, not a mythological entity whose identity is based on traditional historical or mythological texts.

On the other hand, Witzel’s claim that “Jahnāvī was the wife or a female relation of Jahnu or otherwise connected to him or his clan” is definitely based on Epic/Purāṇic concepts: no person named Jahnu is mentioned anywhere in the Rigveda, and while a clan named Jāhnava appears only in later Vedic texts, Jahnu himself is an Epic/Purāṇic figure probably created (like so many others in the Purāṇas, see Yadu according to SOUTHWORTH 1995:266) in order to provide a mythological explanation for the name of the river and of the clan (who may in fact have been originally named that only because they were the inhabitants of that part of the course of the Gaṅgā  which originally bore the name Jahnāvī or Jāhnavī). Not only does Witzel accept this Epic/Purāṇic person as the source of the Rigvedic word Jahnāvī, he even visualizes, in the manner of the Amar Chitrakatha comic books, a mysterious lady named Jahnāvī, “the wife or a female relation of Jahnu or otherwise connected to him or his clan”, whose very existence is completely unknown to the whole of Vedic and Epic/Purāṇic literature and Indian tradition, but who is apparently so very important in the Rigveda that she is mentioned twice (how many other ladies are mentioned twice in the Rigveda outside of references to people aided by the Aśvins?) in special references, which are worded so peculiarly (what, after all, unless she was a symbol of the motherland, like the present-day Bhāratmātā, has this lady to do with an “ancient home”), that they can be more conveniently and logically translated as references to a river!

One piece of evidence confirming that Jahnāvī is the Gaṅgā , if evidence is necessary, is the fact that the second reference to Jahnāvī, in I.116.19, is adjacent to (and forms a continuum with) verse I.116.18, which refers to Divodāsa, Bharadvāja and the dolphin, all three of whom are associated with the Gaṅgā  (the reference to the Gaṅgā  in VI.45.31 is in the Divodāsa-Bharadvāja Book 6: “In book 6 of the Bharadvāja, the Bharatas and their king Divodāsa play a central role” WITZEL 1995b:332-333).

Witzel, typically, refuses to consider this as evidence: “T.’s Gangetic dolphin is also found in the Indus river! And RV 1.116.18-19 are not as closely connected as T. wants us to believe; this is part of a long 25-verse list of the miracles of the Āśvins.” (WITZEL 2001b:§4). But Divodāsa and Bharata are associated with the Gaṅgā , and not with the Indus, and RV I.116.18-19 are definitely not unconnected, as Witzel wants us to believe. His objections clearly amount to juvenile quibbling rather than genuine doubts arising from serious examination.

But Witzel’s primary ire is directed at the implications of the reference to the Gaṅgā  in Book 6, the oldest Book of the Rigveda. In his review of TALAGERI 2000, he tells us: “One can immediately throw out the reference to the Ganges that appears at RV 6.45.31 (Gāngya). […] Applying the principles pioneered by Oldenberg, RV 6.45 can be shown to be a composite hymn built out of tṛcas at an uncertain period. The ordering principle of the old family books clearly points to the addition of all these hymns in mixed meters at the end of an Indra series. Such late additions must not be used as an argument for the age of the bulk of Book 6” (WITZEL 2001b: §7).

In later writings, he is even more categorical: “The Ganges is only mentioned twice in the RV, once directly in a late hymn (10.75.5), and once by a derived word, gāngya in a late addition (6.45.31). This occurs in a tṛca that could be an even later addition to this additional hymn, which is too long to fit the order of arrangement of the RV, see Oldenberg 1888” (WITZEL 2005:386, fn 76).

This is what he writes after the publication of TALAGERI 2000, which highlighted the lethal implications, to the AIT, of this reference to the Gaṅgā  in the oldest book of the Rigveda.

 

Now see what he had written before TALAGERI 2000:

1. In his 1995 article, he refers to this reference as follows: “BOOK 6 […] mentions even the Gaṅgā  in an unsuspicious hymn (though in a tṛca section)” (WITZEL 1995b:317). [Just above this, he also notes that “Book 5 […] even knows, in a hymn not suspected as an addition, of the Yamunā”].

Although he notes that it is in a “tṛca section”, Witzel does not see it as an obstacle to the Gaṅgā  being counted as part of the geography of Book 6 proper. He not only notes that this hymn is an “unsuspicious hymn”, he regularly counts the Gaṅgā  among the geographical data in the Rigveda for Book 6 (WITZEL 1995b:318, 320, 343, 345, 348, 352).

2. Two years later, in 1997, Witzel classifies the Rigvedic hymns into six levels of composition. The first two levels, without specifying any particular hymn, he names the “Indo-Iranian level” and the “Pre-Ṛgvedic level”. Thus he takes care of the assumed earlier stages of the Indo-Iranian period when the common Indo-Iranian poetic traditions are assumed to have been first formulated. The next four levels classify the actual Rigvedic hymns into the “Early Ṛgvedic level”, “Later Ṛgvedic level”, “Late Ṛgvedic ritual compositions” and “Early Mantra type compositions”. In the last category, he places Books 9 and 10, and in the second-last level, he places most of Book 1. In the fourth level, he places Books 3 and 7.

