Pointless Discussions on the Nature of the Mitanni Data
Shrikant G. Talageri
Someone just sent me a tweet by Koenraad Elst:
Twenty years ago this discussion was unthinkable, for most of the anti-AIT camp pulled up their noses for a "pseudo-science" like linguistics & a "ghost language" like PIE. Today they can't be ignored anymore & their knowledge of Indo-Iranian is proving superior.
2:38 AM· Mar 20, 2025
I wondered what it was all about, and it was followed up by a twitter thread of a current discussion on Twitter on the identity of the Mitanni and the nature of the Mitanni data. The participants in the debate seemed to be:
And it seems to be a resumption of an earlier discussion a year ago in March 2024, in which the participants, apart from these three, were:
As I went through the thread, I found myself nonplussed by the thrust of the debate, which seemed to be all about whether the Mitanni
data represented Indo-Iranian, Iranian or Indo-Aryan,
and about “Prakritisms” in general or particularly in relation to the Mitanni
data.
Agreed these are interesting points of discussion and debate, and, although it is almost a settled fact that the Mitanni data represents specifically Indo-Aryan, trying to show that there are Iranian elements as opposed to Indo-Aryan elements in the Mitanni data is a perfectly legitimate exercise. Giacomo Benedetti even gave the URL of an article written by him on 24 May 2017, titled “Were the Mitanni Aryans really Indo-Aryans”, where he attempted to show that the Mitanni data represented Iranian rather than Indo-Aryan:
https://new-indology.blogspot.com/2017/05/were-mitanni-really-indo-aryans.html
All very interesting, but already much
discussed in detail (in my articles on the subject as well by countless western
academicians including Michael Witzel, who agrees that it is Indo-Aryan),
and, in fact, Benedetti begins his above article with the admission that
“The most common theory is that they were more precisely
Indo-Aryans, and it is repeated everywhere”
before beginning to dispute it.
Apart from the exact identity (Indo-Iranian, Iranian or Indo-Aryan) of the Mitanni, another peripheral issue deeply discussed on this thread is the question of “Prakristisms” in the Mitanni data. Of course there have always been Prakritisms at every stage of the Sanskrit language, whether the Vedic stage or the Classical stage, and this has also been much discussed by eminent Indologists and Sanskritists. I do not have (and have no right to have) objections to these discussions, but they are misleading if they are carried on under the impression that they are the key to the main issue. And the way in which one tangential discussion leads to another, all leading to confusion can be seen from the fact that among the “Prakritisms” mentioned in (what I saw of) the thread are the following: “Royal names ending in -sena are a late classical Sanskrit invention. virya > biriya has two different Prakritisms etc. Too many Prakritisms in Mittani”.
I have written and been writing on this subject since my book in 2008, and in internet debates from 2002, and have repeated it in many articles, notably the following:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-finality-of-mitanni-evidence.html
Royal names ending in –sena are certainly a late invention, but not a “late classical Sanskrit invention”: they are a late invention in the latest part of the period of the New Rigveda, where we already have one important name ending in –sena: in X.98.5,6,8, we have Ṛṣṭiṣeṇa, the father of Devāpī (and therefore of his brother Śantanū).
And “virya > biriya” is a wrong and now rejected speculation. It is now accepted that the correct equivalence is “priya > biriya”, and we have the direct counterpart of the Mitanni name Biriamasda in the Rigvedic name Priyamedha.
As Yajnadevam points out in the discussion: “Skt > Prkt laws as a set are not seen in other languages. Sound laws are due to random changes that occur when children acquire language. If laws were universal instead of random, then languages would change in lockstep and the tree model of language families would be impossible.” Kṛṣṇa, in Konkani is krūṣṇu, but has also become (and among my acquaintances alone) ki:sanu and ki:ṭṭɑ (and in baby-talk, even kū:ṭṇu). Precise historical conclusions cannot be derived from such “phonetic changes”.
But all these are peripheral discussions about the Mitanni: peripheral to the main issue. The main issue is that − regardless of whether the Mitanni data is purely representative of Indo-Aryan or Iranian (or, as someone suggested, Nuristani!) elements or contained mixed elements from these groups, and regardless of whether their language contained specific “Prakritisms” or not (a very speculative exercise given the somewhat clumsy or ambiguous nature of the exact phonetic symbols used in the Cuneiform script in which the Mitanni words and names are found written) – the geographical location and chronological point of time at which the ancestors of the Mitanni parted from their eastern brethren is very clear and unambiguous from the data.
