3.1. Tracing the Aryan migrants

Though the question of Aryan origins was much disputed in the 19th century, the Aryan invasion theory has been so solidly dominant in the 20th century that attempts to prove it have been extremely rare in recent decades (why prove the obvious?), until the debate flared up again in India after 1990. In his attempt to prove the Aryan invasion, Bernard Sergent uses the archaeological record, which, paradoxically, is invoked with equal confidence by the noninvasionist school (e.g. B.B. Lal: New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books, Delhi 1997).

The crux of the matter is: can archaeologists trace a population migrating through Central Asia and settling down in India? There seems to be new hope to pin down this elusive band of migrants: "Today, thanks to the extremely rich findings in Central Asia in the past twenty years, the discovery of the 'pre-Indian Indians' has become possible." (p.33) Sergent has tried to identify a crucial stage in this itinerary: the 3rd-millennium Bactrian culture as the base from which the Indo-Aryans invaded India.

Bactria, the basin of the Amu Darya or Oxus river, now northern Afghanistan plus southeastern Uzbekistan, is historically the heartland of Iranian culture. In an Indian Urheimat scenario, the Iranians left India before the heyday of the Harappan cities. The next waystation, where they developed their own distinct culture, was Bactria, where Zarathushtra lived (in the city of Balkh). In that framework, it is entirely logical that a separate culture has been discovered in Bactria and dated to the late 3rd millennium BC. However, Bernard Sergent identifies this Bronze Age culture of Bactria, "one of the most briliant civilizations of Asia" (p.157), as that of the Indo-Aryans poised to invade India.

Though not figuring much in the development of his own theory, evidence for similarities in material culture between Harappa and Bactria is acknowledged by Bernard Sergent, e.g. ceramics resembling those found in Chanhu-Daro. This Harappan influence on the Bactrian culture proper is distinct from the existence of six fully Harappan colonies in Afghanistan, most importantly Shortugai in Bactria, "a settlement completely Harappan in character on a tributary of the Amu Darya (...) on the foot of the ore-rich Badakshan range (...) with lapis lazuli, gold, silver, copper and lead ores. Not one of the standard characteristics of the Harappan cultural complex is missing from it." (Maurizio Tosi: "De Indusbeschaving voorbij de grenzen van het Indisch subcontinent", in UNESCO exhibition book Oude Culturen in Pakistan, Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussels 1989, p.133)

Logically, the close coexistence of Harappan colonies and Bactrian settlements was a conduit for mutual influence but also a source of friction and conflict. Indian-Iranian conflict has been a constant from the Bronze Age (replacement of Harappan with Bactrian culture in Shortugai ca. 1800 BC, Genèse de l'Inde, p.180) through Pehlevi, Shaka and Afghan invasions in India until Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi in the 18th century. Any Bactrian-Harappan antagonism would fit this pattern of hostility between Indo-Aryans and Iranians. Sergent's first job is to disprove the Iranian and prove the Indo-Aryan character of the Bactrian culture; the second is to show a Bactrian immigration in late- or post-Harappan India and a subsequent overwhelming Bactrian cultural impact on Indian society.

Sergent cites Akhmadali A. Askarov's conclusion that the Harappan-Bactrian similarities are due to "influence of northwestern India on Bactria by means of a migration of Indus people to Central Asia after the end of their civilization". (p.224, with reference to A.A. Askarov: "Traditions et innovations dans la culture du nord de la Bactriane à l'âge du bronze",Colloque Archéologie, CNRS, Paris 1985, p.119-124) The acknowledgment of a Harappa-to-Bactria movement is well taken, but this poses a chronological problem, for the Bactrian culture was not subsequent to but contemporaneous with Harappan culture. Sergent solves the problem by pointing out that Askarov and other Soviet scholars who first dug up the sites in Margiana (eastern Turkmenistan) and Bactria, used an obsolete form of C-14 Carbon dating, and that newer methods have pushed the chronology of these sites back by centuries, making Bactrian culture contemporaneous with Harappa. (p.160)

For Sergent, this chronological correction is essential: if the Bactrian culture was that of the Indo-Aryans who brought down the Indus civilization, it is necessary that they lived there before the end of the latter. But this synchronism is equally compatible with a dim pre-Harappan kinship between the Bactrian and Harappan cultures, which were different yet partly similar, a similarity which Askarov and Sergent attribute to Harappa-to-Bactria influence (which must inevitably have existed), but which may also owe something to a common origin.

Sergent then mentions a number of similarities in material culture between the Bactrian culture and some cultures in Central Asia and in Iran proper, e.g. ceramics like those of Namazga-V (southern Turkmenistan). Some of these were loans from Elam which were being transmitted from one Iranian (in his reconstruction, Indo-Iranian) settlement to the next, e.g. the so-called "Luristan bronzes", Luristan being a Southwest-Iranian region where Elamite culture was located. Some were loans from the "neighbouring and older" (p.158) culture of Margiana: does this not indicate an east-to-west gradient for the Indo-Iranians?

Well, one effect of Sergent's chronological correction is that what seem to be influences from elsewhere on Bactrian culture, may have to be reversed: "From that point onwards, the direction of exchanges and influences gets partly reversed: a number of similarities can just as well be explained by an influence of Bactria on another region as one of another on Bactria." (p.160) Note that this fits the Iranian east-to-west expansion implicit in the Avestic data and in the first chapter of the Zoroastrian Vendidad, which puts Afghanistan in the centre of the Iranian world, with the Caspian region hardly on the horizon yet. So, even for the relation between the Bactrian culture and its neighbours, the proper northwest-to-southeast direction required by the AIT has not been demonstrated, let alone a movement all the way from the northern Caspian region to India. And if there was transmission from other cultures to Bactria (as of course there was), this does not prove that the Bactrians were colonists originating in these other cultures; they may simply have practised commerce. Conversely, if they were colonists from elsewhere, they may have been colonists originating in pre-Harappan India.

At any rate, all the sites related in material culture to the prototypical Bactrian settlement of Dashli are in present-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan or Iran proper, without exception regions which were Iranian at the time they made their appearance in written history, mostly in the last millennium BC. While migrations are obviously possible, this Iranian bias says something about the burden of proof. It is entirely reasonable to accept as a starting hypothesis that the Dashli settlement, like its sister settlements, was Iranian. Those who insist it was something else, should accept the burden of proving that Dashli was Indo-Aryan, that migrations took place in which the Indo-Aryans there made way for Iranians.

3.3. Bactria vs. Harappa

A new insight based on archaeology and detrimental to the stereotypical Harap-pan/Aryan opposition, is that the Harappans were not matriarchal pacifists after all, that they did have weapons and fortifications, "just like" the Aryans (see e.g. Shereen Ratnagar: Enquiries into the Political Organization of Harappan Society, Ravish Publ., Pune 1991; note that Prof. Ratnagar is a virulent critic of all Indocentric revisions of the Aryan question, as in her article "Revisionist at work: a chauvinistic inversion of the Aryan invasion theory", Frontline, 9-2-1996, an attack on Prof. N.S. Rajaram). Yet, Sergent insists that the old picture still holds good: relatively unarmed mercantile Harappans versus heavily armed Aryans preparing their invasion in Bactria. The Bactrian settlements abound in metal weaponry, and this does present a contrast with the relative paucity of weapons in Harappa. The latter was a well-ordered mercantile society, Bactria a frontier society.

This contrast actually reminds us of a contrast between Iranian and Indian in the historical period. In pre-Alexandrine Iranian royal inscriptions, we come across truly shameless expressions of pride in bloody victories, even defiantly detailing the cruel treatment meted out to the defeated kings. By contrast, in Ashoka's inscriptions, we find apologies for the bloody Kalinga war and a call for establishing peace and order. Far from being a purely Buddhist reaction against prevalent Hindu martial customs, Ashoka's relative pacifism presents a personal variation within a broader and more ancient tradition of Ahimsa, nonviolence, best expressed in some sections of the Mahabharata. Though this epic (and most explicitly its section known as the Bhagavad Gita) rejects the extremist non-violence propagated by Mahatma Gandhi and also by the wavering Arjuna before the decisive battle, Krishna's exhortation to fight comes only after every peaceful means of appeasing or reconciling the enemy has been tried, whence the Hindu dictum Ahimsa paramo dharma, "non-violence is the highest religious duty".

True, the Vedas seem to be inspired by the same martial spirit of the Iranian inscriptions, but in the Indocentric chronology, they predate the high tide of Harappan civilization, belonging to a pre-Harappan period of conquest, viz. the conquest of the northwest by the Yamuna/Saraswati-based Puru tribe. Their westward conquest was connected with a larger westward movement which included the Iranian conquest of Central Asia (later continued into the Caspian area and West Asia). By way of hypothesis, I propose that Ahimsa was a largely post-Vedic development, and that the Iranians (who had a taste of it through Zarathushtra's strictures against animal sacrifice and the like) missed its more radical phase, sticking instead to the more uncivilized glorification of victory by means of force. This would concur with the finding of a more military orientation of Bactrian culture as compared with the post-Vedic Harappan culture.

3.4. The Bactrian tripura

In the principal Bactrian site of Dashli, a circular building with three concentric walls has been found. The building was divided into a number of rooms and inside, three fireplaces on platforms were discovered along with the charred remains of sacrificed animals. In this building, its Soviet excavator Viktor Sarianidi recognized an Iranian temple, but Sergent explains why he disagrees with him. (p.161) He argues that the Vedic Aryans were as much fire-worshippers as the Iranians, and that they sacrificed animals just like the early Iranians did (prior to the establishment of Zarathushtra's reforms, and even later, cfr. the bull sacrifice in the Roman-age Mithras cult), so that the excavated fire altars could be either Indo-Aryan or Iranian.

Of course, India and Iran have a large common heritage, and many religious practices, mythical motifs and other cultural items in both were the same or closely similar. But that truism will not do to satisfy Sergent's purpose, which is to show that the Bactrian culture was not generally Indo-Iranian, and definitely not Iranian, but specifically Indo-Aryan. There is nothing decisively un-Iranian about the Dashli fire altars, and I think Sarianidi's identification of Dashli as Iranian remains undisproven.

In fact, there may well be something un-Indic and specifically Iranian about it. First of all, roundness in buildings is highly unusual in Hindu culture, which has a strong preference for square plans (even vertically, as in windows, where rectangular shapes are preferred over arches), in evidence already in the Harappan cities. Moreover, Sergent notes the similarity with a fire temple found in Togolok, Margiana. The Togolok fire altar has gained fame by yielding traces of a plant used in the Soma (Iranian: Haoma) sacrifice: laboratory analysis in Moscow showed this to be Ephedra, a stimulant still used in ephedrine and derivative products.

Asko Parpola has tried to identify the Togolok temple as Indo-Iranian and possibly proto-Vedic, citing the Soma sacrifice there as evidence: the Rg-Vedic people reproached their Dasa (Iranian) enemies for not performing rituals including the Soma ritual, so Parpola ("The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic identity of the Dasas", in Studia Orientalia, vol.64, Helsinki 1988, p.195-265) identifies the former with the "Haumavarga Shakas" or Soma-using Scythians mentioned in Zoroastrian texts. However, every testimony we have of the Scythians, including the Haumavarga ones in whose sites traces of the Soma ceremony have been found, is as an Iranian-speaking people. It is possible that the sedentary Iranians included all nomads in their term Shaka, even the hypothetical Vedic-Aryan nomads on their way to India, but it is not more than just possible. The use of Soma was a bone of contention within Mazdeism, with Zarathushtra apparently opposing it against its adepts who were equally Iranian. There is nothing against characterizing the Togolok fire temple as Iranian.

And even if Thomas Burrow ("The Proto-Indoaryans", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1973, cited with approval by Sergent: Genèse de l'Inde, p.232) were right with his thesis that the Mazdean religion originated in a sustained reaction against the Indo-Aryans present in Bactria and throughout the Iranian speech area, making the non-Zoroastrian faction in Greater Iran an Indo-Aryan foreign resident group, it remains to be proven that these dissident Indo-Aryans made way for Zoroastrian hegemony in Iran by moving out, and more specifically by moving to India, somewhat like Moses taking the Israelites out of Egypt. There is neither scriptural nor archaeological evidence for such a scenario: the normal course of events would be assimilation by the dominant group, and the only emigration from Iranian territory (if it had already been iranianized) by Indo-Aryans that we know of, is the movement of the Mitannic Indo-Aryans from the southern Caspian area into Mesopotamia and even as far as Palestine.