In the “Early Ṛgvedic level”, he names only the following: “Śamyu Bārhapatasya 6.45.1 [sic], some early Kaṇvas (in book 8)” (WITZEL 1997b:293). Thus, however vaguely and with his usual and typical careless mistakes (Bārhaspatya spelt as Bārhapatasya, etc.), he classifies hymn VI.45 in the “Early Ṛgvedic level”.

3. By 2000, Witzel is even more categorical, and much more systematic and specific in his classification. At around the time of publication of TALAGERI 2000 itself, Witzel writes as follows:

“Even now, however, three RV periods can be established, as follows:

1. early Ṛgvedic period: c.1700-1450 BCE: RV books 4, 5, 6.

2. middle, main Ṛgvedic period : c.1450-1300 BCE: books 3, 7, 8.1-47, 8.60-66 and 1.51-191, most probably also 2; prominent: Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu and Bharata chieftain Sudās and their ancestors, and

3. late Ṛgvedic period: c.1300-1200 BCE: books 1.1-50, 8.48-59 (the late Vālakhilya hymns), 8.67-103, large sections of  9, and finally 10.1-84, 10.85-191; emergence of the Kuru tribe, fully developed by the time of Parīkṣit a descendant of Trasadasyu.” (WITZEL 2000a:§6).

Witzel not only provides us with tentative dates for the different periods, but he systematically places Book 6 distinctly and categorically before at least Books 1-3 and 7-10.

Is hymn VI.45 excluded from this classification? Far from it, in his footnote to the “early Ṛgvedic period: c.1700-1450 BCE”, he writes: “With Indo-Aryan settlement mainly in Gandhāra/Panjab, but occasionally extending upto Yamunā/Gaṅgā , e.g. Atri poem 5.52.17; the relatively old poem 6.45.13 [sic] has gāngya […]” (WITZEL 2000a:§6).

Later, he reiterates: “Even the oldest books of the RV (4-6) contain data covering all of the Greater Panjab: note the rivers Sindhu 4.54.6, 4.55.3, 5.53.9 ‘Indus’; Asiknī 4.17.5 ‘Chenab’; Paruṣṇī 4.22.3. 5.52.9 ‘Ravi’; Vipāś 4.30.11 (Vibali) ‘Beas’; Yamunā 5.52.17; Gaṅgā  6.45.31 with gāngya ‘belonging to the Ganges’ […].”(WITZEL 2000a:§6).

Finally, he leaves no room for any doubt as to what he is saying: “G. van Driem and A. Parpola (1999) believe that these oldest hymns were still composed in Afghanistan […]. This is, however, not the case as these books contain references to the major rivers of the Panjab, even the Ganges (see above).” (WITZEL 2000a:§6).

Note what Witzel is writing shortly before reading TALAGERI 2000: he repeatedly refers not only to Book 6 in general, not only to hymn VI.45 in general, but specifically to the verse in that hymn which refers to the Gaṅgā , as pertaining to the “early Ṛgvedic period” and as constituting part of the geographical data of “the oldest books” and “the oldest hymns”, and he even takes up issue with other western scholars who think otherwise!

He categorically places the reference to the Gaṅgā  in VI.45.31 (as well as the reference to the Yamunā in V.52.17) before Books 1-3 and 7-10: i.e. before the Battle of the Ten Kings on the Paruṣṇī (in VII.18, 83), before the crossing of the Vipāś and the Śutudrī (in III.33), and before the establishment of the sacred fire at “the centre of the earth” in Kurukṣetra by the ancestors of Sudās (in III.23); and naturally long before the introduction of camels to Vedic ṛṣis by kings with proto-Iranian names (in VIII.5, 6, 46).

 

But immediately after reading the analysis of the Rigveda in TALAGERI 2000, there is a magical transformation in Witzel’s attitude: suddenly, he realizes that this reference “occurs in a tṛca that could be an even later addition to this additional hymn” and finds this revelation so compelling that he has no alternative except to “immediately throw out the reference to the Ganges that appears at RV 6.45.31 (Gāngya)”.

The fact is that writing in historical subjects has become a front for pursuing political agendas or personal ego-trips. Before the year 2000, also, Witzel was an AIT writer; but this was not his main battlefront. It had genuinely never occurred to him, any more than it could have occurred to any other AIT writer, that there could be a serious and fundamental threat to the AIT model on which the analysis of the ancient history of South Asia, and of the Vedic texts, had so far been based. Therefore, they could indulge in academic quibbling on other minor points within the AIT framework. Witzel was, since quite a few years before the year 2000, engaged in debate with other western academicians on the question of the linguistic identity of the Harappan language: Witzel’s contention was that the Vedic language contained a strong Munda substratum acquired in the area of the Harappan civilization, and that the language, or indeed one of the two languages, of the Harappan civilization was a Kol-Munda language. In the course of this debate, with Witzel’s contentions being challenged or opposed by other western scholars, it became necessary, for various reasons (see, for example, WITZEL 2000a:§10), for Witzel to demonstrate that the Vedic Aryans had penetrated considerably far into the interior of northern India in a considerably early period of composition of the Rigveda. Hence, all the pre-2000 assertions and conclusions about the Gaṅgā!