As Witzel makes very clear, the final redactions resulted in changes in the sounds in the original hymns, but not changes in the words. (as in “an ancient inscription”, the words of the RV “have not changed since the composition of these hymns c.1500 BCE, as the RV has been transmitted almost without any change”, but in certain “limited cases certain sounds — but not words, tonal accents, sentences — have changed”. WITZEL 2000a:§1). So any comparison of the Vedic and Mitanni IA data should be on the basis of words and not sounds.
1. The ancestors of the Mitanni very definitely parted from their eastern brethren from the area of composition of the hymns of the New Rigveda (i.e. the area stretching from easternmost U.P and Haryana in the east to Afghanistan in the west), since all the names and name-types, and the few other common words (maṇi, for example), are very definitely innovations of this new period.
2. They very definitely parted from their eastern brethren after the period of composition of the hymns of the Old Rigveda, these hymns of the Old Rigveda being completely lacking in all these new words (the Mitanni elements being, in fact, just a drop in the total huge new vocabulary which separates the New Rigveda from the Old Rigveda):
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-version-of-chronological-gulf.html
3. The geographical area of the Old
Rigveda, in a period far earlier to the
period during which the ancestors of the Mitanni parted from their eastern
brethren, is originally to the east of the Sarasvati river
flowing through Haryana; and the narration of the expansion of the
ancestors of all these people from there, westwards into the area
of composition of the New Rigveda (right up to Afghanistan),
is also recorded in the hymns of the Old Rigveda.
4. Since the Mitanni kingdom flourished in Syria-Iraq from at least 1500 BCE, and their presence there is known from at least three centuries before that, their ancestors must have left the area of composition of the hymns of the New Rigveda (i.e. the area stretching from easternmost U.P and Haryana in the east to Afghanistan in the west) well before 2000 BCE, and this places the Old Rigveda (located to the east of this area) many centuries before that. I leave open the problem of deciding how many centuries earlier.
5. And, in this period, many centuries before 2000 BCE, the Old Rigveda was being composed in and around Haryana, and this area in this period had rivers and local animals with full-fledged Indo-Aryan names, was regarded by the composers of the hymns composed in this period as their beloved ancient homeland, and the hymns give no indication of any non-Indo-Aryans in the vicinity then or earlier.
No discussions about the exact linguistic
identity (within the “Indo-Iranian” spectrum) of the Mitanni
data, or about the presence or absence of “Prakritisms” in that data,
can make any alteration in the above facts.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYou are really dense, but also shameless.
DeleteA person named "Jyeshthadeva" posted the following comment to this article. [After the above reply by "Abhishek@sig", he deleted it. But I want it on record]:
Delete"It is quite easy to falsify your fake data of "new words" (many of which are demonstrated to be descended from the so-called PIE) in the so-called New Rigveda. For example, if I take a random chemistry book and a random physics book, there will be some vocabulary present in the physics book which would be absent in the chemistry book and vice versa, even if the physics book and the chemistry book are written and published in the same year. Similarly, there are massive amount of vocabulary in the so-called Old Rigveda that is absent in the so-called New Rigveda and vice versa. So, you cannot say that the so-called New Rigveda is later in time than the so-called Old Rigveda. You will even find the same thing if you do your modernist analysis with any two books of the Rigveda.
See how easy it was for me to falsify your work of more than one decade. That is what happens when a nastika like you tries to attack the apaurusheya nature of the Veda (which includes the Samhita, Brahmanan, Aranyaka and Upanishad). Now, mend your ways or else, good luck in your journey to hell".
Pathetic. I pity such people. They should debate issues with people of his own ilk like Zakir Naik and Billy Graham, not with "nastikas" like me.
To draw your attention to this popular science article in the December 2024 issue of the Scientific American, "Archaeological and genetic discoveries topple long-standing ideas about the domestication of equines BY WILLIAM T. TAYLOR"
ReplyDeleteThe basic finding is that horses were domesticated much later than people thought. I wonder how it integrates with your findings.
We are told that William T. Taylor is an archaeozoologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. He studies the relationship between people and animals, with a focus on horse domestication.
I assume that he knows his horses very well but about languages and their diffusion much less well, and just parrots the orthodoxy when it comes to that.