In the Dashli building, Asko Parpola recognized a tripura such as have been described in the Vedic literature as the strongholds with three circular concentric walls of the Dasas or Asuras (Asura/Ahura worshippers), whom Parpola himself has identified elsewhere as Iranians ("The coming of the Aryans", Studia Orientalia, vol.64, p.212-215, with reference to Shatapatha Brahmana 6:3:3:24-25; and: "The problem of the Aryans and the Soma", in G. Erdosy ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.368 ff.). So, chances are once more that the Soma-holding fire-altars, like the tripura structures around them, in both Togolok and Dashli, were Iranian. Parpola (in Erdosy, ibid.) makes this conclusion even more compelling when he informs us that a similar building in Kutlug-Tepe "demonstrates that the tradition of building forts with three concentric walls survived in Bactria until Achaemenid times" -- when the region was undoubtedly Iranian.

Moreover, Parpola points out details in the Vedic descriptions of the tripura-holding Dasas and Asuras which neatly fit the Bactrian culture: the Rg-Veda "places the Dasa strongholds (..) in the mountainous area", which is what Afghanistan looks like to people from the Ganga-Saraswati-Indus plains; it speaks of "a hundred forts" of the Dasa, while the Vedic Aryans themselves "are never said to have anything but fire or rivers as their 'forts'. The later Vedic texts confirm this by stating that when the Asuras and Devas were fighting, the Asuras always won in the beginning, because they alone had forts. (...) The Rg-Vedic Aryans described their enemy as rich and powerful, defending their cattle, gold and wonderful treasures with sharp weapons, horses and chariots. This description fits the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in Bactria, with its finely decorated golden cups, weapons with ornamental animal figurines including the horse, and trumpets indicative of chariot warfare." (in Erdosy, ibid.)

This may pose a chronological problem to those who consider the Rg-Veda as pre-Bronze Age, or perhaps not, e.g. Parpola notes that the term tripura was "unknown to the Rg-Veda" and only appears later, "in the Brahmana texts" (in Erdosy, p.369) which noninvasionists date to the high Harappan period, contemporaneous with the Bactrian Bronze Age culture. At any rate, it affirms in so many words that the Bactrian Bronze Age culture was Dasa or Asura, terms which Parpola ("The coming of the Aryans", Studia Orientalia, vol.64, p.224) had identified with "the carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran". It also constitutes a challenge to those who make India the Urheimat of IE or at least of Indo-Iranian: if the presumed tripuras are a distinctly Dasa/Iranian element, identified as such in Vedic literature, and if the Vedic Aryans fought the Dasas in India, as the Rg-Vedic data indicate, should we not be able to find some tripuras in India too? Or did the Iranians only develop them after leaving India but while still waging occasional wars on the Indian border?

3.5. Were the Bactrians Indo-Aryans?

Other artefacts in Dashli have the same Iranian/Indo-Aryan ambiguity with a preference for the Iranian alternative. A vase in Dashli shows a scene with men wearing a kind of shirt leaving one shoulder uncovered. In this, Sergent recognizes the upanayana ceremony, in which a youngster is invested with the sacred shirt or thread. (p.163) But this is both a Vedic and a Zoroastrian ritual, with the latter resembling the depicted scene more closely: in India, only a thread is given, but among Zoroastrians, it is an actual shirt.

Some vases display horned snakes or dragons carrying one or more suns inside of them: according to Sergent, this refers to an Indo-Iranian dragon myth, attested in slightly greater detail in the Rg-Veda than in the Avesta (but what else would you expect, with Vedic literature being much larger, older and better preserved than the Avestan corpus?), about Indra liberating the sun by slaying the dragon Vrtra, or in the Avesta, Keresaspa killing the snake Azhi Srvara, "the horned one". (p.163-164, ref. to Rg-Veda 1:51:4, 1:54:6) The sources which drew his attention to this picture, both Soviet and French (Russian articles from the 1970s by Viktor Sarianidi and by I.S. Masimof, and Marie-Hélène Pottier: Matériel Funéraire de la Bactriane Méridionale à l'Age du Bronze, Paris 1984, p.82 ff.), are agreed that it is specifically Iranian, and we have no reason to disbelieve them. What Sergent adds is only that, like with the fire cult, it could just as well be Indo-Aryan; but that does not amount to proof of its Indo-Aryan rather than Iranian identity.

Several depictions (statuettes, seals) of a fertility goddess associated with watery themes have been found. Sergent points out that they are unrelated to Mesopotamian mythology but closely related to the "Indo-Iranian" goddess known in India as Saraswati, in Iran as Anahita. Which shall it be in this particular case, Iranian or Indian, Avestan or Vedic? Sergent himself adds that the closest written description corresponding to the visual iconography in question is found in Yasht 5 of the Avesta. (p.163)

Of course we must remain open to new interpretations and new findings. In this field, confident assertions can be overruled the same day by new discoveries. But if Sergent himself, all while advocating an Indo-Aryan interpretation of the known Bactrian findings, is giving us so many hints that their identity is uncertain at best, and otherwise more likely Iranian than Indo-Aryan, we have reason to believe in the Iranian identification established by other researchers. On the strength of the data he offers, the safest bet is that the Bactrian Bronze Age culture was the centre of Iranian culture.

This happens to agree with the evidence of Zoroastrian scripture, which has dialectal features pointing to the northeast of the historical Iranian linguistic space, meaning Bactria, and which specifically locates Zarathushtra in Bahlika/Balkh, a town in northern Afghanistan. It tallies with the list of regions in the opening chapter of the Vendidad, corresponding to Bactria, Sogdia, Pamir, Margiana, southern Afghanistan and northwestern India (Hapta Hendu, the Vedic Sapta Sindhavah), which happens to put Balkh near the geographical centre. Iran proper was iranianized only well after Zarathushtra's preaching. As Sergent notes, in ca. 1900 BC, the Namazga culture in Turkmenistan changes considerably taking in the influence of the then fast-expanding Bactria-Margiana culture (p.179): I read that as the Iranian expansion from their historical heartland westward into the south-Caspian area. From there, but again only after a few more centuries, they were to colonize Kurdistan/Media and Fars/Persia, where their kingdoms were to flourish into far-flung empires in the 1st millennium BC.

It is only logical that the dominant religious tradition in a civilization is the one developed in its demographic and cultural metropolis: the Veda in the Saraswati basin, the Avesta in the Oxus basin, i.e. Bactria. That Bactria did have the status of a metropolis is suggested by Sergent's own description of its Bronze Age culture as "one of the most brilliant in Asia". Though provincial compared with Harappa, it was a worthy metropolis to the somewhat less polished Iranian civilization.

3.6. Clarions of the Aryan invaders

Another distinctively Aryan innovation attested in Dashli was the trumpet: "Bactria has yielded a number of trumpets; some others had been found earlier in Tepe Hissar and Astrabad (northeastern Iran); Roman Ghirshman proposed to connect these instruments with the use of the horse, with the Iranian cavalry manoeuvring to the sound of the clarion. (...) In ancient India, the trumpet is not mentioned in the written sources". (p.162) Would it not be logical if the same type of cavalry manoeuvres had yielded the Aryans both Iran and India? In that case, we should have encountered some references to clarions in the Vedas. But no, as per Sergent's own reading, the Rg-Veda, supposedly the record of Aryan settlement in India, knows nothing of trumpets; though post-Harappan depictions of riders with trumpets are known.

All this falls into place if we follow the chronology given by K.D. Sethna and other Indian dissidents: the Rg-Veda was not younger but older than the Bronze Age and the heyday of Harappa. So, the trumpet was invented in the intervening period, say 2,500 BC, and then used in the subsequent Iranian conquest of Bactria, Margiana and Iran.

The comparatively recent migration into Iran of the Iranians, who supposedly covered the short distance from the Volga mouth to Iran in the 3rd or 2nd millennium BC (losing the wayward Indo-Aryans along the way), has not been mapped archaeologically, in contrast with the successive Kurgan expansion waves into Europe. Jean Haudry reports optimistically: "Since the late 3rd millennium BC, an undecorated black pottery appears in Tepe Hissar (Turkmenistan), together with violin-shaped female idols and esp. with bronze weapons, the horse and the war chariots, and -- a detail of which R. Ghirshman has demonstrated the importance -- the clarion, indispensible instrument for collective chariot maneuvers. We can follow them from a distance on their way to the south." (J. Haudry: Les Indo-Européens, p.118, with reference to R. Ghirshman: L'Iran et les Migrations des Indo-Aryans et des Iraniens, 1977) But this is not necessarily the entry of "the" Iranians into Iran, and if it is, it need not have the Kurgan area as its starting-point.

In the account of Roman Ghirshman and Jean Haudry, the proto-Iranians with their clarions travelled "to the south". Rather than Indo-Iranians on their way from South Russia to Iran and partly to India, these may just as well be the Iranians on their way from Bactria (and ultimately from India), via the Aral Lake area, to Iran and Mesopotamia. Indeed, viewed from Iran, entrants from Russia and from India would arrive through the same route, viz. from the Aral Lake southward. A look at the map suffices to show this: rather than go in a straight line across the mountains, substantial groups of migrants would follow the far more hospitable route through the fertile Oxus valley to the Aral Lake area, and then proceed south from there.

Even in Bernard Sergent's erudite book, I have not found any data which compel us to accept that a particular culture can be identified with the very first Indo-Iranian wave of migrants; Central Asia was criss-crossed for millennia by variegated Iranian-speaking tribes. Nonetheless, Haudry's clarion-wielders of "the late 3rd millennium BC" and Sergent's occupiers of Namazga "in ca. 1900 BC" may of course be the first Iranian intruders into Turkmenistan and Persia, but that would serve the Indocentric theory even better, for Sergent's data show that these intruders came from Bactria, not from Russia.

3.7. Bactrian invasion in India

Thus far, the archaeological argument advanced by some scholars in favour of an Aryan invasion into India has not been very convincing. Consider e.g. this circular reasoning by Prof. Romila Thapar ("The Perennial Aryans", Seminar, December 1992): "In Haryana and the western Ganga plain, there was an earlier Ochre Colour Pottery going back to about 1500 BC or some elements of the Chalcolithic cultures using Black-and-Red Ware. Later in about 800 BC there evolved the Painted Grey Ware culture. The geographical focus of this culture seems to be the Doab, although the pottery is widely distributed across northern Rajasthan, Panjab, Haryana and western U.P. None of these post-Harappan cultures, identifiable by their pottery, are found beyond the Indus. Yet this would be expected if 'the Aryans' were a people indigenous to India with some diffusion to Iran, and if the attempt was to find archaeological correlates for the affinities between Old Indo-Aryan and Old Avestan."

Firstly, if no common pottery type is found in Iran and India in 1500-800 BC, and if this counts as proof that no migration from India to Iran took place, then it also proves that no migration from Iran to India took place. In particular, the PGW, long identified with the Indo-Aryans, cannot be traced to Central Asia; if it belonged to Aryans, then not to Aryan invaders. So, if substantiated, Prof. Thapar's statement is actually an argument against an Aryan invasion in ca. 1500 BC. Secondly, if the absence of migration in either direction in the period from 1500 BC onwards is really proven, this evidence remains compatible with an Indo-European emigration from India in another time bracket, say between 6000 and 2000 BC.

In spite of the impression created in popular literature, archaeology has by no means demonstrated that there was an Aryan immigration into India. Even the new levels in accuracy do not affect the following status quaestionis of the Aryan Invasion theory: "The question of Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent of India can, at best, be described as enigmatic." (David G. Zanotti: "Another Aspect of the Indo-European Question", Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1975/3, p.260) Thus, among those who assume the Aryan Invasion, there is no consensus on when it took place, and some AIT archaeologists alter the chronology so much that the theory comes to mean the opposite of what it is usually believed to mean, viz. an affirmation of Aryan dominance in Harappa rather than an Aryan destruction of Harappa: "[This] episode of elite dominance which brought the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family to India (...) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus civilization (...)" (C. Renfrew: "Before Babel", Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1, p.14)

Enter Bernard Sergent. He builds on a corpus of findings (some of them already used by Asko Parpola) pertaining to the apparent entry of elements from the Bactrian Bronze Age culture into late- and post-Harappan northwestern India. He also offers a theory of how these Bactrians may have caused the downfall of the Harappan civilization, parallel with the contemporaneous crisis in civilizations in Central and West Asia.

Civilization and urbanization are closely related to commerce, exchange, colonization of mining areas, and other socio-economic processes which presuppose communications and transport. When communication and transport cease, we see cultures suffer decline, e.g. the Tasmanian aboriginals, living in splendid isolation for thousands of years, had lost many of the skills which mankind had developed in the Stone Age, including the art of making fire. One of the reasons why the Eurasian continent won out against Africa and the Americas in the march of progress, was the fairly easy and well-developed contact routes between the different civilizations of Europe, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. So, one can force decline on a culture by cutting off its trade routes, a tactic routinely used for short periods (hence only with limited long-term effect) in wartime, but which seems to have troubled the ancient civilizations in ca. 2000 BC with devastating effect for several centuries. It was in reaction to this destabilization of international trade links that the civilizational centres started building empires by the mid-2nd millennium, e.g. the Kassite empire in Mesopotamia where there had only been city-states (Ur, Uruk, Isin, Larsa, etc.) prior to the great crisis.

