4.6. MEMORY OF THE
URHEIMAT
4.6.1. Poetry vs.
history
The Vedas do not
preserve any veneration, not even any mention, of an
Urheimat. Compare this with the Thora (the first five
books of the Bible): edited in about the 6th century BC, it gives a
central place to Moses’ exodus from Egypt in about 1200 BC, and of Abraham
from “Ur of the Chaldees” in about 1600 BC. Similarly, in the 16th
century, the Aztecs in Mexico still preserved the memory of Aztlan
(probably Utah), the country from which they migrated in the 12th
century. Postulating that the Vedic people kept silent about a
homeland which they still vividly remembered, as the invasionists imply,
is not coherent with all we know about ancient peoples, who preserved such
memories for many centuries.
Admittedly, the
Vedas are a defective source of history. As religious books, they
only deal with historical data in passing. But that has never kept
the invasionist school from treating the Vedas as the only source of
ancient Indian history, to the neglect of the legitimate history books,
the ItihAsa-PuraNa literature, i.e. the Epics and the
Puranas. It is like ignoring the historical Bible books (Exodus,
Joshua, Chronicles, Kings) to draw ancient Israelite history
exclusively from the Psalms, or like ignoring the historians
Livius, Tacitus and Suetonius to do Roman history on the basis of the poet
Virgil. What would be dismissed as “utterly ridiculous” in Western
history is standard practice in Indian history.
Essentially the same remark was already
made by Puranic scholar F.E. Pargiter.41 It was
dismissed by some, with the remark that the Puranas are even more
religious and unhistorical than the Vedas.42
However, that does injustice to the strictly historical parts of the
Puranas, mixed though they are with religious lore. No serious
historian would ignore the Exodus narrative simply because it also
contains unhistorical episodes like the Parting of the Sea and the voice
from the Burning Bush.
Experience
should also make us skeptical towards the knee-jerk skepticism displayed
by historians when confronted with ancient historiography. Thus, the
king-list of the Chinese Shang dynasty (16th-12th century BC) was
dismissed as “obviously mythical”, but when in the 1920s the Shang oracle
bones were discovered, all the kings were found to be mentioned there: the
“mythical” dynastic list proved to be correct to the detail.
Likewise, the first Bible historians were skeptical of Biblical history,
e.g. of the “obviously wildly exaggerated” description of the huge city of
Niniveh; but then archaeologists discovered the ruins of Niniveh, and
found that the Bible editors had been fairly accurate in their
description.
The Bible
provides another important parallel with the Epics and Puranas: most
historians now accept the basic historicity of the Biblical account of
Israelite political history from at least king David until the Exile, yet
it is almost completely unattested in non-Biblical documents, just as
ancient Indian history as narrated in the Epics and Puranas (and glimpsed
in the Vedas) is practically unattested in non-Indic literature. The
non-attestation of Israel’s history in the writings of its highly literate
neighbours is more anomalous than the non-attestation of early Indian
history in the writings of other literate cultures, which were more
distant from India geographically and linguistically than Babylon was from
Jerusalem. So, if Biblical history can be accepted as more than
fantasy, the same credit should be given to the historiographical parts of
the Epics and Puranas.
4.6.2. Value of the
Puranas
In spite of the low esteem in which they are held, the Puranas are
essentially good history. More than 30 years ago, P. L. Bhargava has
already demonstrated that the dynastic lists which form the backbone of
Puranic history cannot be dismissed as legend or propaganda.43 His
first argument is that the oldest names of kings, though mostly
Indo-Aryan, are often of a different type (e.g. absence or paucity of
theophoric names, like in ancient Greek or Germanic) than those common at
the time of the Puranic editors, who show their unfamiliarity with the
obsolete names by sometimes misspelling or misinterpreting them.
This would not be the case if they had made them up.