But, after the publication of TALAGERI 2000, priorities changed rapidly: it became necessary to close AIT ranks in a holy crusade against the new case and the new evidence for the OIT. The identity of the Harappan language could wait ― or could be pursued separately in different articles; after all, Witzel has a limitless capacity for writing mutually contradictory things, sometimes on the very same page, without causing the slightest dent in the faith and loyalty of his admirers ― what was important now was to rapidly drag the Vedic Aryans of the early period all the way back from the area of the Gaṅgā  to the safety of Afghanistan. Hence, all the post-2000 assertions and conclusions about the Gaṅgā !

 

II. Johanna Nichols: The Epicenter of the Indo-European Spread

The second fire-fighter is Johanna Nichols, but at this point let me make it clear that in my opinion she is a reluctant fire-fighter, probably practically blackmailed or coerced by strong "peer-pressure" disapproval into doing this fire-fighting against her own earlier brilliant linguistic analysis, whose lethal effect on the AIT case became apparent to the AIT crusaders among the western academic circles only after I highlighted it in both my books (in 2000 and 2008).

The very detailed and complex linguistic study by Johanna Nichols and a team of linguists in `1997, appropriately entitled "The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread", examined ancient loan-words from West Asia (Semitic and Sumerian) found in Indo-European and also in other language families like Caucasian (with three separate groups Kartvelian, Abkhaz-Circassian and Nakh-Daghestanian), and the mode and form of transmission of these loan-words into the Indo-European family as a whole as well as into particular branches, and combines this with the evidence of the spread of Uralic and its connections with Indo-European, and with several kinds of other linguistic evidence : "Several kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the centum-satem split all point in the same direction [….]: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea. The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very early IE development). The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana." (NICHOLS 1997:137): i.e. in the very area outside the exit point from Afghanistan into Central Asia indicated by the data in the Puranas regarding the emigration of the Druhyu tribes.

The defeat of the AIT on all three fronts, though still successfully stonewalled by Western Academia (and the International, including Indian, Academia that they control) to this day, has led to some swift and radical damage control measures, represented by weird about-turns by western scholars on crucial points like the identity of the Rigvedic Sarasvatī with the Ghaggar-Hakra river complex. But nothing weirder than the Stalin-era like Confession and visibly reluctant Apology by this major western linguist, Johanna Nichols, whose linguistic study on the locus of the Indo-European language spread, which she locates in Bactria-Margiana in Central Asia east of the Caspian, is mentioned above. Read the full details of Nichols' conclusions in her 1997 paper. She has posted the above paper (and another one from 1998) on academia.edu, but she prefaces the paper with the following "retraction":

 

"PARTIAL RETRACTION:

The theory of an east Caspian center of the IE spread argued for here is untenable and with much regret I retract it. It's a beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread, but it conflicts with essential archaeological and etymological facts. The paper that convinced me to abandon it is:

Darden, Bill J. 2001. On the question of the Anatolian origin of Indo-Hittite, Robert Drews, ed., Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, 184-228. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.

The rest of both chapters still stands, but the east Caspian locus is post-PIE. The PIE homeland was on the western steppe."

 

https://www.academia.edu/18306905/The_Eurasian_spread_zone_and_the_Indo-European_dispersal

 

Incredible but true. The scholar who had presented such detailed data and conclusions in 1997 and 1998 ("The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana." NICHOLS 1997:137), is now (after her conclusions were profusely quoted by opponents of the AIT) forced by academic and "peer" pressure to state (without detailed explanation in the form of data or logistics which would negate the original thesis) that "the east Caspian locus is post-PIE. The PIE homeland was on the western steppe", even as she still insists that the "rest" of what she had written "still stands"!  She fails to point out the details of the "archaeological or etymological facts" which now overturn the "beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread", or to point out which part of this theory "still stands" as opposed to the part which does not, and why she is now compelled to create this new division of her original thesis into one part which "still stands" and another part which does not.

This whole episode clearly speaks volumes about the political power and academic clout of the AIT crusaders in control of western academic studies on ancient Vedic and Indo-European history, and of the perfectly coordinated and massively successful agenda to bring about complete u-turns in matters where earlier academic analyses of the linguistic-archaeological-textual data now turn out to be lethal to the AIT case and supportive of the OIT case.