Or so Sergent says. Dismissing the thesis of a climatological crisis (though such a crisis would by itself already trigger an economic crisis even in the areas not directly affected climatologically), he argues that only an economic crisis can explain the simultaneous decline of cities in widely different locations, some near rivers and some on hills, some in densely populated agglomerations and some overlooking thinly populated steppes or mountain areas, some in hot and some in colder areas. The ones to blame are -- who else? -- the Aryans. They, and "specifically Indo-Aryans" (p.198-99), played a role in the Hurrian and Kassite invasions disrupting Mesopotamia (while the IE or non-IE identity of the Guti and Lullubi invaders remains unknown, though attempts are made to link the Guti with the Tocharians); and from Bactria, they by themselves disrupted the economy of the Indus-Saraswati civilization.

They didn't physically destroy the Harappan cities, as Mortimer Wheeler and others of his generation thought: "No trace of destruction has been observed in these cities." (p.201) But by creating insecurity for the travelling traders, they bled and suffocated the economy which made city life possible, and thus forced the Harappans to abandon their cities and return to a pre-urban lifestyle. The declining and fragmented Harappan country and society then fell an easy prey to the Indo-Aryan invaders from Bactria.

This scenario has been attested in writing in the case of Mesopotamia. Sergent quotes other experts to the effect that "from ca. 2230 BC, (...) the Guti had cut off the roads, ruined the countryside, set the cities on fire" (p.199, quoting Paul Garelli: Le Proche-Orient Asiatique, PUF, Paris 1969, p.89-93), that the Assyrian trade system was disrupted by the Mitannic people, etc. But is there similar evidence for the Indus-Saraswati civilization?

Sergent cites findings that in the final stage of Mohenjo Daro, we see the large mansions of the rich subdivided into small apartments for the poor, the water supply system neglected, the roads and houses no longer following the plan. (p.200) This certainly marks a decline, the rich losing their power and the powerful losing their control and resources. Same story in Harappa, Chanhu Daro, Kalibangan, Lothal: a great loss of quality in architecture and organization in the last phase. Moreover, all traces of long-distance trade disappear (just as in Mesopotamia, all signs of commerce with "Meluhha"/Sindh disappear by 2000 BC), and trade is the basis of city life. So, "these cities didn't need to be destroyed: they had lost their reason for existing, and were vacated". (p.201) But that doesn't bring any Indo-Aryan invasion into the picture. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with a hypothesis of Iranian Bactrians disrupting a Harappan economy manned by Indo-Aryans.

3.8. Aryan invader settlements in India

To Bernard Sergent, the "strategic" key to the Aryan invasion puzzle has been provided by the discovery, by a French team in 1968, of the post-Harappan town of Pirak, near the Bolan pass and near Mehrgarh in Baluchistan. Pirak was a new settlement dating back only to the 18th century BC. Culturally it was closely related to the societies to its north and west, especially Bactria. Sergent sums up a long list of precise material items which Pirak had in common with those non-Indian regions. (p.219 ff.) So, this was a settlement of foreign newcomers bringing some foreign culture with them.

Sergent will certainly convince many readers by asserting that in Pirak, "the horse makes its appearance in India, both through bones and in figurines", and this "connotes without any possible doubt the arrival in India of the first Indo-European-speaking populations". (p.221) That depends entirely on how much we make of the limited but real evidence of horses in the Harappan civilization. Note moreover that while the horse was important to the Indo-Aryans, the Bactrian two-humped camel was not; but in Pirak, both camel and horse are conspicuous, both in skeletal remains and in depictions.

If the Bactrian culture and those to its west were Iranian-speaking, which is likely, then Pirak is simply an Iranian settlement in an Indian border region, a southward extension of the Bactrian culture. Indo-Iranian borders have been fluctuating for millennia, while different groups of Iranians down to Nadir Shah have again and again tried to invade India, so the Iranian intrusion in Pirak (which may have ended up assimilated into its Indo-Aryan environment) need not be the momentous historical breakthrough which it is to Sergent. It would only be that if it can be shown that the Pirak innovations are repeated in many North-Indian sites in the subsequent centuries, where we know that the dominant culture was Indo-Aryan.

A related culture is the Cemetery H culture on the outskirts of Harappa itself. Sergent offers a detail which is distinctly non-Vedic and Mazdean (Zoroastrian): "The dead, represented by unconnected skulls and bones, were placed, after exposure, in big jars". (p.224; emphasis added) Exposure to birds and insects is still the first stage in the Zoroastrian disposal of the dead. Sergent also reports that the influence of the native Harappan civilization is much greater here than in Pirak. So, as the Iranian invaders moved deeper inland, across the Indus, they soon lost their distinctiveness. Considering that Afghan dynasties have ruled parts of India as far east as Bengal, using Persian and building in a West-Asian style, this post-Harappan Iranian intrusion as far as the Indus riverside is not that impressive.

Indeed, from the Indus eastwards, we lose track of this Bactrian invasion. Sergent himself admits as much: "For the sequel, archaeology offers little help. The diggings in India for the 2nd millennium BC reveal a large number of regional cultures, generally rather poor, and to decree what within them represents the Indo-Aryan or the indigenous contribution would be arbitrary. If Pirak (...) represents the start of Indian culture, there is in the present state of Indian archaeology no 'post-Pirak' except at Pirak itself, which lasted till the 7th century BC: the site remained, along with a few very nearby ones, isolated." (p.246-247) So, the Bactrian invaders who arrived through the Bolan pass and established themselves in and around the border town of Pirak, never crossed the Indus, and never made their mark on India the way the Indo-Aryans did.

This confirms the statement by the American archaeologist Jim Shaffer that "no material culture is found to move from west to east across the Indus" (personal communication, 1996), or more academically, that the demographic eastward shift of the Harappan population during the decline of their cities, i.e. an intra-Indian movement from Indus and Saraswati to Ganga, "is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC", while the archaeological record shows "no significant discontinuities" for the period when the Aryan invasion should have made its mark. (Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein: "The concepts of 'cultural tradition' and 'palaeoethnicity' in South-Asian archaeology", in G. Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.139-140)

The Pirak people were not the Vedic Aryans conquering India. The Aryan invasion of India has somehow gone missing from the archaeological record, and this is admitted by Sergent himself in the very section containing his decisive piece of evidence for the Aryan Invasion Theory.

3.9. Scriptural evidence

To fortify his reconstruction of the Aryan invasion, Bernard Sergent repeats some well-known scriptural references. Indian authors are right in pointing out that this is systematically the weakest part in AIT argumentations, as the knowledge of Vedic literature among Western scholars is either too limited or too distorted by AIT presuppositions. Sergent's arguments at this point repeat well-known claims about the contents of the Vedas. Thus, the Rg-Veda was written by foreigners because it doesn't know the tiger nor rice nor "the domesticated elephant which existed in the Harappan Indus culture". (p.241)

As for the tiger, it is often said that India was divided in a lion zone in the west and a tiger zone in the rest. This image persists in the symbolism of the civil war in Sri Lanka: the Sinhalese, originating in Gujarat (where lions exist even today), have the lion as their symbol, while the separatists among the Tamils, originating in southeastern India, call themselves the Tigers. However, to judge from the Harappan seal imagery, tigers did originally exist in the Saraswati and Indus basins as well, overlapping with the lion zone. As Sir Monier Monier-Williams (Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p.1036, entry vyâghra) notes, in the Atharva-Veda, "vyâghra/tiger is often mentioned together with the lion". It is simply impossible that the Rg-Vedic seers, even if they were unfamiliar with the Ganga basin (quod non), had never heard of tigers.

As for the domesticated elephant, if it was known in Harappa, does anyone seriously suggest that it was not known in the same area in subsequent centuries by the Vedic Aryans?

While regression in knowledge and technology does sometimes happen, there is no reason whatsoever why people who could domesticate elephants would have lost this useful skill, which is not dependent on foreign trade or urbanization, when the Harappan cities declined. Isn't the mention of how "the people deck him like a docile king of elephants" (Rg-Veda 9:57:3, thus translated by Ralph Griffith: Hymns of the Rg-Veda, p.488) a reference to the Hindu custom of taking adorned domesticated elephants in pageants?

Rice, according to Sergent himself, made its appearance in the Indus basin in the late Harappan period, and was known to the Bactrian invaders in Pirak. (p.230) He identifies those Bactrian invaders as the Vedic Aryans, so why haven't they mentioned rice in their Rg-Veda? One simple answer would be that the Rg-Veda is pre-Harappan, composed at a time when rice was not yet cultivated in northwestern India. This chronological correction solves a lot of similar arguments from silence. Thus, there was cotton in Harappa and after, but no cotton in the Rg-Veda. Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and in Pirak, but are not mentioned in the Rg-Veda; a short knife can be made from soft metals like gold or copper, but a sword requires advanced bronze or iron metallurgy. (Ralph Griffith uses "sword" twice in his translation The Hymns of the Rg-Veda, p.25, verse 1:37:2, and p.544, verse 10:20:6, both already in the younger part of the Rg-Veda, but in the index on p.702 he corrects himself, specifying that "knife" or "dagger" would be more appropriate.) Likewise, the core stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the ones most likely to stay close to the original versions even in their material details (unlike the many sideshows woven into these epics, often narrating much more recent events), feature only primitive pre-Bronze Age weapons: Rama's bow and arrow, Hanuman's club.

Camels were part of the Bactrian culture and its Pirak offshoot, but are not mentioned in the Rg-Veda except for its rather late 8th book, which mentions Bactrian fauna, possibly in the period when the early Harappans were setting up mining colonies like Shortugai. It all falls into place when the Rg-Veda is considered as pre-Harappan. Incidentally, the late appearance of Afghan fauna in the Rg-Veda contradicts an Afghanistan-to-India itinerary, and argues in favour of an India-to-Afghanistan movement during the Rg-Vedic period.

For a very different type of scriptural evidence, Sergent sees a synchronism between the archaeologically attested settlement of Pirak and the beginning of the Puranic chronology, which in his view goes back to the 17th century BC, in "remarkable coincidence" with the florescence of Pirak. (p.223) Reference is in fact to Kalhana's Rajatarangini, which starts a dynastic lists of kings of Kashmir in 1882, i.e. the early 19th century BC. But if Kalhana can be a valid reference, what about Kalhana's dating the Mahabharata war to the 25th century BC? If Puranic history is any criterion, Sergent should realize that its lists of Aryan kings for other parts of India than Kashmir go way beyond 2,000 BC.

Another classic scriptural reference concerns everything relating to the enemies of the Vedic Aryans, such as the "aboriginal" Dasas. Very aptly, Sergent identifies the Dasas and the Panis as Iranian, and the Pakthas (one of the tribes confronting the Vedic king Sudas in the Battle of the Ten Kings) as the Iranian Pathans. (p.241-244) He specifically rejects the common belief that the Dasas were black-skinned, in spite of their occasional description as "black-covered" or "from a black womb", pointing out that even the fair-haired and white-skinned Vikings were called the "black foreigners" by the Irish, with "black" purely used as a metaphor for "evil". (This is even the case in some African languages, for there is no relation between colour symbolism and skin colour: white is the sacred colour to dark-skinned Indian tribals, while black is auspicious to the whitish Japanese, who consider white as the colour of mourning, just as Sanskritic Hindus do.)

Yet, Sergent doesn't identify the said Iranian tribes with the Bronze Age Bactrians, arguing that in Alexander's time, Greek authors locate the Parnoi and Dahai just south of the Aral Lake. But that was almost two thousand years after the heyday of the Bactrian Bronze Age culture and arguably even longer after the Rg-Veda. The only mystery is that these ethnonyms managed to survive that long, not that during those long centuries, they could migrate a few hundred miles to the northwest -- centuries during which we know for fact that the Iranians expanded westward from their Bactrian heartland across rivers and mountains to settle as far west as Mesopotamia.

Moreover, the Vedas locate the confrontations in the prolonged hostility between IndoAryans and Iranians not on the Saraswati (which could in theory be identified as the homonymous Harahvaiti/Helmand in Afghanistan) (p.242), but on the riverside of the Parush-ni/Ravi and other Panjab rivers, unambiguously in India. This is only logical if the Vedic Aryans were based in the Saraswati basin and their Iranian enemies were based in an area to their west near the Khyber pass: they confronted halfway in Panjab. So not only did these Iranian tribes (Dahai, Parnoi) move from Bactria to the Aral Lake area in 2000-300 BC, but they had started moving northwestward centuries earlier, in the Rg-Vedic period, in Panjab.

