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     Thokkalohdi Junior Artist Username: Thokkalohdi Post Number: 906 Registered: 01-2008 Posted From: 24.6.104.213 Rating: N/A |
Well much for history recorded by west.. Everything known is a mystery to them... I lost the sources but basically Iranian tribes were considered part of hindu kingdom.. Most notable Iranian tribe is parashurama. They great warrior who appears through indian texts at different times.. Killing all the kings.. They say he can only appear in texts centuries apart because he is not one person but different people for same Iranian tribe who carried over orders from their ancestors... Other Iranian tribes were considered mlechas.. Iranians later turned to different religion much later in modern history.. Ranbir Kapoor is god of acting | ||
| Kabbalah Junior Artist Username: Kabbalah Post Number: 308 Registered: 10-2011 Posted From: 66.90.101.228 Rating: N/A |
http://new-indology.blogspot.com/2013/02/indo-iranians-new-p erspectives.html There are some strange and quite funny ideas in the 'orthodox' academic theory about Indo-Europeans and Indo-Iranians. One of these is the idea that Indo-Iranians arrived from the steppes with their horses, substituting the local millenarian civilizations in a mysterious way, imposing a new Indo-European pantheon... If we compare the situation of the Hittites in Anatolia, where they are almost absorbed by the local Hattic and Hurrian and Mesopotamian religions, with many gods with non-Indo-European names, we should be amazed by the strength of Indo-Aryan culture in avoiding any contamination with local Dravidian or Munda gods... It is true that Åšiva is regarded as a Dravidian god adopted by the Aryans, but then why does he bear a Sanskrit name (and different Sanskrit epithets starting from the Vedas) and not even a trace of a Dravidian one? And where are non-Indo-European deities in the Avesta? Even the demons (the daevas) are Indo-Iranian there... Another strange idea is that Mitanni Aryans had already Vedic deities and were already Indo-Aryans without ever touching India, as if the Indo-Aryan language and the Vedic religion were not something developed in India, but brought ready-made from a totally different environment, and unchanged when transplanted in South Asia. And when we look at archaeology, we find that the migrationist/invasionist believers try to forcedly see the arrival of the Aryans in every little trace of steppe pastoralists in Central and South Asia. But how these scanty traces, which just touch the Indus Valley and do not interrupt the continuity of settled civilizations of Margiana and Bactriana, can account for a total change of civilization? This reminds me of a cartoon about creationism compared with the scientific method: I have the impression that the Aryan Invasionism follows the same method as Creationism. The supporters of the Indo-Iranian invasion from the European steppes of Central and South Asia have no sacred text to defend, although sometimes they use the Vedas or the Avesta with biased (often racial) interpretations. They have a sort of preconceived faith, maybe based on a secret, obstinate Eurocentrism: Europeans must be the conquerors of the Indo-European world, and not the conquered or colonized, they must be the origin of the change, not the recipients. So, they already firmly believe that the Indo-Aryans must have arrived there in the 2nd millennium BC, and so we have to find, in one way or another, the facts able to support that dogma. I think that we should rather start from the archaeological facts, and build a theory from there, seeing if we find a harmony with linguistics and textual traditions, and also genetics. Someone could object (with Nietzsche) that there are no facts, only interpretations, particularly in the realm of prehistoric archaeology, but still, there are worse and better interpretations. The evolution and connections of material cultures can give a reliable picture, which can be mirrored by the linguistic and textual tradition. What we see in Central Asia and Northwestern South Asia, in the same area where historically we find Indo-Iranian languages, and described by the Avesta (Vendidad 1), is, since the Neolithic, and particularly during the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age, a strong net of relations. In the wonderful book History of Civilizations of Central Asia, V.M. Masson writes at pp.228-9 that the settled communities of southern Turkmenistan in the Late Eneolithic (late fourth - early third millennium BC) "found themselves included in a system of increasingly close cultural ties and ethnic shifts which encompassed an extensive area in Iran, Afghanistan and north-western India/Pakistan." Exactly the area of ancient Indo-Iranians. If there were 'cultural ties', they should have spoken a common language, and why not Indo-Iranian as in the later centuries, the same language of the names of the rivers and mountains of that region, when not substituted by Turkic words? Moreover, if we look at the textual traditions, in the Avesta we have the Airyas as a settled people, living on agriculture and stockbreeding, opposed to the Tuiryas (remained as Turanians in the Iranian tradition), who are nomads (but also bearing Iranian names), exactly the situation that we find in the late Bronze Age and in the Iron Age in Central Asia, with steppe pastoralists in contact with the settled agriculturists of a tradition of millennia of sedentary civilization, well reflected also in the Shahnameh of Firdusi. If the Aryans where the nomads from the steppe, the situation in the Avesta and Firdusi should be completely opposite. Not only, in the hymns of the Avesta (e.g. Yt. 5) the ancient Iranian heroes are often associated with mountains, including the progenitor Yima, who is described as offering a sacrifice on the Hukairya mountain, which is probably in Pamir. Whence came this traditions if they came from the northern flatlands? So, if we combine Iranian texts and archaeology, we suspect that the Aryans are actually the heirs of the Central-South Asian Neolithic tradition, and not of the steppe nomads, who normally are absorbed by the superior culture of the sedentary