Secondly,
against those who think that court historians may have concocted
genealogies and ancient claims to the land for their royal patrons,
Bhargava points out that the Puranas do not locate any dynasties in those
areas which are reasonably assumed to have been non-Aryan originally but
which were dominated by Indo-Aryan dynasties (or Dravidian-speaking
dynasties claiming an “Aryan” ancestry) at the time of the Purana editors,
e.g. parts of Bihar, the east coast (Utkala, Kalinga, Cola), and the south
(Pandya, Kerala):“This clearly means that the lists
are all genuine and the later Puranic editors, in spite of their failings,
never went to the extent of interspersing imaginary genealogies with
genuine ones.”44
The argument is similar to one of Irving Zeitlin’s arguments for
the authenticity of the Biblical account of the conquest of Palestine by
the Israelites.45
Zeitlin shows that the land conquered by Joshua according to the Biblical
narrative did not coincide with the Promised Land as promised by Jahweh to
Joshua (it falls short of the promised area while also comprising some
non-promised territory); a purely propagandistic narrative intent on
legitimizing the later extent of the Israelite kingdom or on glorifying
Jahweh’s reliability, would have made Joshua acquire the exact territory
promised by the Lord.
Thirdly, many
names from the Puranic lists also show up in other sources, including the
Epics, the Jain Agamas, the Sutras, and earliest of all, the Vedas.
Of course, persons are sometimes shown in a rather different light in
different sources, and there are differences on details between the
different Puranas as well as between the Puranas and the other sources;
but that is exactly what happens when authentic events (such as a traffic
accident) are related by different witnesses.
4.6.3. Dynastic history in
the Puranas
Shrikant Talageri takes up the argument where Bhargava had left
it, and proceeds to demonstrate that the fragmentary Vedic data and the
systematic Puranic account tally rather splendidly.46 The
Puranas relate a westward movement of a branch of the Aila/Saudyumna clan
or Lunar dynasty from Prayag (Allahabad, at the junction of Ganga and
Yamuna) to Sapta Saindhavah, the land of the seven rivers. There,
the tribe splits into five, after the five sons of the conqueror Yayati:
Yadu, Druhyu, Anu, Puru, Turvashu. All the rulers mentioned in the
Vedas either belong to the Paurava (Puru-descended) tribe settled on the
banks of the Saraswati, or have come in contact with them according to the
Puranic account, whether by alliance and matrimony or by war. Later,
the Pauravas (and minor dynasties springing from them) extend their power
eastward, into and across their ancestral territory, and the Vedic
traditions spread along with the economic and political influence of the
metropolitan Saraswati-based Paurava people.
This way, the
eastward expansion of the Vedic horizon, which has often been read as
proof of a western origin of the Aryans, is integrated into a larger
history. The Vedic people are shown as merely one branch of an
existing Aryan culture, originally spanning northern India (at least) from
eastern Uttar Pradesh to Panjab. The approximate and relative
chronology provided by the dynastic lists allow us to estimate the time of
those events as much earlier than the heyday and end of the Harappan
cities.
Puranic history
reaches back beyond the starting date of the composition of the
Vedas. In the king-lists, a number of kings are enumerated before
the first kings appear who are also mentioned in the Rg-Veda. In what
remains of the Puranas, no absolute chronology is added to the list, but
from Greek visitors to ancient India, we get the entirely plausible
information such a chronology did exist.To be
precise, the Puranic king-list as known to Greek visitors of Candragupta’s
court in the 4th century BC or to later Greco-Roman India-watchers,
started in 6776 BC.47 Even
for that early pre-Vedic period, there is no hint of any
immigration.
4.6.4. Emigrations in the
Puranas
What is more:
the Puranas mention several emigrations. The oldest one explicitly
described is by groups belonging to the Afghanistan-based Druhyu branch of
the Aila/Saudyumna people, i.e. the Pauravas’ cousins, in the pre-Vedic or
early Vedic period. They are said to have moved to distant lands and
set up kingdoms there. Estimating our way through the dynastic
(relative) chronology given in the Puranas, we could situate this
emigration in the 5th millennium BC. It is not asserted that that
was the earliest such emigration: the genealogy starts with Manu’s ten
successors, of whom six disappear from the Puranic horizon at once, while
two others also recede m the background after a few generations; and many
acts of peripheral tribes and dynasties, including their emigration, may
have gone unnoticed. But even if it were the earliest emigration, it
is not far removed from a realistic chronology for the dispersion of the
different branches of the IE family. It also tallies well with the start
of the Kurgan culture by Asian immigrants in ca. 4500
BC.