With every invasionist attempting to strengthen his case by appealing to the testimony of Hindu scripture, the collective failure becomes more glaring.

3.10. Comparison with archaeological reconstruction in Europe

The westward expansion of the Kurgan culture has been mapped with some degree of accuracy: "If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware culture. At about 3200-2300 BC this Corded Ware horizon is sufficiently early to predate the emergence of any of the specific proto-languages. In addition, it is universally accepted as the common component if not the very basis of the later Bronze Age cultures that are specifically identified with the different proto-languages. Furthermore, its geographical distribution from Holland and Switzerland on the west across northern and central Europe to the upper Volga and middle Dniepr encompasses all those areas which [have been] assigned as the 'homelands' of these European proto-languages."

(J.P. Mallory: In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Hudson & Hudson, London 1989, p.108)

This is a very important insight for understanding the large common (partly pre-IE substratal) element in the European IE languages, distinguishing them collectively from Anatolian, Tocharian and Indo-Iranian: "The study of the lexicon of the Northern European languages, especially Germanic and Baltic, reveals that a large number of terms relevant to the ecology of the habitat of the early populations of the area and to their socio-economic activities have no plausible Indo-European etymology. (...) it is possible to ascribe to the pre-Indo-European substrate in the Baltic area a number of names of plants, animals, objects and activities characteristic of the Neolithic cultures." (Edgar C. Polomé: "The Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe: the Linguistic Evidence", Journal of Indo-European Studies, fall 1990, p.331-337) Many of these terms also extend to Celtic, Slavic and sometimes Italic and Greek.

Examples include the words barley, Russian bor ("millet"), Latin far ("spelt"); Irish tuath, Gothic thiuda, "people", whence the ethnic names Dutch/Deutsch; German wahr, Latin verus, Old Irish fir, "true"; Latin granum, Dutch koren, English grain and corn; Lithuanian puodas, Germanic fata, whence Dutch vat, "vessel"; Dutch delven, "dig", Old Prussian (Baltic) dalptan, "piercing-tool"; Old Irish land, Old Prussian lindan, Germanic land; Latin alnus (<alisnos), Dutch els, Lithuanian elksnis, "alder", also related to Greek aliza, "white poplar"; Dutch smaak, "taste", Gothic smakka, "fig, tasty fruit", Lithuanian smaguricu, "sweet, treat"; from an ancient form *londhwos, Dutch lenden, Latin lumbus, "waist". Likewise, the Germanic words fish, apple, oak, beech, whale, goat, elm, (n)adder have counterparts in other European languages, e.g. Latin piscis, Old Irish aball, Greek aig-ilops or krat-aigos (possibly related to Berber iksir, Basque eskur, as suggested by Xavier Delamarre: Le Vocabulaire Indo-Européen, Maisonneuve, Paris 1984, p.167), Latin fagus, squalus, haedus, ulmus, natrix; but they have no attested counterparts in the Asian IE languages. Archaeology and linguistics reinforce each other in indicating the existence of a second centre of IE dispersal in the heart of Europe, the Corded Ware culture of ca. 3000 BC, whence most European branches of IE parted for their historical habitats.

Even earlier demographic and cultural movements have been mapped with promising accuracy. The sudden apparition of full-fledged Neolithic culture in the Low Countries in about 5,100 BC can clearly be traced to a gradual expansion of the agricultural civilization through Hungary (5700) and southern Germany (5350 BC), from the Balkans and ultimately from Anatolia. (Pierre Bonenfant & Paul-Louis van Berg: "De eerste bewoners van het toekomstige 'België': een etnische overrompeling", in Anne Morelli ed.: Geschiedenis van het eigen volk, Kritak, Leuven 1993, p.28) It is this gradual spread of agriculture and its concomitant changes in life-style (houses, tools, ceramics, domesticated animals) which the leading archaeologist Colin Renfrew has rashly identified as the indo-europeanization of Europe, but which Marija Gimbutas and many others would consider as the spread of the pre-IE "Old European" culture.

It remains possible that in some outlying regions, the early Indo-Europeans arrived on the scene in time to capture this movement of expanding agriculture, but it did not originate with them, because Anatolia and the Balkans were demonstrably not the IE Urheimat. On the contrary, in the northeastern Mediterranean, the presence of pre-IE elements in the historically attested IE cultures and languages (Greek, Hittite) is very strong, indicating that the Indo-Europeans had to subdue a numerous and self-confident, culturally advanced population. It is this Old European people, known through towns like Catal Hüyük and Vinca, which gradually spread to the northwest and civilized most of Europe before its indo-europeanization.

So, that's archaeology in action. After the wave of agriculture spreading to the farthest corners from the southeast in the 7th-4th millennium BC (linguistically unidentified), the wave of the horse-riding late-Kurganites has been identified as bringing the IE languages. There is as yet no parallel map of a Kurgan-to-India migration. Thus, the material relation between the Andronovo culture in Kazakhstan (often considered as the Indo-Iranians freshly emigrated from the Kurgan area) and the Bactria-Margiana culture (presumed to be the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians on their way to India and Iran) has been established only vaguely, certainly not well enough to claim that the latter was an offshoot of the former (which would support the AIT). As we saw, even tracing a migration from Bactria across the Indus has not succeeded so far.

But then, neither has a reverse migration been mapped archaeologically. If the Bactrian Bronze Age culture was Iranian and the Iranians had earlier been defeated in India, where is the archaeological trail of the Iranians from India to Bactria? And earlier, where is the evidence of Proto-Indo-Europeans on their way from India to the Kurgan area? Those who consider India as the Urheimat of IE should suspend their current triumphalism and take up the challenge.

3.11. Indo-Aryans in West Asia

Another challenge to the Indocentric school has been thrown by Bernard Sergent without his realizing it. On p.206 ff., he adds some new data about the large IE and specifically Indo-Aryan presence in West Asia: Indo-Aryan names are quite common in Syria and Palestine in the 15th-13th century BC, e.g. the Palestian town of Sichem was ruled by one Birishena, i.e. Vira-sena, "the one who has an army of heroes", and Qiltu near Jerusalem was ruled by one Suar-data, i.e. "gift of Heaven"; to Sergent, this also proves that the Indo-Aryans maintained a separate existence after and outside the Mitannic kingdom until at least the 13th century BC.

A fairly serious problem for the non-invasionists in this regard concerns the term Asura: in the Rg-Veda a word for "god" (cfr. Germanic Ase, Aesir), in later Vedic literature a word for "demon", obviously parallel and causally related with the Iranian preference for Asura/Ahura as against the demonized Deva/Daeva, the remaining Hindu term for "god". On p.211 and p.280, Sergent makes the very popular mistake of seeing "the Asuras" as a separate class of gods next to "the Devas". In fact, the distinction and opposition between them is a late-Vedic development connected with the Irano-Indian (or Mazdeic-Vedic) conflict. In the Rg-Veda, Deva and Asura are not two tribes of gods; they are as synonymous as "God" and "Lord" are in Christian parlance.

That state of affairs seems to persist in the Indo-Aryan diaspora in West Asia of the 2nd millennium BC, i.e. long after the completion of the Rg-Veda in the non-invasionist chronology.

Sergent has found quite a few personal names with Asura in West Asia, e.g. the Mitannic general Kart-ashura, the name Biry-ashura attested in Nuzi and Ugarit, in Nuzi also the names Kalm-ashura and Sim-ashura, the Cilician king Shun-ashura, while in Alalakh (Syria), two people were called Ashura and Ashur-atti. (p.210) He explicitly deduces a synchronism between early Vedic and Mitannic-Kassite, which tallies splendidly with the AIT chronology. But in that case, the problem which I am drawing attention to, disappears: of course the West-Asian Indo-Aryans practised a form of the Vedic religion consistent with the early Vedic data, because theirs was the early Vedic age. And that is why Sergent doesn't see the problem which arises when the wild non-invasionist chronology is accepted: if two millennia have passed between the Rg-Vedic seers and the said testimony of an Indo-Aryan presence in West Asia, how is it possible that these West-Asian Indo-Aryans have missed the late-Vedic developments which turned the revered Asuras into demons?

At present, this problem for the non-invasionists can only be solved at the level of hypothesis. It is perfectly possible, even if not yet attested archaeologically or literarily, that along with the Iranians, a purely Indo-Aryan-speaking group emigrated from India in the Rg-Vedic period to seek its fortune in the Far West. Perhaps it is from them that Uralic speakers borrowed the term Asura, "lord", along with Sapta, "seven, week", Sasar, "sister", and a few other Indo-Aryan words. Some of these Indo-Aryans, organized as bands of warrior, engineered the conquests of their Mitannic and Kassite host populations. Considering that Vedic names are still given to Hindu children today, thousands of years after Vedic Sanskrit went out of daily use, and often in communities which speak a non-Indo-Aryan language, it is conceivable that the Indo-Aryans in West Asia managed to preserve their Vedic tradition from the time of their emigration from India during the Vedic age until the mid-2nd millennium BC. And if so, they had to preserve it in the form it had at the time of their emigration, i.c. complete with the veneration for Asura, the Lord.

A related problem concerns the Kassites, who were also Indo-Aryan to a extent. Non-in-vasionists have made much of the presence of Sanskrit names in the Kassite dynasty in Babylon. However, we have information from Semitic Mesopotamians about the Kassite language, and it was not Indo-Aryan. A number of known Kassite words are apparently unrelated to any known language, e.g. mashu, "god"; yanzi, "king"; saribu, "foot". They also seem to have a formation of the plural unknown in IE, viz. with an infix, e.g. sirpi, sirpami, "brown one(s)", or minzir, minzamur, "dotted one(s)". (Wilfred van Soldt: "Het Kassitisch", Phoenix, Leiden 1998, p.90-93) Assuming that the language described as "Kassite" and located by the Babylonian sources in the hills east of Mesopotamia was indeed the language of the Kassite dynasty (for language names sometimes change referent), does this not refute the Indian connection of the Kassites?

No: this state of affairs suggests a third scenario, viz. that a non-IE population in Iran used Sanskrit names referring to Vedic gods. This would be the same situation as in the Dravidian provinces: a non-IE-speaking population maintains its own language but adopts Sanskritic lore and nomenclature. It would mean that Vedic culture had spread as much to the west as we know it has spread to the east and south, and that a part of western Iran (well before its iranianization) was as much part of Greater India as Kerala or Bali became in later centuries.

4.1. East-Asian influences

Bernard Sergent traces practically all Indian language families to foreign origins. He confirms the East-Asian origins of both the Tibeto-Burmese languages (Lepcha, Naga, Mizo etc.) and the Austro-Asiatic languages (Santal, Munda, Khasi etc.). Though many tribals in central and southern India are the biological progeny of India's oldest human inhabitants, their adopted languages are all of foreign origin. To Sergent, this is true of not only Austro-Asiatic and Indo-Aryan, but also of Dravidian.

The Himalayan branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, distinct from Tibetan, already has a very long but inconspicuous presence in northern India. Originating in China, this group of now very small languages once embraced parts of the northern plains. Of greater historical importance is the Austro-Asiatic family, which Sergent describes as once the predominant one in a continuous area from central India to Vietnam, but now reduced to a series of pockets in between the riverine population centres dominated by the immigrant Thai and Tibeto-Burmese languages (originating in China) and in India by the Indo-Aryan languages.

Sergent is merely following in others' footsteps when he assumes that mayura, "peacock", gaja, "elephant", karpasa, "cotton", and other Sanskrit fauna or flora terms are loans from Austro-Asiatic. (p.370) In most such cases, the only ground for this assumption is that similar-sounding words exist in the Munda languages of Chotanagpur, languages which have not been committed to writing before the 19th century. Chances are that in the intervening millennia, when these words were attested in Sanskrit but not necessarily in Munda, they were borrowed from Indo-Aryan ino Munda, or from an extinct language into both. At any rate, the hypothesis of an Austro-Asiatic origin should only be accepted in case the term is also attested in non-Indian branches such as Khmer.

The alleged loans only start appearing in the 10th and youngest book of the Rg-Veda and really break through in the Brahmanas. Sergent follows the classical interpretation, viz. that this shows how the Vedic Aryans gradually moved east, encountering the Austro-Asiatic speakers in the Ganga basin. While I am not convinced of the existence of more than a few Munda terms in Sanskrit (more in the adjoining Indo-Aryans Prakrits: Hindi, Bengali, Oriya), I would agree that there are other Munda influences, notably in mythology, as we shall discuss separately. Non-invasionists will have to account for this Munda contribution.