 

III. W.E.Clark: The Mitanni Evidence

The Mitanni (and Avestan) evidence presented by me in my third book "The Rigveda and the Avesta - The Final Evidence" (TALAGERI 2008) is the most clinching evidence of all, showing that the ancestors of the Mitanni kings of West Asia and of the composers of the Avesta migrated from northwestern India at some point of time before 2000 BCE during the period of composition of the New Rigveda, and that the even earlier ancestors (of the Mitanni kings and the composers of the New Rigveda) lived in an area to the east of the Sarasvatī river of Haryana further inside North India in a period far before 2500 BCE at the latest.

 

To begin with, the first fact about the Rigveda to understand is that it consists of ten Books (Maṇḍalas) which fall, five each, into two distinct chronological periods, so that we have the Old Rigveda (Books 6,3,7,4,2) and the New Rigveda (Books 5,1,8,9,10). Within the five Books of the Old Rigveda , we have the proper Old Hymns and the Redacted Hymns, the latter of which, for various reasons, were modified and redacted during the period of composition of the hymns of the New Rigveda, and therefore share to some extent the new linguistic characteristics of the New Rigveda.

The full list of Old Hymns and Redacted Hymns in the five Old Books is as follows:

Old Rigveda (280 hymns, 2368 verses)	Redacted Hymns (62 hymns, 873 verses)
II. 1-31, 33-40 (39 hymns, 394 verses).	II. 32, 41-43 (4 hymns, 35 verses).
III. 1-25, 32-33, 35, 37, 39-47, 49-50, 54-61 (48 hymns, 428 verses).	III. 26-31, 34, 36, 38, 48, 51-53, 62 (14 hymns, 189 verses).
IV. 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-47, 49, 51-54 (47 hymns, 456 verses).	IV. 15, 30-32, 37, 48, 50, 55-58 (11 hymns, 133 verses).
VI. 1-14, 17-43, 53-58, 62-73 (59 hymns, 449 verses).	VI. 15-16, 44-52, 59-61, 74-75 (16 hymns, 316 verses).
VII. 1-14, 18-30, 34-54, 56-58, 60-65, 67-73, 75-80, 82-93, 95, 97-100 (87 hymns, 641 verses).	VII. 15-17, 31-33, 55, 59, 66, 74, 81, 94, 96, 101-104 (17 hymns, 200 verses).

And the total number of hymns and verses in the three sets of hymns, is as follows:

TOTAL NUMBER OF HYMNS AND VERSES IN THE RIGVEDA:

1. Old Rigveda Books 2,3,4,6,7:  280 Hymns, 2368 verses.

2. Redacted Hymns in Old Books 2,3,4,6,7:  62 Hymns, 873 verses.

3. New Rigveda Books 1,5,8,9,10:  686 Hymns, 7311 verses.

 

The period of composition of the New Rigveda saw a totally new vocabulary come into existence which was completely missing in the Old Rigveda (for greater details, see my blog The Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda 19/8/2020 and my blog The Recorded History of the Indo-European Migrations Part 2 of 4 The Chronology and Geography of the Rigveda 27/7/2016).

And this new vocabulary is found distributed as follows in the hymns of the Rigveda:

1. Old Rigveda Books 2,3,4,6,7:  0 Hymns out of 280 = 0%.

2. Redacted Hymns in Old Books 2,3,4,6,7:  51 Hymns out of 62 = 82.26%.

3. New Rigveda Books 1,5,8,9,10:  660 Hymns out of 686 = 96.21%.

What is most significant is that a major part of the vocabulary and personal-name culture common to the Mitanni data and the Rigveda belongs to this new vocabulary which is found only in the New Rigveda and is completely missing in the Old Rigveda. This common Mitanni-Rigvedic vocabulary alone is found distributed as follows in the hymns of the Rigveda:

1. Old Rigveda Books 2,3,4,6,7:  0 Hymns out of 280 = 0%.

2. Redacted Hymns in Old Books 2,3,4,6,7:  2 Hymns out of 62 = 3.22%.

3. New Rigveda Books 1,5,8,9,10:  154 Hymns out of 686 = 22.44%.

 

This massive evidence proves:

1.  That the vocabulary and personal-name culture of the Mitanni Indo-Aryan rulers in Syria-Iraq came into existence during the period of composition of the New Rigveda, and did not exist during the earlier period of composition of the Old Rigveda.

2. That the ancestors of the Mitanni Indo-Aryan rulers separated from the Vedic Indo-Aryans at some point of time during the period of composition of the New Rigveda.

3. That they must have separated from the Vedic Indo-Aryans at some point of time before 2000 BCE, since to the Mitanni rulers of 1500 BCE (and even to the Kassite invaders of Mesopotamia in 1750 BCE, who show Mitanni Indo-Aryan linguistic influence) the Indo-Aryan linguistic heritage was an old ancestral and almost fading-out heritage: it represented the “remnants” of IA in the Hurrite language of the Mitanni (WITZEL 2005:361), and “the residue of a dead language in Hurrian” (MALLORY 1989:42).