civilizations, like the Mongols in China or in Persia. Someone could observe that in modern Central Asia Turks have imposed their languages, but there we have clear traces of migrations and invasions, and Iranian languages were not swept away: they still remain in Tajikistan, in Samarkanda and Bukhara in Uzbekistan, in Afghanistan, in Baluchistan and in Iran, as is shown in the map below. All regions where we had the Bronze Age culture of Central Asia, rooted in the previous Neolithic cultures, and continuing in the Iron Age till the historical times. As Tosi, Shahmirzadi and Joyenda write (op. cit., p.210): "The process of integration probably took place during the third quarter of the third millennium B.C., whit the result that the embryonic Iranian and middle Asian states of the Early Iron Age were set up between Kerman and Bactriana, from the Caspian to the Helmand. Furthermore, the timing and stages of this process apparently corresponded to, or just preceded, those of the Indus civilization." The steppe pastoralists in the Iron Age learned from the agriculturists, for instance, in the Tagisken mausoleums on the Syr Darya, they used bricks, obviously unknown in the steppes, but so typical of the southern civilization, since the Neolithic Mehrgarh in Baluchistan and Jeitun in Turkmenistan, from the seventh millennium BC. Probably this civilization had its roots in the Middle East, the cradle of wheat and pulses and breeding of goats, sheep and cattle, but it created a particular Neolithic culture, characterized by barley cultivation and zebu cattle. In this Central/South Asian net, cultural influences went also from East to West. Mehrgarh is the most ancient Neolithic settlement of the region (its origins are dated around 7000 BC), and burials identical to those of the earliest aceramic Neolithic layers of Mehrgarh are found in Mundigak, Afghanistan, and in Altyn Depe, Turkmenistan, during the third millennium BC (op. cit., pp.213-214). Around 3800 BC in Baluchistan (the technologically most advanced pottery tradition of Eastern Iran) appeared the earliest grey ware, which spread over the Indus plain but also westward in the whole of the Helmand valley, Bampur and Kerman. Only towards the end of the 4th millennium BC grey ware appears at Tepe Hissar II and Sialk IV in the West, linked with the Gorgan Grey Ware typical of the 3rd and beginning of the 2nd millennium BC (op. cit., pp.202-203). Moreover, in Altyn Depe various Mature Harappan artifacts, like seals (one with a swastika) and ivory objects, were found, and "the influence of Harappa prototypes is evident in a variety of ceramic and metal objects" (op. cit., p.241). At Shortugai in Northern Afghanistan we have a real Harappan colony or trading factory. Shahr-i Sokhta, in Southeastern Iran, has types of burials typical of both the southern Turkmenian Calcolithic and the Baluchi Neolithic-Calcolithic, so that "the new urban configuration of cultural tradition is more likely to have been influenced by a convergence of customs and traditions flowing from the two poles" (op. cit., p.214). And since the Baluchi Neolithic-Calcolithic is regarded as the source of the Calcolithic culture of Northwestern South Asia, the idea that this cultural tradition is actually the 'Indo-Iranian' tradition becomes quite convincing. The western limit of this cultural net was Gorgan, which appears to be the western limit also of the Vendidad sacred geography, where the eastern limit is the Land of the Seven Rivers (HaptahÉ™ndu), that is, the Indus Valley and Northwestern India, called Saptasindhu in the Rigveda. There, the Harappan civilization created a cultural integration in an area which corresponds to the Rigvedic geography, and the hymns of the Rigveda should be dated mainly in the Late Harappan period. In the later Vedic texts, we see an expansion of the horizon towards East and South, but the ancient Ä€ryÄvarta ('abode of the noble ones') was placed between the end of the SarasvatÄ« river (Hakra in Pakistan) to the west and kÄlakavana, the 'black forest' near PrayÄga (Allahabad) to the east. Maybe it is significant that in that region has been found the site of Jhusi, which has a very ancient Neolithic settlement (from the 8th millennium BC according to a C-14 date), apparently the eastern limit of the cultivation of wheat and barley in India till the 3rd millennium BC, when it reaches also the middle Ganga plain (cp. here the view of Bellwood). Later on, in the Manusmriti, the Ä€ryÄvarta reaches the eastern sea. In the west, the land of the Aryas was also extended, by the Iranians. The arrival of Medes and Persians in Western Iran is known in the ninth century BC from Assyrian sources, and probably connected with the Late Iranian Buff Ware which appears around 1100 BC in the Gorgan plain and then spreads westwards (see here). Actually, also the Mitanni Aryans have been connected with Gorgan, because the Early West Iranian Grey Ware (1500-1000 a.C.), found at Hasanlu near Lake Urmia, to the east of the kingdom of Mitanni, has been derived (by Young) from the Gorgan Grey Ware. And the scenes of the golden bowl there have been interpreted through Iranian myths present in the Avesta, particularly Thraetaona (see here). Actually, in the Bronze Age of Margiana, we find also maces with heads in the shape of an animal head, and this recalls the mace, sculptured in the shape of an ox head, used by Feridun, the Persian name of Thraetaona. So, the Aryan land in the Antiquity included Persia and Media, that is, present Western Iran, as is said by Strabo, Geography 15.2.8: "The name also of Ariana is extended so as to include some part of Persia, Media, and the north of Bactria and Sogdiana; for these nations speak nearly the same language." But this extension seems to be not very traditional, because Strabo himself says earlier, in the same paragraph, that Eratosthenes so defined Ariana: ‘Ariana,’ he says, is bounded on the east by the Indus, on the south by the Great Sea, on the north by the Paropamisus and the succeeding chain of mountains as far as the Caspian Gates, on the west by the same limits by which the territory of the Parthians is separated from Media, and Carmania from Parætacene and Persia. |
