The Finality of the Mitanni Evidence

 

The Finality of the Mitanni Evidence

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

I find it necessary to again stress the paramount importance of the scientifically dated Mitanni evidence in West Asia in proving the OIT and Indian Homeland (of the Indo-European languages) case beyond challenge.

I felt impelled to do this after I received the following quotation put up by yajnadevam on twitter today (from the volume Éléments destinés à éclairer les origines de la civilisation, depuis l'Antiquite jusqu'à nos jours by Claude Gétaz, p.1575). This particular reference is new to me and again confirms the fact that the Mitanni were present in West Asia (Syria and Iraq) as per the dated records at least more than two centuries before the establishment of the Mitanni kingdom in 1550/1500 BCE. 

 

"Scholars" studying, or incidentally dealing with, the subject of the geographical origins of the Indo-European family are free to make up as complicated and colourful accounts of the alleged Indo-European migrations from the steppes to the rest of the Indo-European world (including India) as they want, using all the fake genetic and other speculative and presumptuous arguments they can cook up. But ultimately, all their theories and hypotheses will end up clashing with the evidence of the dated Mitanni records and the chronological divisions of the Rigveda. However much they succeed (within the toxic academic vacuum that they occupy) in stonewalling this evidence for the present, the evidence will not simply disappear into thin air for their convenience. The evidence exists, and the evidence is irrefutable, and, when the time comes to finally face this evidence, their present perfidy will only increase the huge mass of pseudo-scholarly writings that will have to be discarded in future as fraudulent or grossly unscholarly "scholarship". [It may be noted that, just before giving the above evidence of the recorded and established presence of the Mitanni in West Asia in 1761 BCE, Claude Gétaz reiterates the detailed fairy tale about the migration of the "Indo-Iranians" from the Steppes!!!]

My job is simply to place this evidence on record for the time when it will become impossible to ignore or stonewall it any more. I have of course, already presented the evidence countless times. This article (triggered by this new quotation) is merely a final summary of all this evidence.

There are two sets of evidence, and their combined force, which will finally have to be faced by the Steppe-to-India theorists:

1. The actual chronological dating of the Mitanni in West Asia.

2. The basic internal chronological evidence of the Rigveda.

3. The combined evidence of the Rigvedic-Mitanni data.

 

I. The actual chronological dating of the Mitanni in West Asia

The above tweet by yajnadevam with which I started this article was in response to a querulous tweet by an AIT-protagonist demanding "scientific" evidence for the dating of the Mitanni presence in West Asia to 1800 BCE (or more):

 

In reply to this, yajnadevam presented the quote from Claude Gétaz's book which testifies that a new discovery of a dated or datable document from 1761 BCE testifies to the presence of the Mitanni in Syria "two centuries prior to the formation of the Mitanni state" (i.e. well more than two centuries prior to the dates quoted by Bjørn in his tweet).

While this specific (new to me at least) evidence is very significant, what it shows − that the Mitanni were present in West Asia more than "two centuries prior to the formation of the Mitanni state" − is not new. It is accepted by most scholars talking about Mitanni chronology in West Asia, even if Bjørn pretends to be unaware of it:

1. In my article "Evidence for the OIT Beyond the Mitanni?", I described the works of Geoffrey Caveney which show, by an examination of the "Evidence of Indo-Aryan dialect in 10 Minoan Linear A inscriptions and Minoan Indo-Aryan etymologies of 16 Greek words", that there were earlier advance-guard Indo-Aryan migrants, well before the formation of the Mitanni state, already present in Crete (to the west of Syria-Iraq), and recorded in the Linear A inscriptions in Crete dating from "the 17 th century BCE (i.e., between 1700 and 1600 BCE)":

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/evidence-for-oit-beyond-mitanni.html

As Caveney points out, these "Indo-Aryans who migrated to Crete would have represented an earlier wave of westward Indo-Aryan migration, preceding the arrival of the Mitanni rulers"

2. Even before that, there is a consensus among the scholars, again based on dated evidence from West Asia, that the Kassites − who also definitely represented either an originally Indo-Aryan group like the Mitanni, or else an originally non-Indo-Aryan group influenced by Mitanni − were already part of the historical narrative in West Asia: "The Kassite conquerors of Mesopotamia (c.1677-1152 BCE) have a sun god Šuriiaš, perhaps also the Marut and maybe even Bhaga (Bugaš?), as well as the personal name Abirat(t)aš (Abhiratha); but otherwise the vocabulary of their largely unknown language hardly shows any IA influence, not even in their many designations for the horse and horse names (Balkan 1954)" (WITZEL 2005:362).