4. That, at that point of time before 2000 BCE, the far ancestors of the Mitanni Indo-Aryan rulers migrated from the geographical area of the New Rigveda, which extended from westernmost U.P. and Haryana in the east to Afghanistan in the west.

5. The geographical area of the Old Rigveda, which preceded the New Rigveda in time by at least a few centuries, long before 2000 BCE (and even long before 2500 BCE) is restricted originally to the area east of the Sarasvatī river in Haryana, since":    

Four books of the Old Rigveda (2,3,6,7) are located completely in the east:

a) they know the eastern place names Kīkaṭa, Iḷaspada (also called vara ā pṛthivyā or nābhā pṛthivyā, i.e. "the best place on earth" or "the centre of the earth"), the eastern lake Mānuṣā, and eastern animals like the buffalo, the gaur (Indian bison), the elephant, the peacock and the spotted deer, and the other eastern rivers Gaṅgā/Jahnāvī, Yamunā, Dṛṣadvatī, Āpayā, Hariyūpīyā, Yavyāvatī, Śutudrī, Vipāṣ, Paruṣṇī, Asiknī,           

b) but not the western place names Saptasindhava, Gandhāri, the western lake Śaryaṇāvat(ī) and the western mountains Mūjavat, Suṣom and Arjīk, or western animals (whose names are found in common with the Avesta) like the uṣṭra, varāha, mathra, chāga, vṛṣṇi, urā and meṣa, or the western rivers Marudvṛdhā, Vitastā,  Ārjīkīyā, Suṣomā, or even the Sindhu and its western tributaries Triṣṭāmā, Susartu, Anitabhā, Rasā, Śveti, Śvetyāvarī, Kubhā, Krumu, Gomatī, Sarayu, Mehatnu, Prayiyu, Vayiyu, Suvāstu, Gaurī, Kuṣavā.

All these western geographical features (except three of the western river names) appear exclusively in the New Rigveda.

In short: the Mitanni evidence hammers the last nail in the coffin of the AIT case (according to which the "Aryans" entered India from the northwest only after 2000 BCE and composed the Rigveda after 1500 BCE) with such finality that it has put western academic supporters of the AIT case completely to flight. There is nopossible  way in which they can disprove the evidence which is so fully backed by the massive and unchallengeable Rigvedic-Avestan-Mitanni data and the scientifically dated chronology of West Asia. Silence and Stonewalling are the only possible responses.

 

But, for good measure, it looks like a western academician perhaps not directly connected with Indo-European linguistics but with Semitic linguistics (though even this is doubtful: see the admission by Clark himself at the end of his article, quoted at the end of this section) has either been deputed, or has taken it upon himself, to cast the first stone — by completely denying the Indo-Aryan identity of the language and ancestry of the Mitanni rulers (an untenable stand which no self-respecting western academician directly involved in the AIT-vs.-OIT debate would dare to take in writing). So we have this article "The Alleged Indo-Aryan Names in Cuneiform Inscriptions" by W.E.Clark in the American Journal of Semitic Languages):

Clark tells us: "If the names are Indic or Indo-Iranian, the evidence of the Rig Veda must be carefully considered" (CLARK 1917:263). However, it does not look as if his zealous crusade to debunk the Indo-Aryan identity of the Mitanni rulers allowed him to "carefully consider" the evidence of the Rigveda. Even apart from the general mess of speculations and groundless dismissals of accepted interpretations that fill his article from beginning to end, there are many very specific points which show his total ignorance of both the Rigveda as well as the state of the debate concerning the Mitanni data.

1. "For instance, there is no certain case (in India) of a name containing ṛta as an element before Ārtabhāga of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka 3, 2, 1. 13 (cf. 6, 5, 2) - the name of a priest (ca. 600 B.C. ?)" (CLARK 1917:264).

But Rigveda I.112.20 has the name Ṛtastubh. See the text, as well as any translation of the text (Griffith, Geldner, Wilson, Jamison, etc.).

 

2. "In classical Sanskrit manya enters freely into composition in the sense 'thinking oneself to be, appearing as.' In the Rig Veda the word occurs only once in the compound punar-manya (Pet. Lex., 'sich erinnernd')." (CLARK 1917:266).

But the name Manyamāna appears in the Rigveda VII.18.20 as the name of a person (check the translations of Wilson and Griffith, and the Vedic Index of Names and Subjects of Keith and MacDonnell). 

 

3. "There is no Sanskrit form ṛtaya, to which Ar-ta-ia could be compared." (CLARK 1917:270).

But the "form" ṛtāya appears by itself in the Rigveda itself in I.34.10; 137.2; 151,3,6; 153.3; IV.3.8; 23.10; V.20.4; IX.17.8; 97.23 and X.8.4,5 (twice in the Middle Book 4, and ten times in the New Books), so this sweeping statement about "Sanskrit forms" is clearly false.  