Here too, I suggest that chronology is all-important. It is quite possible that Munda had not arrived in India at the time of the Rg-Veda. When the Harappans migrated eastward (as demographically expansive populations do), or when the post-Harappans fled eastward from the disaster area which the Indus-Saraswati basin had become, the Munda-speaking people they encountered in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar may have been recent immigrants from the agricultural civilization of what is now Thailand and southwestern China. All the same, it remains possible that for local flora and fauna, the Indo-Aryans did adopt some Munda terminology.

Broadly, the Austro-Asiatic expansion can be compared with the gradual spread of the Old European Neolithic from Anatolia and the Balkans to the far corners of Europe, and with the spread of India's Northwestern Neolithic to the rest of the subcontinent. In that case, the Munda-speaking farmers in the eastern Ganga basin must have assimilated into the Indo-Aryan population, with only the peripheral populations in the hills retaining their imported languages. This Munda contribution is by no means incompatible with a native status of IE.

4.2. Is Dravidian native to India?

In one of his most innovative chapters, Sergent reviews all the evidence of Dravido-African and Dravido-Uralic kinship. In African languages spoken in the entire Sahel belt, from Sudan to Senegal, numerous semantic and grammatical elements are found which also exist in Dravidian. The similarity with the Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Samoyedic) is equally pronounced. Sergent offers the hypothesis that at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, some 10,000 years ago, the Dravidians left the Sudan, one band splitting off in Iran to head north to the Urals, the others entering India and moving south.

Within this scenario of a Dravidian immigration, it is tempting to speculate that upon entering India, the Dravidians first of all founded the Indus civilization. Surprisingly, Sergent rejects this otherwise popular hypothesis, on the impeccably rational ground that there is no evidence for it. Thus, except in coastal Sindh and Gujarat, geographical terms in the Indus-Saraswati area are never of Dravidian origin. There is also no continuity in material culture between Harappan culture and the oldest known Dravidian settlements.

True to scholarly norms, Sergent pleads for a provisional acceptance of our ignorance about the identity of the Harappans. However, as a concession to impatient readers who insist on having some theory at least, he gives one or two very slender indications that the Burushos (who preserve their Burushaski language till today in Hunza, Pak-Occupied Kashmir) may have played a role in it. (p.138) However, he finds no Burushaski lexical influence on Indo-Aryan except possibly the word sinda, "river", connected in one direction or the other with Sanskrit Sindhu, "river, Indus", not otherwise attested in IE. (Remark that the Iranian name Hindu for "Indus", hence also for "India", indicates that the Iranians have lived near the Indus. If they had not, then Sindhu would have been a foreign term which they would have left intact, just as they kept the Elamite city name Susa intact rather than evolving it to Huha or something like that; but because Sindhu was part of their own vocabulary, it followed the evolution of Iranian phonetics to become Hindu.)

Sergent is also skeptical of David MacAlpin's thesis of an "Elamo-Dravidian" language family: what isoglosses there are between Elamite and Dravidian can be explained sufficiently through contact rather than common origin.

Like many others, Sergent suggests that the early Dravidians can be equated with the "southern Neolithic" of 2500-1600 BC. Their round huts with wooden framework are the direct precursors of contemporary rural Dravidian housing. Two types of Hindu vessel have been discovered in southern Neolithic sites, including a beaked copper recipient still used in Vedic fire ceremonies. (p.48, with reference to Bridget and Raymond Allchin and to Dharma Pal Agrawal) Though the prehistory of the southern Neolithic is difficult to trace, it can be stated with confidence that the best candidate is the Northwestern Neolithic, which started in Mehrgarh in the 8th millennium BC. It is, by contrast, very unlikely that it originated as an outpost of the Southeast-Asian Neolithic, which expanded into India at a rather late date, bringing the Austro-Asiatic languages. According to Sergent, a link with the mature Harappan civilization is equally unlikely: neither in material culture nor in physical type is such a link indicated by the evidence. The Dravidians were certainly already in the Deccan when the mature Harappan civilization started. Sergent suggests that the Dravidians formed a pre-Harappan population in Sindh and Gujarat, and that they were overwhelmed and assimilated, not by the invading Aryans, but by the mature-Harappan population. (p.52)

The picture which emerges is that of a multi-lingual Indus-Saraswati civilization with Dravidian as the minor partner (possibly preserved or at least leaving its mark in the southern metropolis of Mohenjo Daro) who ended up getting assimilated by the major partner, a non-Dravidian population whom we may venture to identify as Indo-Iranian and ultimately Indo-Aryan.

4.3. Afro-Dravidian kinship

One of the most remarkable findings related in some detail by Bernard Sergent, on the basis of three independent studies (by Lilias Homburger, by Tidiane Ndiaye, and by U.P. Upadhyaya and Mrs. S.P. Upadhyaya) reaching similar conclusions, is the multifarious kinship of the Dravidian language family with African languages of the Sahel belt, from Somalia to Senegal (Peul, Wolof, Mandé, Dyola). As Sergent notes, all Melano-African languages have been credibly argued to be related, with the exception of the Khoi-San and Korama languages of southern Africa and the Afro-Asiatic family of northern Africa; so the kinship of Dravidian would be with that entire Melano-African superfamily, though it would be more conspicuous with some of its members.

Thus, between Dravidian and Bantu, we find the same verbal endings for the infinitive, the subjunctive, the perfect, the active participle or nomen agentis, related postpositions or nominal case endings, and many others. In over-all structure, Dravidian and the Melano-African languages (as distinct from North-African and Khoi-San languages) form a pair when compared with other language families: "The tendency to agglutination, the absence of grammatical gender, the absence of internal vowel change, the use of pre- or postpositions instead of flection are some of the main traits which set the Negro-African and Dravidian languages jointly apart from the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic groups." (p.55) Here I would say that this doesn't prove much: the first trait is shared with some more, and the other ones are shared with most language families on earth; it is IE and Semito-Hamitic which stand out jointly by not having these traits.

That Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and IE stand jointly apart and may have a common origin in Mesopotamia, has been argued by B. Sergent himself (Les Indo-Européens, p.431-434). Critics such as the reviewer in Antaios 10, Brussels 1996, have suggested that with this position, he is playing a political game. This much is true, that by design or by accident, Sergent is pulling the leg of far-rightist adepts of IE studies who consider the reduction of IE to sisterhood with Semitic as sacrilege. All the same, his position is quite sound linguistically.

But between Melano-African and Dravidian, there are more specific similarities: "A simple system of five basic vowels with an opposition short/long, vocalic harmony, absence of consonant clusters in initial position, abundance of geminated consonants, distinction between inclusive and exclusive pronoun in the first person plural, absence of the comparative degree in adjectives, absence of adjectives and adverbs acting as distinct morphological categories, alternation of consonants or augmentation of nouns noted among the nouns of different classes, distinction between accomplished and unaccomplished action in the verbal paradigms as opposed to the distinction of time-specific tenses, separate sets of paradigms for the affirmative and negative forms of verbs, the use of reduplicated forms for the emphatic mode, etc." (Genèse de l'Inde, p.55)

Sergent himself adds more isoglosses: "Preference for open syllables (i.e. those ending in vowels), the rejection of clusters of non-identical consonants, the generally initial position of the word accent in Dravidian and in the languages of Senegal". (p.56) The similarity in the demonstrative affixes is among the most striking: proximity is indicated by [i], initial in Dravidian but terminal in Wolof; distance by [a], intermediate distance by [u].

Knowing little of Dravidian and nothing at all of African languages, I don't feel qualified to discuss this evidence. However, I do note that we have several separate studies by unrelated researchers, using different samples of languages in their observations, and that each of them lists large numbers of similarities, not just in vocabulary, but also in linguistic structure, even in its most intimate features. Thus, "the preposed demonstratives of Dravidian allow us to comprehend the genesis of the nominal classes, the fundamental trait of the Negro-African languages". (p.53)

To quite an extent, this evidence suggests that Dravidian and some of the African languages (the case has been made in most detail for the Senegalo-Guinean languages such as Wolof) have a common origin. At the distance involved, it is unlikely that the isoglosses noted are the effects of borrowing. Either way, Proto-Dravidian must have been geographically close to the ancestor-language of the Negro-African languages. Did it come from Africa, as Sergent concludes? Should we think of a lost Saharan culture which disappeared before the conquests of the desert? Note that earlier outspoken fans of Dravidian culture (e.g. Father H. Heras: Studies in Proto-Indo-Meditarranean Culture, 1953, and Alain Daniélou: Histoire de l'Inde, 1983) didn't mind describing the Dravidians as immigrants: unlike the Aryans, they were bringers rather than destroyers of civilization, but they were immigrants nonetheless. Or should we follow Tamil chauvinists in assuming that the Dravidians came from Tamil Nadu and the now-submerged lands to its south, and took their language and civilization to Africa?

4.4. Additional indications for Afro-Dravidian

Bernard Sergent argues against the Indian origin of Dravidian. One element to consider is that the members of the Dravidian family have not diverged very much from one another. The relative closeness of its members suggests that they started growing apart only fairly recently: a thousand years for Tamil and Malayalam (well-attested), perhaps three thousand for the divergence of North- from South-Dravidian. This would indicate that Dravidian was still a single language covering a small area in the early Harappan period, after having entered the country from the West.

That the "genealogical tree" of the Dravidian family seems to have its trunk in the coastal West of India, i.e. to the northwest of the main Dravidian area, has long been recognized by scholars of Dravidian. A map showing this "tree" is given in G. John Samuel, ed.: Encyclopedia of Tamil Literature, Institute of Asian Studies, Madras 1990, p.45, with reference to Kamil Zvelebil, who locates the Proto-Dravidians in Iran as late as 3500 BC. It also fits in with the old Brahminical nomenclature, which includes Gujarat and Maharashtra in the Pancha-Dravida, the "five Dravida areas of Brahminical settlement" (as contrasted with Pancha-Gauda, the five North-Indian ones). The northwestern coast was the first part of India to be dravidianized, the wellspring of Dravidian migration to the south, but also an area were Dravidian was gradually displaced by Indo-Aryan though not without influencing it.

Another indication for the Dravidian presence in Gujarat is the attestation in Gujarati Jain texts of inter-cousin marriage, typically South-Indian and quite non-Indo-European. (p.51) The IE norm was very strict in prohibiting even distant forms of incest, a norm adopted by both Hinduism and Christianity. Linguists had already pointed out, and Sergent confirms, that Dravidian has left its mark on the Sindhi, Gujarati and Marathi languages (as with the distinction between inclusive and exclusive first person plural) and toponymy. So, it is fairly well-established that Dravidian culture had a presence in Gujarat while spreading to South India.

It is possible that Gujarat was a waystation in a longer Dravidian migration from further west. Whether the itinerary of Dravidian can ultimately be traced to Sudan or thereabouts, remains to be confirmed, but Sergent already has some interesting data to offer in support. Africans and Dravidians had common types of round hut, common music instruments, common forms of snake worship and tree worship. A South-Indian board game pallankuli closely resembles the African game mancalal; varieties of the game are attested in Pharaonic Egypt and in a pre-Christian monastery in Sri Lanka. (p.59)

A point which I do not find entirely convincing is the distinction, based on Mircea Eliade's research, between two types of Shamanism, one best known from Siberia and in evidence among all people originating in North and East Asia including the Native Americans and the Indian Munda-speaking tribes, another best known from Africa but also attested among some South-Indian tribes. (p.62) This is a distinction between Shamanism properly speaking, in which the Shaman makes spirit journeys, despatches one of his multiple souls to the spirit world to help the soul of a sick person, etc.; and the religion of ghost-possession, in which the sorcerer allows the ghost to take him over but at the same time makes him obey. The latter is perhaps best known to outsiders through the Afro-Caribbean Voodoo religion, but is also in evidence among South-Indian tribals such as the Saora and the Pramalai Kallar.

If anthropologists have observed these two distinct types, I will not disbelieve them. It does not follow that there must be a link between Africa and South India: Sergent himself notes that the same religion of ghost-possession is attested among the Australian aboriginals, who may be related with the Veddoid substratum in India's population. (p.62) On the other hand, this theme of ghost-possession is but one of Sergent's numerous linguistic and anthropological data which all point in the same direction of Afro-Dravidian kinship.

4.5. Uralic-Dravidian kinship

If Dravidian migrated from Africa to India through the Middle East, it could have left traces in Egypt and countries under Egyptian influence as well, explaining the data which led earlier researchers to the thesis of a Dravidian "Indo-Mediterranean" culture, most influentially Father H. Heras: Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture, 1953. Sergent links Indian forms of phallus worship with Sahel-African, Ethiopian, Egyptian and Mediterranean varieties of the same. The Egyptian uraeus ("cobra"), the snake symbol on the pharaonic regalia, has been linked in detail with Dravidian forms of snake worship, including the priest's possession by the snake's spirit. Dravidian cremation rituals for dead snakes recall the ceremonial burial of snakes in parts of Africa. Others have added the similarity between the Dravidian nâga-kal (Tamil: "snake-stone", a rectangular stone featuring two snakes facing one another, their bodies intertwined) and the intertwined snakes in the caduceus, the Greek symbol of science and medicine.