The Kassites conquered Mesopotamia in 1677 BCE, so this definitely places their presence in West Asia well before that date.

3. And finally, there is a consensus that the Indo-Aryan linguistic elements found in the West Asian records in respect of the Mitanni (at the dates mentioned by Bjørn above, 14th century BCE, 16th century BCE) are not new or contemporary elements of newly arrived people in West Asia but ancestral elements representing the linguistic heritage of the ancestors of the Mitanni rulers, only remnants of which have survived in the records:

"Other evidence, from Mitanni and neo-Hittite sources, indicates that the names of Mitanni kings were traditionally Indo-Aryan, even though the Mitanni belonged to the Hurrian-speaking peoples. We therefore surmise that the Mitanni once lived close to an early Indo-Aryan group, that had perhaps taken a dominant position over the pre-Mitanni population, and then became quickly acculturated as Hurrian speakers" (WITZEL 1995a:110). The Indo-Aryan elements in the Mitanni records represent ancestral "remnants of IA in Mit." (WITZEL 2005:361).

"Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC, it should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier" (MALLORY 1989:42).

So the actual dated Mitanni records post-1550 BCE do not represent Indo-Aryan elements newly arrived in the area, but are "remnants" of a "symbiosis that produced the Mitanni [that] may have taken place centuries earlier".

So it is an irrefutable fact that the Mitanni or their ancestors were prominently present in West Asia from 1800 BCE at least as a very important part of the West Asian political-historical landscape.

 

II. The basic internal chronological evidence of the Rigveda

From the very beginning of modern Indological studies of the Rigveda, the entire text has been treated as one single unit so far as historical analysis is concerned. The Indologists realized that the Rigveda consisted of different books and hymns composed at different times, and that there were older parts and newer parts. But although they even identified many old and new elements in the text, they continued to treat the entire Rigveda as basically one text representing one historical unit, and refused to logically classify the text into its chronological divisions and base their historical analyses on that basis.

Even though I have been pointing out from my second book in 2000 that the Rigveda consists of different maṇḍalas or books representing different epochs, and that Rigvedic history should be analysed chronologically, this idea has been opposed and ridiculed not only by western or AIT supporting writers and scholars, but also by Indian ones (though for different reasons). I have had many arguments on this point with many scholars ranging from AIT-supporting Michael Witzel to AIT-opposing Narahari Achar.

But after my article "Final version of the Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda [With the Hymn-and-verse wise list of new words and other new elements in the Rigveda]" (23/8/2022), it will be impossible for anyone to feign disbelief.

In this article I have shown that the Rigveda consists of three distinct parts:

1. The Old Rigveda (consisting of the bulk of books 6,3,7,4,2 in that chronological order) which is historically as well as linguistically Old: 280 Hymns, 2368 verses

2. A section of hymns in the old books 6,3,7,4,2, which can be classified as Redacted Hymns which are historically Old but linguistically New: 62 Hymns, 873 verses

3. The New Rigveda (consisting of books 5,1,8,9,10 in that order), which is historically as well as linguistically New: 686 Hymns, 7311 verses

And (check my above article for the details, which I will not bother to repeat here), this three-fold division is not concocted by me: it is based on the analyses and classifications of the western Indologists from Oldenberg through Witzel to Proferes!!

In spite of my pointing out this three-fold chronological division of the Rigveda right from my third book in 2008, it continued to be criticized, ridiculed or stonewalled.

 

However, my above article, "Final version of the Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda [With the Hymn-and-verse wise list of new words and other new elements in the Rigveda]" (23/8/2022), contains a massive list of new words, new meters and new composer-name-types in the Rigveda, all of which are found only in the New Rigveda and the Redacted Hymns but are completely missing in the Old Rigveda, as follows:

Old Rigveda Books 2,3,4,6,7:  0/280  Hymns, 0/2368 verses, 0 words.  +0 C + 0 M.