 

4. About a Mitanni name Da-a-šar-ti-i identified as Indo-Aryan: "The only Sanskrit parallel for the first element that occurs to me is dāsa 'slave'. It is impossible that a word with this meaning should enter into composition with arta." (CLARK 1917:269).

Apparently he is not aware that one of the most prominent heroes of the Rigveda is named Divodāsa, in whose name "a word with this meaning enters into composition with Divas.", so obviously there is nothing "impossible" in the Mitanni name (although I have not included it in my list of Mitanni names).

 

5. "Several Vedic names are formed with ratha, but duṣratha is not a likely name for a warrior." (CLARK 1917:274).

Here is a true strawman argument: the Mitanni name Tu-iš-e-rat-ta is not construed as duṣratha by any serious scholar, but as tveṣaratha (e.g. by Witzel). 

 

6. "Šu-ba-an-di or Šu-ba-an-du, TA 301-6 (di in four out of five occurrences) has been compared by Scheftelowitz (p. 271) to Sanskrit Subandhu, which means 'good friend', and is not found as a proper name in the Rig Veda." (CLARK 1917:276).

But the name Subandhu is definitely found as a proper name in the Rigveda in the name of a composer of  V.24 and X.57-60, and also within the hymns in X.59.8; 60.7 as testified in the translations of Griffith, Wilson, Geldner and Jamison.

It is one of the directly common names in the Rigvedic and Mitanni lists: Mittaratti (Mitrātithi), Dewatti (Devātithi), Subandu (Subandhu), Indarota (Indrota) and Biriamasda (Priyamedha).

 

7. Clark Completely ignores all the names with the commonest prefix "bi-ri-a" (Biria, Biriasauma, Biriasura, Biriawaza, Biriatti, Biriassuva, Biriamasda, Biriasena) which is definitely identified with the Vedic word "priya" (although formerly it was erroneously speculated that it could be the later name-element "vīrya"), and argues pointlessly against some of these names, each separately. But the word "priya" does not appear even once in the article.

 

8. Even more starkly, so far as I could make out, Clark completely avoids even referring to the most common Indo-Aryan element (Indo-Aryan numerals) in the Mitanni data: the references to the number of "vartanas" or "rounds" (of the race-course) in the horse-training manual of the Mitanni writer Kikkuli: "aika (eka, one), tera (tri, three), panza (pañca, five), satta (sapta, seven), na (nava, nine)".

 

9. Most hilarious of all is Clark's attempt to argue  that the four names of the Mitanni Gods in a famous treaty are not the names of the Vedic Gods Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra, Nāsatya/Aśvin.

This is a point on which there is practically no dispute even in the western academic community. The Wikipedia article on "Indo-Aryan Superstrate in Mitanni", for example, points out: "In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni (between Suppiluliuma and Shattiwaza, c. 1380 BC), the deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya (Ashvins) are invoked."

This treaty invokes a very large number of Gods of different tribes and cultures of West Asia, and one of the groups of Gods is this Mitanni foursome, and Clark gives the actual Mitanni reference in the treaty: "mi-it-ra-aš-ši-el (ilāni) a-ru-na-aš-ši-el ilu in-da-ra (ilāni) na-š(a)-at-ti-ia-an-na." (CLARK 1917:281). All the four names are in the middle of a long list of names of different Gods, and they are clubbed together in that order. The four Gods are named in that same order in Rigveda X.125.1.

But Clark not only argues loud and long (CLARK 1917:277-80) against this, but even throws out a desperate plea for an alternate interpretation: "Halévy (Rev.sém., 1908, p. 247) suggests that Mitraš, Uruwnaš, and Našatti are names of tribes. Considering the context this is a plausible suggestion"  (CLARK 1917:281)!! The "context", incidentally, is in fact the long list of names of Gods (further emphasized by the words ilu and ilāni), and not tribes!!

In sum: Clark is not even a genuine expert on the subject, and this is just a pedestrian attempt to deny the Indo-Aryan identity in order to deny the now-demonstrated true implications of that identity for the AIT-vs.-OIT debate: "The solution of the problem rests with the unpublished documents from Boghaz-köi. Since I have no knowledge of the Semitic languages, I have had to work entirely at second hand and heap up random comparisons in the hope that some competent Semitic scholar will criticize and carry on the Mitannian and Hittite comparisons to some certain conclusion."  (CLARK 1917:282). And yet, this is an "academic" paper published in an eminent, and probably "peer-reviewed", Journal.

 

Appendix: The Evidence for the Ghaggar-Hakra

The Sarasvatī  is found in the Rigveda in contexts where it can only be the Ghaggar-Hakra of Haryana and not any river of Afghanistan: it is found in many hymns in four (2,3,6,7) of the five Books of the Old Rigveda (III.4, 23, 54; VII.2, 9, 35, 36, 39, 40, 95) as well as in the Redacted Hymns (VI.49, 50, 52, 61; VII.96). The only 3 full hymns to the Sarasvatī  in the Rigveda are in these books: VI.61; VII.95,96, and the most well-known ode to the river "ambitame, devītame, nadītame" (best of mothers, best of Goddesses, best of rivers) is again in these books, in II.41.16.