Later the Anavas
are said to have invaded Panjab from their habitat in Kashmir, and to have
been defeated and expelled by the Pauravas in the so-called Battle of the
Ten Kings, described in Rg Veda 7:18,19,33,83. The ten tribes allied
against king Sudas (who belonged to the Trtsu branch of the Paurava tribe)
have been enumerated in the Vedic references to the actual battle, and a
number of them are unmistakably Iranian: Paktha (Pashtu),
BhalAna (Bolan/Baluch), Parshu (Persian), PRthu
(Parthian), the others being less recognizable: VishANin, AlIna, Shiva,
Shimyu, BhRgu, Druhyu. At the same time, they are (except for
the Druhyus) collectively called “Anu’s sons”, in striking agreement with
the Puranic account of an Anava struggle against the Paurava natives of
Panjab. Not mentioned in the Vedic account, but mentioned in the
Puranic account as the Anava tribe settled farthest west in Panjab (most
removed from the war theatre), is the Madra (Mede?)
tribe.
Talageri tentatively identifies the other tribes as well: the
Druhyu as the Druids or Celts (untenable)48; the
Bhrgus as the Phrygians (etymologically reasonable); the
AlInas as the Hellenes or Greeks (shaky); the Shimyus
with the Sirmios/Srems or ancient Albanians (possible), etc.
It is hard to prove or disprove this; all we can say is that along with
the Iranian tribes, there may have been several non-Iranian tribes who
emigrated from northwestern India after the Battle of the Ten
Kings.
More migrations
are attested, of individuals, families as well as whole tribes. The
Vedic character Sarama calls on the Panis to go far away and to the north;
assuming that thePanis are not some kind of heavenly
creatures, this presupposes that the northward exit was a well-known
route, and perhaps a common trail for exiles, outlaws and refugees (just
as in the colonial period, an Englishman who had lost all perspectives in
his homeland could always move to Australia).49Vishvamitra’s sons, fifty in number, dissented from their
father and left the country, after which they are called udantyah,
“those of the northern border”.50A group of Asuras are said to have fled across the northern
border, chased by Agni and the Devas, who mounted guard there.51
4.6.5. Migration history of
other IE tribes
Other branches of IE have a clear migration history, even if no
literary record has been preserved. It is commonly accepted that the
Celtic and Italic peoples were invaders into their classical
habitats. The Celts’ itinerary can be archaeologically traced back
to Slovakia and Hungary, and Germany still preserves some Celtic
place-names.52 In
France, Spain, and the British Isles, a large pre-IE population existed,
comprising at least two distinct language families. Of the Iberian
languages, only a few written fragments have been preserved.
Etruscan is extinct but well-attested and fully deciphered, though we
don’t know what to make of the persistent claims that it was a wayward
branch of the IE Anatolian family. The Basque language survives till
today, but attempts to link it to distant languages remain
unsuccessful. At any rate, this area witnessed a classic case of IE
expansion, resulting in the near-complete celtization or latinization of
western and southern Europe.
Germanic, Baltic
and Slavic cover those areas of Europe which have been claimed as the
Urheimat: Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, South Russia. In the
case of the Germanic peoples, there is no literary record (but plenty of
archaeological indications) of an immigration, nor of the replacement or
assimilation of an earlier population. The Baltic language group,
represented today by Latvian and Lithuanian, once covered a slightly
larger area than today, but there is no literary memory of a migration
from another area. However, many Balts today will tell you that they
originally came from India. Before this is declared to be an
argument for an Indian Urheimat, it should be verified that this belief
really pre-dates the 19th century, when it was the prevalent theory among
scholars throughout Europe. The folklore avidly recorded by
nationalist philologists in the 19th century could well contain not only
age-old oral traditions of the common people but also some beliefs
fashionable among those who recorded them. The Slavic peoples have
expanded to the southwest across the Danube, and in recent centuries also
(back?) to the east, across the Ural mountains. The farthest in time
that human memory can reach, Ukraine and southern Poland seem to have been
the Slavs’ homeland.