Redacted Hymns in Old Books 2,3,4,6,7:  61/62  Hymns, 470/873 verses, 724 words. +1 C + 6 M.

New Rigveda Books 1,5,8,9,10:  684/686 Hymns, 4256/7311 verses, 6828 words. +300 C + 96 M.

 

To put the absolutely sweeping nature of this evidence in clear perspective:

1. The Old Rigveda with 280 hymns and 2368 verses, does not have a single one of the above new words, or new composer names or meters. The New Rigveda with 686 hymns and 7311 verses has: 6828 words, 300 hymns with new composer names and 96 hymns with new meters.

2. The Old Rigveda with 280 hymns and 2368 verses, does not have a single one of the above new words, or new composer names or meters. The Redacted Hymns in these same five Books, with 62 hymns and 873 verses, have: 724 words and 1 hymn with a new composer name (only in 1 verse) and 6 hymns with new meters.

3. The Old Rigveda with 280 hymns and 2368 verses, does not have a single one of the above new words. But even some single hymns in the New Rigveda are loaded with new words: for example, I.112, 116 and 117 have 43, 49 and 48 words respectively. VIII.1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 have 44, 35, 28, 39 and 38 words respectively. IX.86, 96 and 97 have 71, 30 and 59  words respectively. And X.61, 85, 86, 87 have 38, 56, 45 and 48 words respectively.

And, as I have shown in the above article, this is just the tip of the iceberg: in this analysis huge masses of other grammatical forms have not been included, which, if included, would raise the figures for the New Rigveda and the Redacted Hymns to incredible numbers. And, taking note of the Middle Words (words found in the New Rigveda and Redacted Hymns, and in books 4,2, but not in books 6,3,7) would add volumes to the chronological picture.

In short, the Rigveda consists of two distinct sections, the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda, with a buffer zone of Redacted Hymns between the two. And there is a huge chronological gulf of many centuries separating these two sections with many developments in historical events, language and technology which took place after the period of the Old Rigveda. Rigvedic (and consequently Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian and Indo-European) history cannot be analyzed without keeping this chronological division in mind.

 

III. The combined evidence of the Rigvedic-Mitanni data

So here we have two facts:

1. The founders of the Mitanni kingdom (1550/1500 BCE) in Syria-Iraq were already a very long-established local population in that area with their Indo-Aryan identity already constituting the "remnants" of an ancient ancestral part of their identity which had taken place "taken place centuries earlier". The proto-Mitanni presence in West Asia goes back by many centuries (beyond 1800 BCE at the least).

2. The Rigveda consists of two distinct eras, an old period represented by the Old Rigveda and a new period represented by the New Rigveda, the two periods separated from each other by centuries of momentous changes in history, geography, culture, technology and language.

What does the combination of these two facts tell us about the date of the Rigveda and about the geographical location of the PIE Homeland? Let us examine this stage by stage:

 

III.A. The Mitanni vis-a-vis the Rigveda:

The Mitanni Indo-Aryan elements (i.e. the ancestral Mitanni elements surviving in the records of the second millennium BCE in West Asia) are naturally connected to the Indo-Aryan elements in the Rigveda. But in which Rigveda: the Old Rigveda or the New Rigveda?

Only a comparison of the Mitanni and Rigvedic data can answer this question. But what is the exact data which can help us to narrow down this search?

The Mitanni data which can be compared with the Rigvedic data to identify whether it is connected to the Old Rigveda or the New Rigveda:

As Witzel points out, the Indo-Aryan elements in the Mitanni data "cover the semantic fields of horses, their colors, horse racing, and chariots, some important 'Vedic' gods, and a large array of personal names adopted by the ruling class" (WITZEL 2005:361): the horse racing words include some number words. The only other important word is the word maini (bead, jewel).

The Rigvedic data which distinguishes the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda from each other, which can be compared to the Mitanni data:

This data consists of a very large vocabulary of new words, new meters, and new personal names and name types found only in the New Rigveda and in subsequent texts but missing in the Old Rigveda.