As we already saw, these four books of the Old Rigveda (2,3,6,7) are located completely in the east:

a) they know the eastern place names Kīkaṭa, Iḷaspada (also called vara ā pṛthivyā or nābhā pṛthivyā, i.e. "the best place on earth" or "the centre of the earth"), the eastern lake Mānuṣā, and eastern animals like the buffalo, the gaur (Indian bison), the elephant, the peacock and the spotted deer, and the other eastern rivers Gaṅgā/Jahnāvī, Yamunā, Dṛṣadvatī, Āpayā, Hariyūpīyā, Yavyāvatī, Śutudrī, Vipāṣ, Paruṣṇī, Asiknī,           

b) but not the western place names Saptasindhava, Gandhāri, the western lake Śaryaṇāvat(ī) and the western mountains Mūjavat, Suṣom and Arjīk, or western animals (whose names are found in common with the Avesta) like the uṣṭra, varāha, mathra, chāga, vṛṣṇi, urā and meṣa, or the western rivers Marudvṛdhā, Vitastā,  Ārjīkīyā, Suṣomā, Sindhu and its western tributaries Triṣṭāmā, Susartu, Anitabhā, Rasā, Śveti, Śvetyāvarī, Kubhā, Krumu, Gomatī, Sarayu, Mehatnu, Prayiyu, Vayiyu, Suvāstu, Gaurī, Kuṣavā.

All these western geographical features (except three of the western river names) appear exclusively in the New Rigveda.

Further, the only remaining book in the Old Rigveda (Book 4) which represents the Indo-Aryan expansion westwards (already described), and which mentions these three western rivers (Sindhu, Sarayu, Rasā), otherwise found only in the New Rigveda, is also the only book in the whole of the Rigveda which does not refer to the Sarasvatī  at all, thereby emphasizing the fact that there was no Sarasvatī  river in the west (in Afghanistan) at that time.  

Therefore, this Sarasvatī which is located in such an utterly and purely eastern milieu, so totally devoid of western associations, cannot be a river of Afghanistan but has to be the river of Haryana.

 

But to move to the next step, is it possible that the name of the Sarasvatī  of the Rigveda, although located in Haryana, represented a memory of an older Sarasvatī  in Afghanistan (the Haraxvaiti of the Avesta) through which the "invading/migrating Indo-Aryans" entered India?

The evidence, showing whether the Ghaggar-Hakra of Haryana or the Haraxvaiti of Afghanistan is the original Sarasvatī  of the Rigveda, is very clear:

1. Linguistically, the word Sarasvatī  of the Rigveda is accepted by everyone to be the older and original form of the name and the word Harahvaiti is linguistically the derived form. There is no controversy in this, although Tony Joseph gives us the comparison in terms which would seem to make the two forms equally old: "It is a common practice for the letter 'h' in Indo-Aryan to be interchanged with the letter 's' in Indo-Iranian and vice versa, […] So Harahvaiti and Sarasvatī  are virtually the same name" (JOSEPH 2018:224)

[Note the printing error in his book or the confusion in his sentence: he actually wants to say "for the letter 's' in Indo-Aryan to be interchanged with the letter 'h' in Iranian and vice versa"].

 

2. Chronologically and geographically, the word Sarasvatī  appears in the Rigveda long before the word Harahvaiti appears in the Avesta, and the actually recorded historical contexts also make the direction of movement of the name, taken from the east to the west by the proto-Iranians, clear:

2a) As we saw, the name Sarasvatī  is found recorded many times in the oldest parts of the Old Rigveda.

In the Old Rigveda the proto-Iranians are recorded as inhabitants of the Punjab to the west of the Paruṣṇī: hymns VII.18,19,33,83 record the dāśarājña battle, which describes the battle between the Bharatas (Vedic Indo-Aryans) led by king Sudās, and the ancestors of all the historical Iranian tribes who are named:

VII.18.5 Śimyu.

VII.18.6 Bhṛgu.

VII.18.7 Paktha, Bhalāna, Alina, Śiva, Viṣāṇin.

VII.83.1 Parśu/Parśava, Pṛthu/Pārthava, Dāsa.

This coalition of proto-Iranian tribes in the Punjab is led by a king Kavi: VII.18.8 (Avestan name Kauui), and an old priest Kavaṣa: VII.18.12 (Avestan name Kaoša). This Kavi Cāyamāna (descendant of Abhyāvartin Cāyamāna, who is located in the oldest book of the Rigveda, in VI.27.5,8, as an inhabitant of Haryana, and is described as a Pārthava) is clearly the eponymous ancestral king of the Kauuiian dynasty of the Avesta, who were supposed to be of Parthian stock.