It has consequently been suggested that some Dravidian words may also have penetrated into the European languages. Thus, Dravidian kal, "stone", resembles Latin calculus, "pebble", and Dravidian malai, "mountain", resembles an Albanian and Rumanian word mal, "rock, rocky riverside". (Sorin Paliga: "Proto-Indo-European, Pre-Indo-European, Old European", Journal of Indo-European Studies, fall 1989, p.309-334) But this hypothesis is a long shot and we need not pursue it here.

Far more substantial is the Dravidian impact on another language family far removed from the present Dravidian speech area, viz. Uralic. The influence pertains to a very sizable vocabulary, including core terms for hand, fire, house (Finnish kota, Tamil kudi), talk, cold, bathe, die, water, pure, see, knock, be mistaken, exit, fear, bright, behind, turn, sick, dirty, ant, strong, little, seed, cut, wait, fish (Hungarian men, Tamil min) tongue, laugh, moist, break, chest, tree; some pronouns, several numerals and dozens of terms for body parts. (p.66-67) But it goes deeper than that. Thus, both language families exclude voiced and aspirated consonants and all consonant clusters at the beginning of words. They have in common several suffixes, expressions and the phonological principle of vocalic harmony.

As the Dravidian influence, like that of IE, is more pronounced in the Finno-Ugric than in the Samoyedic branch, we may surmise that the contact took place after the separation of the Samoyedic branch. But the main question here is how Dravidian could have influenced Uralic given their actual distance. Sergent suggests that a lost branch of Dravidians on the way from Africa strayed into Central Asia and got assimilated but not without influencing their adopted language.

On the other hand, he rejects the theory that Dravidian forms one family along with Uralic, Turkic, Mongolian and Tunguz. The latter three are often grouped as "Altaic", a partly genetic and partly areal group which may also include Korean and Japanese, and all the said languages including Japanese have at one time or another been claimed as relatives of Dravidian, with which they do present some isoglosses. However, the isoglosses are fragmentary and mostly different ones for every language group concerned. Moreover, some Dravidian influences are also discernible in Tocharian, or Arshi-Kuchi (Tocharian A c.q. Tocharian B) as Sergent appropriately calls it, which is obviously a matter of influence through contact. So Sergent concludes that this is a matter of areal influence rather than genetic kinship: Dravidian was a foreign language entering Central Asia at some point in time to briefly exert an influence on the local languages before disappearing. (p.71-76) This goes against a fairly popular theory locating Dravidian origins in Central Asia whence a Dravidian immigration preceded the Aryans one.

I am not sure this will convince everyone: if Dravidian is not genetically linked with all the said language groups, it might still be so with one of them, viz. Uralic, at least on the strength of the data Sergent offers. Tamil chauvinists may well be tempted to complete the picture by claiming that before the Indo-Europeans from India colonized Central Asia and Europe, it was the turn of the Dravidians to colonize Central Asia and, after mixing genetically and linguistically with the natives, to develop the Uralic languages. At a time when subtropical Neolithic cultures had a tremendous technological and demographical edge over the hunter-gatherers in the inhospitable northern countries, it would not even be so far-fetched to imagine that a small wayward group of Dravidians could enter the vast expanse of Central Asia and completely change the linguistic landscape there.

At any rate, Sergent's observations represent a clean break with earlier theories which had the Dravidians originate in the Uralic speech area and preceding the Indo-Aryans in an invasion of India from Central Asia.

4.5. Geographical distribution of IE languages

Since Bernard Sergent doesn't take the Indocentric case for IE seriously, he doesn't bring out all the linguistic data which to him support the Kurgan scenario. One classical argument from linguistics is nonetheless developed at some length: "In Europe one finds the most numerous and geographically most concentrated IE language groups. Such a situation is not unique, and invariably denotes the direction of history: the Indo-Iranian languages represent a branch extended to the east and south, starting from Europe and not the other way around. It is obviously not the IE languages of Europe which have come from India". (p.29-30)

This early in his book (p.30 of 584 pp.), he is already so sure that "obviously" the central question of the Urheimat has been decided to the disadvantage of India. That is a great pity, for it is the reason why he has not applied himself to really developing the argument against the Indian Urheimat. If anyone is capable of proving the AIT, it must be Sergent. Yet, because he assumes no proof is necessary, he gives the question much less attention than

e.g. the much less contentious (though more original) question of the geographical origins ofDravidian.

To be sure, the pattern of language distribution invoked by Sergent as "not unique", is indeed well-attested, e.g. in sub-Saharan West Africa, there are about 15 language families, while in the much larger region of sub-equatorial Africa, a very large majority of the people speaks languages belonging to only one family, Bantu. Though it is only a branch of a subfamily of the Niger-Kordofanian language family, Bantu easily outnumbers all the other branches of this family combined: "Africanists conclude that Bantu originated in a small area, on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon." (p.30)

But in fact, India is in this respect more akin to West Africa, and Europe more to subequatorial Africa. India has more language families: Nahali, Andamanese, Burushaski, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic (Munda and Mon-Khmer), Sino-Tibetan (Himalayan, Tibetic and Burmese) and IE (Iranian, Kafir, Dardic, Indo-Aryan, and possibly proto-Bangani). Europe is almost entirely IE-speaking, with Basque serving as the European counterpart to the Khoi-San languages in subequatorial Africa, a left-over of the original linguistic landscape largely replaced with the conquering newcomer, IE c.q. Bantu; and Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian) a fellow if perhaps slightly later intruder in the European landscape, vaguely comparable to the intrusion of an Austronesian language in a part (viz. Madagascar) of southern Africa.

Therefore, I reject the argument from the geographical distribution. If the spread of the IE languages to Europe was often a matter of assimilating divergent native populations, this process promoted the speedy diverging of the IE dialects into distinct language groups. Though this is not a conclusive argument against the possibility of IE settlement in Indian being younger than in Europe, it at least terminates the impression that there was a compelling case in favour of that possibility. So, even under Bernard Sergent's hands, the fabled "linguistic evidence" has failed to decide the IE Urheimat question once and for all.

5.1. Aryan contributions to indigenous culture

Unlike most invasionists, who minimize the IE contribution by seeing "pre-Aryan" origins behind every (post-Harappan) Hindu cultural item, Sergent admits the IE origin of numerous elements of Hinduism usually classified as remnants of earlier populations. This is one of the most elaborate and original sections in his book.

In invasionist sources, and more so in politicized writings against the "Aryan invader religion" Hinduism, it is claimed that the two most popular gods, Vishnu and Shiva, are (the former partly, the latter wholly) sanskritized pre-Aryan indigenous gods. Sergent argues that they are in fact neat counterparts of IE gods attested in distant parts of the IE language domain, Vishnu corresponding to the Germanic god Vidar, Shiva to the Greek and Thracian and Phrygian god Dionysos and to an extent also to the Celtic god Dagda. (p.310, p.402) He notices the puzzling fact that the classical Shiva is unattested in the Vedas (though Shiva's persona includes some elements from Indra, Rudra and Agni who are not counterparts of Dionysos); so he suggests that the Shiva tradition, definitely part of the common IE heritage, was passed on through a Vratya or non-Vedic Indo-Aryan circle. (p.323-324) This is an important acknowledgment of the fact that the Vedic tradition is only one tradition in the Indo-Aryan religious landscape, a key element in Shrikant Talageri's reconstruction of ancient Indian history (The Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, Ch.14): just as Sanskrit is not the mother of all Indo-Aryan languages (rather an aunt), the Vedas are not the wellspring of the whole of Hindu tradition.

Sergent goes into great detail in showing how the IE trifunctionality model does apply throughout the Vedic and Puranic worldview, in fact far more splendidly than in any other IE culture. (p.252-278) Thus, the first function is juridical-religious and corresponds with sattva, the transparent and truthful quality in the Hindu triguna or three-qualities model; the second function is martial-political and corresponds with rajas, the passionate and energetic quality; the third function is production and consumption, corresponding with tamas, the quality of materiality and ignorance. This threesome also corresponds with the trivarga ("three categories") model, where dharma or religious duty is sattvik, artha or striving for worldly success is rajasik, kama or sensuous enjoyment is tamasik, though there is a fourth (nirguna, "quality-less") dimension, viz. moksha, liberation. Likewise for the three states of consciousness: dreaming, waking, sleeping, surpassed by "fourth state", turiya, the yogic state. This scheme can then be applied to the Hindu pantheon, e.g. Brahma the creator is rajasik, Vishnu the maintainer is sattvik, Shiva the dissolver is tamasik; or the white mountain goddess Parvati is sattvik, the tiger goddess Durga rajasik, the black devouring goddess Kali tamasik.

Many more IE elements in Hinduism could be cited to the same effect, such as the numerous correspondences in epic motifs between Hindu and European sagas, which Sergent discusses at length. But the interesting ones for our purpose are those which already existed in the Harappan civilization.

5.2. The linga

Dr. Sergent goes quite far in indo-europeanizing the alleged aboriginal contribution to Hinduism. He even asserts that "the linga (or Shiva's phallus) cult is of IE origin". (p.139) An important detail is that Aryan linga worshippers venerated the linga by itself, not in the linga-yoni combination common in Hindu shrines, for "the yoni cult is without IE parallel". (p.139) Sergent makes a distinction between the sculpted stone phallus and the unsculpted variety. The first type is attested in the Harappan area and period, as well as in Africa and the Mediterranean, while the second type is common in historical and contemporary Hinduism. However, on linga worship in the Harappan cities, we find conflicting presentations of the facts, with Sergent assuming that the same Mediterranean-type phallus worship flourished, while no less a scholar than Asko Parpola claims the exact opposite. Parpola (Deciphering the Indus Script, p.221) contrasts the "earliest historical (1st-2nd century BC) lingas", which are "realistic", with the "abstract form of the Harappan conical stones". If Parpola is right, the Harappan linga cult was more akin to the classical Hindu form than to Mediterranean phallus worship. However, the crucial point of comparison in this case is not Harappa but the Indian tribals.

Votaries of the Indo-Mediterranean school claim that the cult of phallus-shaped stones is unknown among the indigenous (though in many cases historically dravidianized) tribal populations of India, implying that the Dravidian immigrants brought it from abroad, first to the Indus Valley, next to the whole of India. The same claim, that the untainted tribals are unattracted to the urban Hindu depravity of phallus-worship, has often been made by Christian missionaries as an argument in support of their doctrine that "tribals are not Hindus". But is this true?

First of all, many Indian tribals do practise linga worship. Pupul Jayakar (The Earth Mother, Penguin 1989/1980, p.30) situates both Shiva and the linga within the culture of a number of tribes, e.g. the Gonds: "There are, in the archaic Gond legend of Lingo Pen, intimations of an age when Mahadeva or Shiva, the wild and wondrous god of the autochthons, had no human form but was a rounded stone, a lingam, washed by the waters of the river Narmada. Even to this day there are areas of the Narmada river basin where every stone in the waters is said to be a Shiva lingam: '(...) What was Mahadev doing? He was swimming like a rolling stone, he had no hands, no feet. He remained like the trunk (of a tree).' [Then, Bhagwan makes him come out of the water and grants him a human shape.]" Till today, Shiva or a corresponding tribal god is often venerated in the shape of such natural-born, unsculpted, longish but otherwise shapeless stones.

At the same time, female yoni symbols are common enough among Indian tribals, esp. inverted triangles, the origin of the Hindu plural-triangle symbols called yantra, venerated in such seats of orthodoxy as the Shankaracharya Math in Kanchipuram, where celibacy is the rule and thoughts of fertility unwelcome. In a palaeolithic site in the Siddhi district of Madhya Pradesh (10th or 9th millennium BC), a Mother Goddess shrine has been found containing well-known Hindu symbols: squares, circles, swastikas and most of all, triangles. (Pupul Jayakar: The Earth Mother, p.20-22) A participant in an excavation in Bastar (Jan Van Alphen, of the Etnografisch Museum, Antwerp) told me of how a painted triangular stone was dug up, and the guide, a Gond tribal, at once started doing puja before this ancient idol. Such is the continuity of indigenous Indian religion across eleven thousand years.

However, these two-dimensional triangles constitute a different symbolism from the three-dimensional ring-shaped or oval-shaped sculpted yoni symbols used in the linga-yoni combination. Sergent sees these sculpted yoni symbols as part of the Dravidian tradition with African links, while the triangles, like the unsculpted linga stones, might be older in India than even the Dravidian invasion as imagined by Sergent.