The names of Vedic gods and number words, and the words associated with horses, their colors, horse racing, and chariots, found in the meagre Mitanni data are of course few in number and are common words found throughout the Rigveda. Likewise, since no Mitanni hymns have been found, there can be no comparison of meters. Therefore the entire evidence rests on the single word maini and the "large array of personal names".

 

And this evidence is absolute and sweeping:

1. The Rigvedic word maṇi (Mitanni maini) "bead, jewel", is found just twice (I.33.8; 122.14) in the New Rigveda, 78 times in the Atharvaveda, and countless times throughout the subsequent Vedic and Sanskrit literature; and is an extremely common and popular word in all modern Indo-Aryan languages, and in all non-IE languages influenced by Sanskrit. It is completely missing in the Old Rigveda.

2. The prominent personal names and name types in the Mitanni data which are found in the Rigveda are names with the following elements:

-aśva, -ratha, -atithi, -sena, -bandhu, -uta, -medha, vasu-, ṛta-, priya-.

The personal names with these elements are found in the Rigveda as follows:

Names of Composers of the hymns (89 hymns):

V. 3-6, 24-26, 47, 52-61, 81-82 (20 hymns).

I. 12-23, 100 (13 hymns).

VIII. 1-5, 23-26, 32-38, 46, 68-69, 87, 89-90, 98-99 (24 hymns).

IX. 2, 27-29, 32, 41-43, 97 (9 hymns).

X. 20-29, 37, 57-60, 65-66, 75, 102-103, 132, 134, 179 (23 hymns).

Names in References (in 82 verses):

IV.30.18 (1 verse)

V. 27.4-6; 33.9; 36.6; 52.1; 61.5,10; 79.2; 81.5 (10 verses)

I. 36.10,11,17-18; 45.3-4; 100.16-17; 112.10,15,20; 116.6,16; 117.17-18; 122.7,13; 139.9 (18 verses)

VIII. 1.30,32; 2.37,40; 3.16; 4.20; 5.25; 6.45; 8.18,20; 9.10; 23.16,23-24; 24.14,22-23,28-29; 26.9,11; 32.30; 33.4; 34.16; 35.19-21; 36.7; 37.7; 38.8; 46.21,23; 49.9; 51.1; 68.15-16; 69.8,18; 87.3 (39 verses)

IX. 43.3; 65.7 (2 verses)

X. 33.7; 49.6; 59.8; 60.7,10; 61.26; 73.11; 80.3; 98.5-6,8; 132.7 (12 verses)

It will be seen that all these personal names are totally missing in the Old Rigveda, and are found exclusively in the New Rigveda and (in a single verse) in a Redacted Hymn.

[Although I will not bother to give the details here, since they have already been given numerous times in my books and articles, the common Rigvedic-Mitanni data is a sub-set of a much more enormous body of data of personal names as well as general words: the common Rigvedic-Avestan data, which is likewise totally missing in the Old Rigveda, and found exclusively in the New Rigveda and in the Redacted Hymns.]

 

III.B. The chronology of the Rigveda:

The above evidence clearly shows that the ancestral Mitanni people separated from the main body of "Indo-Aryans" (i.e. Rigvedic people) at some point of time after the period of composition of the Old Rigveda and during the period of composition of the New Rigveda.

But the ancestral Mitanni people were already present in West Asia by 1800 BCE at the very least as a very important and established and local part of the West Asian political-historical landscape, a circumstance which is being confirmed to a greater and greater extent by every new research. So they must have arrived in West Asia at least one or two centuries before that: i.e. at least by 2000 BCE.

As the Vedic "Indo-Aryans", the people who composed the Rigveda, did not live in West Asia − the evidence of the data in the text shows that they lived in Haryana to the east of the Sarasvati river in the earliest recorded period of the Old Rigveda, and expanded westwards only up to Afghanistan by the end of the period of the New Rigveda − it is clear that the ancestors of the Mitanni who arrived in West Asia at least by 2000 BCE must have separated from the main body of Vedic "Indo-Aryans" long before that date. Again, taking a conservative minimum of 200 years for their migration from this ancestral area to West Asia, they must have left this area, Haryana to Afghanistan, at least by 2200 BCE.