These Iranian and semi-Iranian tribes (classified in Indian texts as belonging to the Anu tribal conglomerate) are the Sairima, the Phryge (Phrygians), Pakhtoon, Bolan (Baluchi), Alan, Khiv (Khwarezmian),  Piśācin (Nūristani),  Parsua (Persians), Parthava (Parthians) and Dahi/Dahae. Another Anu tribe (as per Indian texts) not actually named in these hymns are the Madra: the Madai (Medes/Medians). These ancient historical Iranian tribes (check Wikipedia) are also the ancestors of other historical Iranians like the Scythians (Sakas), Ossetes and Kurds, and even presently Slavic-language speaking people of eastern Europe like the Serbs and Croats!

The exodus westwards of these defeated tribes is referred to in VII.5.3 and VII.6.3.

2b) The name Sarasvatī  is also recorded right up to the latest parts of the New Rigveda, which as a whole chronologically follows the Old Rigveda, as well as in all later Vedic texts, and in the Epics and Puranas.

The New Rigveda contains the names of certain kings with proto-Iranian names (identified as such by Indologists, including Witzel), still remaining in the western Punjab, in the following references:

I.51.13.

VIII.4.19; 5.37-39; 6.46; 23.28; 24.28; 25.2; 26.2; 32.2; 46.21,24.   

X.86.23.

These proto-Iranian kings, extending out into the northwest as far as Bactria, are the only kings in the Rigveda donating Bactrian camels, a new animal of the northwest and beyond, to the Vedic priests: VIII.5.37; 6.48; 46.22,31.

As we already saw, the Avesta shares a common culture of names with the New Rigveda. Just the example of -aśva names found only in the New Rigveda will make this clear. Note the -aspa names of the closest associates of Zaraθuštra, the composer of the oldest part of the Avesta (the five Gāθās): Zaraθuštra is the son of Pourušāspa, a descendant of Haēčat.aspa, a clansman of Dзjāmāspa, the priest of Vīštāspa, and an enemy to Arəjaţ.aspa.

In fact, the very word gāthā itself is found only in the New Rigveda:

V. 44.5.

I. 7.1; 43.4; 167.6; 190.1.

VIII. 2.38; 32.1; 71.14; 92.2; 98.9.

IX. 11.4; 99.4.

X. 85.6.

So the oldest part of the Avesta (the five collections of the Gāθās) is clearly contemporaneous to, or later than, the New Rigveda, and till this point of time there is no mention anywhere of the Harahvaiti river of Afghanistan.

2c) The word Harahvaiti is found for the first time, and only once, in a late part of the Avesta, long after the Gāθās: in the Vendidad (I.13). By this time, the Iranians are settled all over Afghanistan and southern Central Asia, the areas of which are enumerated in the Vendidad and at a few places elsewhere in the Avesta.

Significantly, the Avesta still remembers the earlier Saptasindhu or the Punjab (Haptahəndu in Vd. I.19) and Mānuṣa in Haryana (Manusha in Yt. IX.1.1) to their east.

 

All this evidence proves two things:

1. The very early (and prolific) recorded occurrence of the original name Sarasvatī  for the river of Haryana, and the very late (and single) record of the name Harahvaiti for the river of Afghanistan.

2. The movement of the Iranians from Haryana to Afghanistan, taking the name of the Sarasvatī  with them and giving it to a river of Afghanistan.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

CLARK 1917: The Alleged Indo-Aryan Names in Cuneiform Inscriptions, Clark, Walter Eugene, in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and literatures Vol. XXXIII, July 1917 No.4, pp. 261-282.

DANINO 2010/2012: The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati. Danino, Michel. Penguin, 2010.

DESHPANDE 2005: Aryan origins: arguments from the nineteenth-century Maharashtra, p.407-433 in “The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history”, Routledge, London and New York (Indian edition), ed. E.F.Bryant, L.L.Patton, 2005.

ERDOSY 1995: Preface to “The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: language, material Culture and Ethnicity”, edited George Erdosy, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin-NY, 1995.

JOSEPH 2018: Early Indians. Joseph, Tony. Juggernaut Books, New Delhi, 2018.

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SETHNA 1981: Karpasa in Prehistoric India. Sethna, K.D. S & S Publishers, New Delhi, 1981.

TALAGERI 1993: The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism. Talageri, Shrikant G.  Voice of India, New Delhi, 1993.

TALAGERI 2000: The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis. Talageri, Shrikant G. Aditya Prakashan (New Delhi), 2000.

TALAGERI 2008: The Rigveda and the Avesta―The Final Evidence. Talageri, Shrikant G. Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2008.

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WITZEL 1995a: Early Indian History: Linguistic and Textual Parameters. Witzel. Michael.  pp. 85-125 in “The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia”, ed. by George Erdosy. Walter de Gruyter. Berlin, 1995.

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