Quite separate from these abstract triangles and unsculpted stones, explicit sexual imagery is also common among the "untainted" tribals: "When the Bhils, primitive people of western India, paint their sacred pithoras, they include in an obscure corner a copulating man and woman. When asked to explain, they say, 'without this, where would the world be?'" (Pupul Jayakar: The Earth Mother, p.36) When they want to express the fertility process, they do so quite explicitly, and they don't have to make do with a shapeless stone. Conversely, when they do choose to use a shapeless stone, it must be for a different purpose. Therefore, it is logical that the tribal linga cannot be equated with the sexually explicit sculptures of the ancient Mediterranean cultures.

Like the tribals, Vedic Hindus worship unsculpted lingas without explicit sexual connotation. Most Hindus will reject the Western interpretation of their idol as a phallic symbol, and the quoted details of tribal linga worship tend to prove their point, as would the abstract uses of the term linga ("sign", "proof", one of the terms in a syllogism, and symbol of the nirguna/undefined primeval reality; for a serious discussion of the profound meanings of linga worship, see Swami Karpatri & Alain Daniélou: Le mystère du culte du linga, Ed. du Relié, Robion 1993). The pebbles picked up from the Narmada river are hardly phallus-shaped, in contrast to the phallic pillars in the Mediterranean.

When Hindus object to the purely sexual reading of their symbols by Western authors, the latter, irritated with the "refusal of prudish Indian hypocrites to face facts", retort that "after all, anyone can see that this is explicit sexual imagery". Or for a more academic variation: "The Brahmans succeeded in concealing the alcoholic and sexual-orgiastic character of the adoration of the phallus (lingam or linga) and transformed it into a pure ritualistic temple cult", according to Max Weber: The Religion of India, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 1992 (ca. 1910), p.298.

Clearly, both conflicting interpretations have their validity, and linga worship in India is probably a syncretic phenomenon. If "phallus worship" was scorned in the Rg Veda (in the much-discussed verses where the enemies are abused as shishna-devâh, "those who have the phallus for god", Rg-Veda 7:21:5 and 10:99:3.), we do not perforce have to deny, as most anti-AIT authors do, that this concerned non-Aryan people who worshipped phallic stones. There were non-Aryans in many parts of India, though these phallus worshippers may equally have been Indo-Aryan-speaking cultists. We have at any rate a testimony for an ancient religious dispute. A clue has perhaps been given in Sergent's information that the lone linga ("objects which are interpreted as phalli", p.139; emphasis added) has been found in the northern half of the Indus-Saraswati civilization, the yoni-linga couple with ring-shaped yoni stones in its arguably Dravidian south.

Anyway, the point for now is that the alleged tribal and Vedic Aryan forms of linga worship are very similar. If this linga worship was IE, as Sergent claims, and if it is an age-old Indian tribal tradition at the same time, may I suggest that the Indo-Europeans discovered or developed it in India itself? Could this be an instance of what should at present be the Holy Grail of non-invasionist researchers, viz. a case of decided continuity between native tribal and IE cultures, distinguishing both together from imported cultures such as that of the Dravidians?

5.3. Harappan and Vedic fire cult

Most invasionist accounts of Hindu history acknowledge that classical Hinduism has included elements from the "Indus civilization". Thus, the unique water-supply system in the Indus-Saraswati system and the public baths so visibly similar to the bathing kunds still existing in numerous Indian cities have been interpreted as early witnesses to the Hindu "obsession" with purity. Though open to correction on details, this approach is not controversial. However, it runs into difficulties when items are discovered which are not typical for the Indian IE-speaking culture alone, but for the whole or larger parts of the IE-speaking family of cultures: how could these have been present in Harappa when the IE contribution was only brought in during or after Harappa's downfall by the Aryan invaders?

The bathing culture which the Harappans shared with the later Hindus is often cited as a pre-IE remnant which crept into Hinduism. However, this is also attested (with local differences, of course) among such IE tribes as the Romans and the Germanic people, and may therefore be part of the common IE heritage. Of course, a general concern about cleanliness is not a very specific and compelling type of evidence. More decisive would be a case like the famous Harappan seal depicting the so-called Pashupati (Shiva as Lord of Beasts), long considered proof that the Shiva cult is indigenous and non-Aryan. It is found to have a neat counterpart, to the detail, in the horned god Cernunnos surrounded by animals (largely similar ones and in the same order as on the Pashupati seal) on the Celtic Gundestrup cauldron made in central Europe sometime in the last centuries BC. So, this Harappan motif may well be part of the common IE heritage.

For another very general trait, the absence of distinct temple buildings in the Harappan cities constitutes a defect in the AIT postulate of a Vedic-Harappan cultural opposition. The fact that no temples are attested is a common trait of Harappa, of some ancient IE cultures (Vedic, Celtic, Germanic), and of that other acclaimed centre of Aryanism, the South Russian Kurgan culture, where "no real sanctuaries have ever been found; they probably had open sanctuaries" (M. Gimbutas: "Proto-Indo-European Culture: The Kurgan Culture during the Fifth, Fourth and Third Millennia BC", in George Cardona et al., eds.: Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, p.191). It contrasts with Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures and with the bhakti cult in later Hinduism, which venerates the deity as if it were a human person and consequently gives the deity a house to live in: a temple. Harappans, Vedic Aryans, many ancient IE-speaking Europeans and contemporary Indian tribals have this in common: they worship without temple buildings.

For a more specific example: fire plays a central role in most historically attested IE religions, most emphatically in the Indo-Iranian branches. A fire-cult was present in the Indus-Saraswati civilization, and it resembled the practices of the Vedic people. The presence of Vedic fire-altars in several Harappan cities (Lothal, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi) has been noticed by a number of authors, but is somehow always explained away or ignored. Parpola ("The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic identity of the Dasas", Studia Orientalia, Helsinki 1988, p.238) admits as "quite plausible" the suggestion (made to him by Raymond and Bridget Allchin) that they form an Indo-Aryan element within Harappan civilization, but he explains them as imported by "carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran, who had become quickly absorbed into the Indus Civilization, culturally and linguistically".

Likewise, Sergent admits that "the Indian Vedic fire altar seemed to have borrowed its construction principles from the Indus civilization", all while "the very idea of the fire cult was Indo-Iranian". (p.161) This falls neatly into place if we equate proto-Harappan with Indo-Iranian: the idea of a fire cult was taken along by the emigrating Iranians, while the Indo-Aryans stayed on in the Indus-Saraswati region to develop their altars' distinct Indian style of construction.

At any rate, how deeply had these Aryan fire-worshippers not penetrated the Harappan civilization, that they had installed their altars in patrician mansions of three of the largest Harappan cities, all three moreover very far from the northwestern border? If they were imported from outside, it rather seems they came from the east, which would bring us back to Shrikant Talageri's thesis that IE originated in the Ganga basin and entered the Harappan area from there. Leaving aside this question of ultimate origins, the very fact of the Vedic fire-altars in the Indus-Saraswati culture is a serious problem for the AIT.

5.4. More on Harappan vs. Vedic

The stellar cult is common to the Harappan and Vedic religions. This is explained by Asko Parpola as the effect of borrowing: the barbarian invaders adopting the religion of the empire they just conquered, somewhat like the Heathen Germanic tribes did when they conquered the Christian Roman empire. In fact, the whole of Vedic and core-Puranic literature has been explained as essentially translations of non-Aryan Harappan traditions.

A similar explanation is given for the "soma filter", often depicted on Harappan seals, and of which an ivory specimen has been discovered by J.M. Kenoyer's team. Iravathan Mahadevan (interviewed by Omar Khan, Chennai, 17-1-1998, on http://www.harappa.com/script/mahadevantext.html) proposes that "the mysterious cult object that you find before the unicorn on the unicorn seals is a filter. (...) Since we know that the unicorn seals were the most popular ones, and every unicorn has this cult object before it, whatever it represents must be part of the central religious ritual of the Harappan religion. We know of one religion whose central religious cult [object] was a filter, that is the soma [cult] of the Indo-Aryans." If this is not an argument for the identity of Vedic and Harappan, I don't know what is. Yet, Mahadevan dismisses this conclusion citing the well-known argument that the Vedas know of no cities while Harappa had no horses, so "the only other possibility is that a soma-like cult (...) must have existed in Harappa and that it was taken over by the Indo-Iranians and incoming Indo-Aryans." This is a case of multilying entities without necessity.

Speaking of the unicorn: Prof. R.S. Sharma ("The Indus and the Saraswati", interview published on http://www2.cybercities.com/a/akhbar/godown/history/RSSIndus.htm) defends the AIT pointing out that the unicorn/ekashrnga is popular on Indus seals and in late- or post-Vedic literature but is not mentioned at all in the Rg-Veda. Within the AIT, this would be an anomaly: first the Harappans had unicorn symbolism, then the Vedic-Aryan invaders didn't have it, and finally the later Aryans again had it. The implied and slightly contrived explanation is that native unicorn symbolism went underground after the Aryan invasion, but reasserted itself later. But this pro-AIT argument is circular in the sense that it is dependent on the AIT-based chronology, viz. of the Rg-Veda as post-Harappan. Its force is dissolved (along with the anomaly) if the possibility is considered that the Rg-Veda was pre-Harappan, with the Unicorn an early Harappan innovation attested in both the the archaeological and the late-Vedic literary record.

Asko Parpola (in G. Erdosy: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.370) has developed the theory that there is at least one clearly identifiable Hindu deity whose trail of importation from abroad we can follow. In the Bactrian Bronze Age culture, deemed Indo-Iranian if not specifically Indo-Aryan, ample testimony is available of the cult of a lion goddess, known in Hinduism as Durga, "the fortress", and who is "worshipped in eastern India as Tripura, a name which connects her with the strongholds of the Dasas". Politicized Indian invasionists usually claim goddess worship as a redeeming native, non-Aryan, "matriarchal" and "humanist" contribution to the "patriarchal" and "oppressive" Hindu religion, but now it turns out to have been brought along by the Bactrian invaders: how one invasionist can upset another invasionist's applecart.

However, Parpola himself reports elsewhere ("The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic identity of the Dasas", Studia Orientalia, Helsinki 1988, p.238) that the same lion or tiger goddess was worshipped in the Indus-Saraswati civilization as well.

Discussing "carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran" as having been "quickly absorbed into the Indus civilization", he finds support in "the famous Kalibangan seal showing a Durga-like goddess of war, who is associated with the tiger". For now we retain Parpola's confirmation of a common religious motif in a Harappan city and an Aryan culture (on top of the indications mentioned above of a soma cult in both the Harappan cities and the Bactria-Margiana Bronze Age culture); but whether this shows an early Bactrian penetration of India as far as the Saraswati riverside remains to be seen. The hypothesis that both Harappa and Bactria were Aryan, is less contorted.

Just like those few colleagues who have paid attention to the elements of continuity between Harappa and Aryan India, Sergent fails to discuss the most plausible conclusion that could be drawn from all this material: that Harappan and post-Harappan or Aryan are phases of a single civilization.

5.5. The impact of East-Asian mythology

Indo-European mythology, or some of its branches, has certain motifs and stories in common with mythologies of non-IE cultures. Some of these are a common heritage dating back to long before a separate IE linguistic and cultural identity existed.

Conversely, some myths can be shown to have been transmitted in a fairly recent time,

e.g. the Excalibur myth known to most readers through the King Arthur saga has an exactparallel in a North-Iranian myth, with the sword being drawn from the stone (a poetic reference to the mystery of metallurgy, transforming shapeless ore into metal implements), making its bearer invincible, and finally getting thrown into a lake. This is not because of a common IE heritage of the Celtic and Iranian communities, but because in the 2nd century AD, Sarmatian mercenaries in the Roman army were garrisoned in Britain and, well, told their story. (Shan

M.M. Winn: Heaven, Heroes and Happiness. The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology, p.34-35) Through Mongolia and Korea, elements of this myth have even reached Japan when the supremacy of the sword was established there. So, myths are not necessarily witnesses from the night of time; their invention and transmission can sometimes be dated.

In the case of the transmission of East-Asian myths into Hindu tradition, by medium of the Munda-speaking culture of the eastern Ganga basin, the apparent date might pose a problem. Some contributions are fairly late: "The puja, that extremely common and important practice of covering the gods' idols with flowers and perfumes, is rather late in India, and succeeds wholly different practices: could that also be an East-Asian substratum?" (p.483, n.639, with reference to Louis de la Vallée Poussin: "Totémisme et végétalisme", 1929, who emphasizes the similarity with devotional practices among the Kol tribe and among the Semang, a tribe in Malaysia. The more usual explanation is that puja came from the Dravidian south.) On the other hand, Sergent mentions several apparently East-Asian contributions to Vedic and Puranic lore which point to the ultimate beginning of those traditions themselves.