When these ancestral proto-Mitanni people left this area, Haryana to Afghanistan, at least by 2200 BCE, the language and culture of the Vedic "Indo-Aryans" which they took with them was already the fully developed culture of the New Rigveda, with its distinctive new words and personal name types, which obviously did not develop within one day, and this culture of the New Rigveda must have taken many centuries to develop these distinctive new words which set it apart from the culture of the Old Rigveda. This places the ending of the period of the Old Rigveda at least a few centuries before the departure of these ancestral proto-Mitanni people from this area: at least 2400 BCE.

The geographic data of the Old Rigveda shows that its composers, in at least 2400 BCE, were residents of Haryana and eastern Uttar Pradesh, with no prior intimate knowledge of areas further west. And this area, Haryana to Uttar Pradesh, in at least 2400 BCE, was a fully "Indo-Aryan" area which the composers regarded as their beloved ancestral land, in which the places and rivers of the area already had fully "Indo-Aryan" names (with no traces of any earlier non-IE names), and there was no trace or even memory of any non-IE people in that area or in the neighbouring areas to the east.

1. As per the linguistic analysis of the common Indo-European vocabulary so far as chronology is concerned, the 12 branches of the family were geographically located in contiguous and mutually interactive areas till at least around 3000 BCE or so, and started separating and losing touch with each other only around that time. As we have shown in detail in our books and articles, every single piece of linguistic evidence which can indicate geographical location points away from the Steppes and towards northwestern India as the area from which these branches started separating from each other.

2. Our analysis of the data and evidence in the dāśarājña battle hymns shows that the last five branches (i.e. Vedic Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian) to remain in the Homeland area after all the others had departed were all present in the Punjab during this battle which took place in the period of the Old Rigveda, and this is confirmed by the rest of the evidence in the Avestan and Vedic (and traditional Indian historical) texts.

3. Any and every analysis of the archaeological evidence in the IE-Homeland debate shows that while there is ample archaeological evidence indicating the external (to their historical areas) origins of all the other branches of IE languages, there is absolutely no such evidence for the Indo-Aryan branch in spite of the strenuous efforts of two centuries of scholarship.

 

In the face of all this, all the multifarious attempts to concoct migration schedules and histories of Indo-European migrations from the Steppes to India, using mumbo-jumbo terminologies and arguments, and presumptuous identification of non-linguistic criteria (including genetic data) with languages, have absolutely no value if the concocters (whatever their academic status) ignore and refuse to explain how the Rigvedic people in the period of the Old Rigveda could have composed the text in Haryana in or before  at least 2400 BCE, in an environment consisting of places and rivers with exclusively Indo-Aryan names and in the total absence of any local non-IE elements in the area.

And if they want to deny that the Rigvedic people did so, they must first disprove (and not merely rhetorically deny or simply stonewall) the evidence of the ancestral Mitanni presence in West Asia prior to 1800 BCE, and the fact that the Mitanni culture is derived from the distinctive new culture of the New Rigveda, which itself represents a stage later to the culture of the Old Rigveda in Haryana.

If they fail to do so, their writings will be regarded in future − at a time when more specific and clinching evidence is available, and a more honest and vested-interest-free scholarship comes to prevail in academia − as specimens of trashy or fraudulent, or at the very least extremely shoddy, scholarship.

 

APPENDIX added 6/3/2024 (same day afternoon):

 

I did not want to mess up the debate with what this man calls "vitriol", but this simply must go on record. This man seems not only to be totally ignorant of the subject of Rigvedic exegesis, and prone to criticize without reading and understanding, but also seems to have a very low I.Q. There is no other explanation for these three tweets by him that I was just sent by someone:

 

 

It would really be a joke to expect to have a serious discussion on this subject with a man who can post such extremely idiotic tweets.  

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

MALLORY 1989: In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. Mallory J.P. Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1989.

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.

WITZEL 2005: Indocentrism: autochthonous visions of ancient India. Witzel, Michael. pp.341-404, in “The Indo-Aryan Controversy — Evidence and Inference in Indian history”, ed.Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton, Routledge, London & New York, 2005.