When scholars
from the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic countries started claiming their own
country as the IE Urheimat, this certainly was not in contradiction with
facts known at the time. But these Urheimat claims were only based
on a weak argumentum e silentio: the first written records of these
peoples are comparatively recent, several millennia younger than the
break-up of PIE, and the true story of their migratory origins has simply
been lost. This is not to deny that they may have preserved
traditions of their own migrations for as long as the Israelites, but
apart from the erosion wrought by time, it is christianization which has
generally put a stop to the continuation of the traditional tribal
knowledge. And where Christian monks stepped in to collect and
preserve remnants of the national heritage (as in Ireland), it was too
late: stories had gotten mixed up, the people who remembered the
traditional knowledge were dying out, the thread had become too thin not
to be broken,
That the Greeks
took their classical habitat from an Old European population is not in
doubt, but there is no definite memory of their immigration. Perhaps
the myth of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, located in Georgia,
should be read as a vague indication of a Greek migration from there,
overseas to Thracia, whence the Greek tribes entered Greece proper in
succession. But an actual immigration narrative is
missing.
4.6.6. Iranian Urheimat
memory
The one branch
of IE which has preserved a relatively unambiguous record of its
migration, is Iranian. The Iranians once controlled a much larger
territory than today, after the Slavic and Turkic expansions. The
Cimmerians and Scythians spread out over the steppes between Ukraine and
the Pamir mountains; of this branch of the Iranians, only the Ossets in
the northern Caucasus remain. The Sogdians in the Jaxartes or Syr
Darya valley and even as far east as Khotan (Xinjiang) made important
contributions to culture and especially to Buddhist tradition. An
unsuspected wayward branch of the Iranian family is the Croat people: till
the early Christian era, when they were spotted in what is now Eastern
Europe, they spoke an Iranian language, which was gradually replaced by
Slavic “Serbo-Croat”. They call themselves Hrvat, apparently
from Harahvaiti, the name of a river in Western Afghanistan, which is
merely the Iranian form of Saraswati. In an Achaemenid inscription,
the Harahvaita tribe is mentioned as one of the tribute-paying
components of the Iranian empire. The migration of the Croats from
Afghanistan to the western Balkan (and likewise, that of the Alans,
a name evolved from Arya, as far west as France) could be the
perfect illustration of the general cast-to-west movement which the Indian
Urheimat hypothesis implies.
The Iranians are
fairly clear about their history of immigration from Hapta-Hendu and
Airyanam Vaejo, two of sixteen Iranian lands mentioned in the
Zoroastrian scripture Vendidad.To the
extent that they are recognizable, all sixteen are in Bactria, Afghanistan
or northwestern India. Iran proper is not m the picture, nor is the Volga
region whence the Iranians are assumed to have migrated m the AIT.
Their religious reformer Zarathushtra, whom modern scholarship dates to
the mid-2nd millennium BC, lived in present-day Balkh in Afghanistan, then
a more domesticated land than today.53
Afghanistan was a half-way station in a slow migration from India.
The Iranians may have brought the name of the lost Saraswati river
along with them and given it, in the phonetically evolved form
Harahvaiti, to a river in their new country; similarly with the
name Sarayu, the river flowing through Ayodhya, becoming
Harayu, the old name of another river in western
Afghanistan.
The Iranian homelands Airyanam Vaejo, described as too cold
in its 10-months-long winter, and Hapta-Hendu, described as
rendered too hot for men (i.e. the Iranians) by the wicked Angra-Mainyu,
are Kashmir and Sapta-Saindhavah (Panjab-Haryana) respectively.54 They
are considered as the first two of sixteen countries successively allotted
to the Iranians, the rest being the areas where the Iranians have
effectively been living in proto-historical times. This scenario
tallies quite exactly with the Vedic and Puranic data about the history of
the Anavas, one of the five branches of the Aila/Saudyumna
people: from Kashmir, they invaded Sapta-Saindhavah, but were defeated by
the Paurava branch (which composed the Rg-Veda) and driven
northwestward.