To quote:
".... the available data emerging from new scientific approaches to studying the past paint a much clearer picture of horse domestication than we’ve ever had before. The recent spate of genomic se- quencing and radiocarbon dating of horse bones from across Eurasia has all but dis- proved the kurgan hypothesis. Such data show us that important cultural develop- ments in the fourth millennium b.c.e.— including the Yamnaya migration and the dissemination of kurgans and Indo- European culture—probably took place many centuries before the first horses were domesticated, aided by the spread of other livestock such as sheep, goats and cattle and the use of cattle to pull wagons. Mean- while many steppe people still hunted wild horses for meat."
Continuing:
ReplyDelete"New genomic analyses led by Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona and Orlando indicate that the ancestors of modern domestic horses origi- nated in the Black Sea steppes around 2200 b.c.e., nearly 2,000 years later than previously thought. Although we do not yet know exactly the details of their initial do- mestication, it is clear based on the timing that these horses belonged to post-Yamnaya culture. Patterns in the ancient genomes suggest that in the early centuries of domestication, the horse cultures of the western steppe were selectively breeding these animals for traits such as strength and docility."
{About this next, just how do they know the Yamnaya spoke an Indo-European language????}
This revised timeline for horse domesti- cation is part of a growing body of evidence that casts the Yamnaya legacy in a new light. Early Indo-European cultures such as the Yamnaya are sometimes portrayed in popu- lar culture in a nationalist manner, with links drawn between their supposed domes- tication of the horse, impressive transconti- nental migrations, and cultural dominance. Now science indicates that the Yamnaya probably didn’t domesticate horses at all, and their migrations were not necessarily heroic conquests. For example, new genomic data show that by around 5,000 years ago Yamnaya migrants reached as far as central Mongolia, where they are known as the Afa- nasievo culture. Although these migrants may have helped spread sheep, goats and cattle into East Asia, initially it seems their impact was limited to a few mountain regions of the eastern steppe. After the Yamnaya arrival, it would be almost 2,000 years before horses showed up in the region. And genomic analyses suggest that their Afanasievo descendants had little lasting ge- netic effect on later populations.
Continuing:
ReplyDeleteThe revelation that people domesticated horses much later than previously thought resolves what was always a nagging problem with the kurgan hypothesis. If horses were domesticated in the Eneolithic, why did it take centuries for much of their impact to show up in the archaeological record? Under the kurgan model, researchers often framed horse domestication as a gradual development to explain why it took so long for horses to move beyond the steppes and revolutionize trade and conflicts, for instance. When we look at our records of the past with this revised time frame for horse domestication in mind, there appears to be the rapid, disruptive and dynamic development we expected to see after all.
In our new understanding it seems that almost as soon as people tamed horses, they began using them for transport. Some of the earliest robust archaeological evidence of horse domestication comes from burials of horses paired with chariots dated to around 2000 b.c.e. at sites associated with Russia’s Sintashta culture. Radiocarbon-dating and genetic records show that within only a few centuries domestic hors- es spread over huge swaths of the Eurasian continent. In some cases, their expansion was peaceful: as availability of horses grew across the steppes, new people incorporat- ed horses, herding and transport into their way of life. In other instances, domesticated horses reached new locales through destructive conquests by marauding charioteers. Some cultures riding this wave of horse-drawn expansion were Indo-Euro- pean; others weren’t.
{Doesn't Indian archaeology have a chariot from 2000 BCE?}
by the middle of the second millennium b.c.e., horsepower had reached civiliza- tions from Egypt and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia in the north and Mongolia and China in the east. In many cases, the arrival of horses upended the balance of power. For example, when horses first arrived in China during the late Shang dynasty, around 3,200 years ago, they were mostly a novelty for the elite. but within little more than a century a rival power, the Western Zhou, was able to marshal its strength and skill in chariotry to bring a dramatic end to Shang rule. In very short order, horses went from being a steppe curiosity to the founda- tion of authority for one of the largest civili- zations of East Asia.
The really relevant point about horses and chariots pertaining to the Mitanni and the Rigveda (or India) is that the Mitanni seem to have introduced into West Asia not only horse-racing as a sport, but also Indian elephants (Egyptian paintings show Mitanni presenting baby elephants to the Egyptians), Indian peacocks, and Indian cattle.
DeleteHi Shrikant,
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting point you made in one of your books are the presence of some Babylonian words in the Rig Veda, like "Bekanata". Has a list of such words been made and in which part of the Rig Veda are they to be found? Because if babylonian words are found in Rig Veda, then it strengthens the case for IVC and Vedic civilization being one and the same. The IVC were known to have trade ties with Mesopotamia.