Those who deny this scenario have had to invent a second “land of
seven rivers” as the common Indo-Iranian homeland, from which the
Iranians’ Vedic cousins took the name but not the memory into India; or to
interpret the Avestan river-name Ranha (correlate of Sanskrit
RasA, the Puranic name of the Amu Darya or Oxus) as meaning the
Volga.55 It is
a safe rule of scientific method that “entities are not to be multiplied
without necessity” (Occam’s razor), and therefore, until proof of the
contrary, we should accept that the term Sapta Saindhavah and its
Iranian evolute Hapta Hendu refer to the same region historically
known by that name. Both Indian and Iranian sources situate the
break-up between Indians and Iranians, Deva- and Asura-worshippers, in
Sapta-Saindhavah. Before such a concordant testimony of all parties
concerned, it is quite pretentious to claim that one knows it all better,
and that they separated in Iran or Central Asia
instead.
The
balance-sheet is that some branches of the IE family have no memory of any
migration, some have vague memories of their own immigration into their
historical habitat, the Iranian branch has a distinct memory of migration
from India to Iran, and only the Indian branch has a record of emigration
of others from its own habitat.
4.6.7. Rama in the
Avesta?
In India, it is sometimes claimed that the Avesta contains the
names of the Hindu hero Rama and of his guru Vasishtha. This was suggested
by among others, Prof. Sukumar Sen and Illustrated Weekly
journalist O. K. Ghosh, who tried to use this hypothesis as “proof” that
Rama could not have been born in Ayodhya, locus of a Hindu-Muslim
controversy involving Rama’s birthplaces.56 The
word rAma appears in Avestan, e.g. thrice in Zarathushtra’s
GAthA-s (29:10, 47:3, 53:8), but apparently only in its proper
sense (“joyful, pleasant, peaceful”, whence the derivative A-rAm,
till today the Persian and Urdu word for “rest”). This means that it
is not referring to the name of an individual called RAma, whether
Ramachandra son of Dasharatha or another. The same is true in the
even older YaSna GAthA-s and in the much younger Pehlevi writings
(Denkart, Vendidad), where derivatives of the root rAm appear in
their proper sense.
There does exist
a royal name RAmateja, carried by at least two kings of Media in
the 8th-7th centuries BC (unless this form is Indic rather than Iranian,
which could be explained as a late remainder of the Indic Mitanni presence
in the same area which later became Media, or today’s Kurdistan). In
the regular Zarathushtrian prayer, RAm is seemingly used as a
personal name: every day of the month is dedicated to one of the
ferishta-s, sort of angels (the Amesha Spenta-s or aspects
of Ahura Mazda, and their hamkar-s or co-workers) who are
personifications (yazad-s) of values, e.g. Bahram (<<
VRtraghna) is the yazad of victory, Ashtad of rectitude
etc., and RAm is the yazad of joy, invoked in prayer on the
21st day of the month. Though used as a personal name, this instance
too may have nothing to do with the Rama from Ayodhya.
In the oldest Avestan texts, the word vahishta also
appears, the equivalent of VasishTha, but this again probably not
as a personal name, but rather in its proper sense of “the best” (whence
behesht, “he best [state]”, paradise). That at least is the
view of accomplished iranologists.57
Admittedly, translating the ancientmost Iranian texts is even trickier
than the already difficult Vedas, but I have as yet no reasons to insist
on a different translation than the established one.
Prof. Sukumar
Sen and his translator (for the Illustrated Weekly). O.K. Ghosh,
found it useful to interpret Avestan rAma and vahishta as
personal names because they thought it would confirm the Aryan invasion
theory, by putting all the Ramayana characters and places in
Iran-Afghanistan. Others think that it would rather confirm the
Indian origin of the Iranians, giving them a memory of the indisputably
Indian characters Rama and Vasishtha. I think that either explanation is
possible once the reading of Rama and Vasishtha as personal names is
accepted. Therefore, nothing is lost if we return to the
non-personal reading.
Footnotes:
41F.E.
Pargiter: Ancient Indian Historical Tradition, London 1922,
p.v.
42A.K.
Majumdar: Concise History of Ancient India, Delhi 1977, p.89, and
D.K. Ganguly who quotes him approvingly: History and Historians in
Ancient India, p.30.
43Bhargava:
India in the Vedic Age, p-139-140. Not that I recommend
Bhargava’s book as an introduction to the Puranic history, for it
imposes grossly arbitrary “corrections” on the geographical data so as
to fit them into a kind of Invasionist framework. He is a mild
example of the school which claims that Puranic history actually took
place alright, but in Central Asia or thereabouts rather than in India;
and that Puranic historians simply transferred it to an Indian
setting. As if an American were to write national history by
transferring the Battle of Hastings and the War of the Roses from a
British to an American setting.
44Bhargava,
Vedic Age, p.139.
45Irving
M. Zeitlin: Ancient Judaism, Polity Press, Cambridge 1991 (1984),
ch.4, particularly p.125ff. Zeitlin’s thesis is that the Biblical
account of the conquest is quite factual. The thesis is
controversial not because actual discoveries plead against it, but
because it is ideologically uncomfortable. After the Holocaust, it
is painful to accept the Biblical account because what it describes is a
genocide in the full sense of the term, eliminating all the men, women
and children of the conquered parts of Canaan. Liberal theologians
of Judaism and Christianity would greatly prefer a more peaceful
version.
46Talageri:
Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, p.304ff.
47Pliny:
Naturalis Historia 6:59; Arrian: Indica
9:9.
48The
etymology of Druid is as follows: do-ro-vid, i.e. Celtic
do, “very”, plus ro (from *pro, as in Latin, cfr.
Sanskrit pra), “very”, plus IE vid, “know”, hence “very
very knowing”. For a full discussion, see Françoise Le Roux
Christian-J. Guyonvarch: Les Druides, Editions Ouest-France,
Rennes 1986, appendix 1.
49Rg
Veda 10:108:11.
50Aitareya
Brahmana 33:6:1. My attention was drawn to this passage by L.N.
Renu: Indian Ancestors of Vedic Aryans, p.28.
51Shatapatha
Brahmana 1:2:4:10. Thanks again to L.N. Renu: Indian
Ancestors, p.31-32. Renu also draws attention to a type of evidence
which we cannot elaborate on: the continuity between the four-syllable
folk-metre which is mentioned in the Shatapatha Brahmana 4:3:2:7 as
“prevalent earlier” (before being reduplicated to the standard
eight-syllable metric unit of Vedic verse) and which according to Renu
(p.24) “belongs to the pre-Samhita days” but is “still popular amongst
the tribal folk in India”. Continuity between tribal and Vedic
culture is one of the most important demonstranda for non-AIT
theorists.
52It
is claimed that the Druids had a tradition tracing their own origins “to
Asia in 3903 BC”, quoted for what it is worth in Harry H. Hicks
Robert N. Anderson: “Analysis of an Indo-European Vedic Aryan head - 4th
millennium BC”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, fall 1990,
p.426, from W. Morgan: St. Paul in Britain, published in
1860.
53The
Cambridge History of Inner Asia (p.15) puts him in the period
1450-1200 BC, others go as far back as 1800 BC. It is to be kept
in mind, however, that this dating is partly based on the AIT, including
the assumption that Zarathushtra must be roughly contemporaneous with
the vedas. It is also disputed that the Gathas were written by
Zarathushtra: just as the Thora was attributed to Moses but written much
after his death, die Gathas may have been written long after
Zarathushtra.
54In
the Zoroastrian evil spirit’s name Angra-Mainyu, later
Ahriman, we can recognize the names Angiras, one of the
principal clans of Vedic seers, and Manyu, “intention”, one of
the names of Indra, and addressed in Rg-Veda 10:83-84.
Coincidence?
55E.g.
Jean Haudry: Les Indo-Européens, p.118. Remark that in other
contexts, Rasa can also mean the Narmada river, and also the mythical
river which surrounds the world. Oxus and Narmada were apparently
the borderline rivers of the Indus-Saraswati
civilization.
56O.K.
Ghosh: “Was Rama an Iranian?”, Illustrated Weekly of India,
27-2-1993, with reference to Sukumar Sen: RAm ItihAser
Prak-kathan (Bengali: “Introduction to the History of
Ram”).
57My
thanks to Prof. Wociech SkalmowskI, who teaches Persian and Iranian at
Catholic University, Leuven.