The name of Ikshvaku, founder of the Solar Dynasty of Ayodhya, whom the Puranic genealogies place several dozen generations before the Rg-Vedic seers, literally means "bitter gourd". Likewise, Sumati, wife of the early Ayodhya king Sagara, is said to produce offspring with the aid of a bitter gourd. Sergent attributes this to the Southeast-Asian mythic motif of the birth of humanity from a bitter gourd: "The Austro-Asiatic myth has visibly been transposed in the legends of Sumati and Ikshvaku". (p.386)

The birth of Vyasa's mother Satyavati from a fish equally refers to a Southeast-Asian myth, unknown in the IE world. The Brahmanas have a story of Brahma or Prajapati, the Creator, taking the form of a boar and diving to the bottom of the ocean to extract the earth and bring it to the surface (p.372, citing Taittiriya Brahmana 7:1:5:1-2 and Shatapatha Brahmana 14:1:2:11). This myth of the "cosmogonic plunge" is widespread in Siberia, among the native Americans, and among some Southeast-Asian peoples, but is foreign to the IE mythologies and to the Vedic Samhitas. The same is true of another innovative mythic motif appearing in the Brahmanas: Brahmanda, the cosmic egg which, when broken, releases all creatures.

Sergent explains that the Rg-Veda could not yet know these myths, just as it had not yet adopted items of Munda vocabulary, because its horizon was still confined to the northwest (note that Ikshvaku is first mentioned in the youngest part of the Rg-Veda: 10:60:4). But once the Vedic Aryans settled in the Ganga basin, they started assimilating the mythic lore of the Munda people, also immigrants, but who had settled there earlier. So, this seems to confirm the classic picture of the Aryans moving through North India from east to west.

However, even the non-invasionist school accepts that the Vedic tradition spread eastwards during and after the Harappan period, just as it spread to South India in subsequent centuries; but it maintains that the Ganga down to Kashi or so, already had an Indo-Aryan (but non-Vedic) population. This population was obviously exposed to influences from its eastern neighbours, immigrants from Southeast Asia. And their non-Vedic, partly borrowed traditions were incorporated in later Vedic and especially in Puranic literature. By contrast, the IE-speaking people living to the west of the Vedic Puru tribe, those who migrated to the west and formed the other branches of IE, were not exposed to this Austro-Asiatic lore, which is why their mythologies have not adopted elements from Southeast-Asian myths, just as their languages have not borrowed from Munda (or if they have, those words or those mythic motifs would be pan-IE and consequently not recognizable as borrowed).

If Ikshvaku, one of flood survivor Manu Vaivasvata's immediate successors, was indeed a historical figure, and if his name really refers to an Austro-Asiatic myth, then that would prove either that Manu and his crew had come from the southeast (but then why hasn't the bitter gourd myth become a pan-IE myth?), or that the Mundas were already in the Ganga basin at the beginning of IE history as narrated in the Puranic genealogies (6776 BC?). In that case, shouldn't non-invasionists be able to find more points of contact between IE and Munda, linguistically too?

A parallel argument could be made from the commonly assumed etymology of Ganga, a name already appearing in the oldest part of the Rg-Veda (6:45:31), viz. as an Austro-Asiatic loan cognate to Chinese kiang/jiang, "river". This would mean that the Munda presence in the (western!) Ganga basin well precedes the beginning of the Vedic period, and that they were either the first or the dominant group, so that they could impose their nomenclature. However, Zhang Hongming: "Chinese etyma for river", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, January 1998, p.1-43, has refuted the derivation of Chinese kiang from Austro-Asiatic, arguing among other things that the reconstructed Austro-Asiatic form is *krong, still preserved in the Mon-Khmer languages. This makes the Munda origin of Ganga less likely. A third language family may be involved, or an obscure IE etymon. How about kinship with Middle Dutch konk-el, "twist, turn, whirlpool"? Or simply a Vedic reduplication, nasalized for onomatopoeic effect, of the root ga-, "go", meaning "the fast-flowing"?

How exactly should we imagine the beginning of IE history in India, in what cultural and linguistic environment? For example, one could imagine that the Aryans overran the Indus basin, then Afghanistan and beyond, because they had been pushed to the west by invading Mundas from the east. If the idea of the fierce Aryans being put to flight by the fun-loving Mundas seems strange, remember that the invasion of the Roman Empire by the fierce Germanic tribes was partly caused by their being pushed westward by the Slavs. For another question: does this evidence of Munda contributions support the mainstream indological position that the entire Puranic history of the Vedic and pre-Vedic age in Ayodhya, Kashi or Prayag is but "reverse euhemerism", i.e. the transformation of myth into fabulated history, so that Ikshvaku and his clan never existed except as projections by aryanized Mundas of their gourd-god onto the ancestry of their conquerors? This is worth a discussion in its own right.

For now, I propose a hypothesis which takes care of all the data: there was a period of neighbourly coexistence of Indo-Aryans and Mundas in the Ganga basin, with a very limited exchange of cultural items (mythic motifs, vocabulary), which suddenly increased when the

Indo-Aryans started incorporating parts of the Munda territory and assimilating its inhabitants. This does not exclude that the Mundas entered India in the late-Vedic period; after all, even a pre-Munda population of the lower Ganga basin may have known some Southeast-Asian myths. But the main point is that North India was big enough to contain both Indoa-Aryans and Mundas, and that a Munda presence does not imply an Aryan invasion from outside India.

5.6. Some caveats to comparatists

Mythology is a large subject, and numerous myths are not well-known even to aficionados of the subject. This way, it sometimes happens that a Hindu myth gets classified as non-IE because it is not reported in any other IE mythology, only to show up in some far corner of the IE world upon closer scrutiny. Sergent provides one example.

Everyone knows the Hindu myth of the "churning of the ocean" with which the gods and demons jointly produce the amrta, the immortality drink. Sergent assures us that this myth "has no parallel in the IE world" (p.116), that it "is ignored by Vedic India and the IE world outside India" (p.378-379) but present in Mongolian mythology and in the Kojiki, a kind of Japanese Purana. Yet, he also informs us of a lesser-known Germanic myth in which the god Aegir churns the ocean to make the beer of the gods. (p.378-79, with reference to Georges Dumézil: Le Problème des Centaures, Paris 1929, p.51-60) But that one finding, even if it is in only one (but certainly distant) corner of the IE world, completely nullifies the earlier statement that the myth "has no parallel in the IE world". It is in fact possible that the Mongolian version (which is closer to the Germanic one, with a single deity doing the churning) and the Japanese version have been adapted from an IE original, just like the Excalibur myth.

Secondly, eastern contributions to Hindu tradition are not exclusively from the Mundas. The Rajasuya ceremony described in the Shatapatha Brahmana has an exact counterpart, not in Rome or Greece, nor in Chotanagpur or Japan, but in Fiji. The latter coronation ceremony has been analyzed into 19 distinct elements, and practically all of them are found in the Rajasuya. (p.381, with reference to Shatapatha Brahmana 5:3-5, and Arthur M. Hocart: Kingship, OUP 1927, p.76-83) This island culture is part of the vast expanse of the Austronesian language family. And indeed, a number of scholars have pointed out remarkable lexical similarities between IE and Austronesian. Unlike in the case of the Mundas, contacts of the Indo-Europeans with the Austronesians are hard to locate even in theory, unless we assume that the Austronesians at one time had a presence in India.

Finally, if a myth or religious custom is attested in India but not in the other IE cultures, this need not mean that the Indians have borrowed it from "pre-Aryan natives" or so. It can also mean that the other Indo-Europeans have lost what was originally a pan-IE heirloom. All of them have started by going through the same bottleneck, passing through Afghanistan, immediately plunging themselves into a very different climate from India's permanent summer, so that they had to adopt a very different lifestyle. And as they moved on, the difference only got bigger. Of practically all IE myths attested in some IE cultures, we know that they have been lost in other (generally in most) IE cultures; it is statistically to be expected that some myths have survived only in the Hindu tradition. And because of the full survival of Pagan religion in India plus the long centuries of literacy, it is in fact to be expected that a much higher percentage than the statistical average has only survived in India. So, probably, some myths attested only in Hinduism are purely IE, and if they are also attested in a non-IE neighbouring culture, the possibility remains that the latter has borrowed it from the Indo-Europeans rather than the reverse.

5.7. Harappa, teacher of China?

Quite separate from the importation of Southeast-Asian myths through the Austro-Asiatic population of the Ganga basin, Sergent also notes similarities between Harappan and Chinese civilizations unrelated to Munda lore. An important myth is that of the cosmogonic tortoise, the Chinese symbol of the universe; also the vehicle of Varuna, god of world order, and the form which, in the Shatapatha Brahmana, Prajapati takes to create the world. A tortoise-shaped construction forms part of the Yajur-Vedic fire altar, and the tortoise has also been depicted in a giant sculpture found in Harappa, indicating a similar myth. (p.116, with reference to John Marshall: Mohenjo Daro and the Indus civilization, London 1931) The tortoise as a cosmogonic symbol may well be one such mythic motif which is purely IE yet not attested in the non-Indian branches of IE. There is no indication for a foreign origin, and the tortoise's association with the Yamuna river (like the crocodile with the Ganga, the swan with the Saraswati) adds to its indigenous Northwest-Indian character.

Sergent also mentions the common origin of the Chinese and Hindu systems of 27 lunar mansions (Xiu, Nakshatra), which we have already considered. He admits that it could only have originated in an advanced culture, and that this was not Mesopotamia. He also notes that the Nakshatra system starts with the Pleiades/Krttika, which occupied the vernal equinox position in the centuries around 2,400 BC, exactly during the florescence of the Indus cities. This date, approximately, has been accepted by Jean Filliozat: "Notes d'astronomie ancienne de l'Iran et de l'Inde", Journal Asiatique 250, 1962, p.325-350; Albert Pike: "Lectures on the Arya", Kentucky 1873; and A.L. Basham: The Wonder That Was India, London 1954, according to Bernard Sergent: Genèse de l'Inde, p.422, n.65. We'll stick to this date for the present discussion, but not without mentioning that Asko Parpola (Decipherment of the Indus Script, p.206, p.263-265) himself gives reasons for thinking that Aldebaran had been the starting-point earlier, which would push back the birthdate of the Nakshatra system to ca. 3054 BC, the time of the pre-Harappan Kot Diji culture.

So, Harappa is the best bet as originator of this system, which spread to China and later also to West Asia. Sergent wonders aloud whether the similarities should be attributed to Harappa being "the teacher of China, whose civilization's beginning is contemporaneous". (p.380)

He informs us that the Nakshatra division of the heavens is unknown in other IE cultures, and in this case I would not speculate that they had known it but lost it along the way: rather, the system was invented after they had left India. This simple fact that there already was IE history before the genesis of the Nakshatra system also explains another fact he mentions: "The Rg-Veda doesn't allude to it, except in its 10th mandala, the youngest one occording to most indologists." (p.118) And even the youngest book only mentions "constellations" (RV 10:85:2), a concept known to all cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions. At any rate, it is only at the end of (if not completely after) the Rg-Vedic period, well after the European branches of IE had left India, that the Nakshatra system was devised. This indicates once more that the Rg-Veda was pre-Harappan.

This chronology is confirmed by another fact related by Sergent: "Another aspect of the continuity between Indus and historical India is marked in the personal names: the oldest in Vedic India are in perfect conformity with Indo-European customs and highlight mostly the attributes with which an individial (or his family) adorns himself. In a later period astral names appear in India, which is foreign to the customs observed elsewhere among the Indo-Europeans". (p.121) Exactly: the Rg-Vedic people lived before the heyday of astronomy in Harappa and before the starry sky acquired a central place in the late-Vedic "and" in the Harappan religion.

5.7. The Harappan contribution

Sergent has identified the Oriental origin of so many Hindu myths, and the Dravidian (ultimately even African) origin of so many Hindu customs, including even the purity concept underlying post-Vedic caste relations: "As the same importance of purity is found in other societies, e.g. Semitic societies including even Islam and sub-Saharan Africa, it is not impossible that we have here another substratum: that of the ex-Dravidians of North India [Sindh-Gujarat], for instance?" (p.483, n.639) Yet, he has said relatively little about specifically Harappan contributions, eventhough these should logically have made a much larger impact. After all, the Harappans were more numerous, more advanced and more literate than the Mundas, and it is in their territory that the invading Aryans settled before scouting around in the then peripheral and relatively backward Munda-speaking region.

To be sure, Sergent devotes a chapter to the Harappan heritage in Hindu civilization. Thus, the weights and measures found in Lothal are the same ones which Kautilya has defined in his Arthashastra. (p.113) Personally, I would add that apart from being an important fact in itself, this continuity may also be symptomatic for a profounder continuity pertaining to fundamental cultural traits. Thus, the same search for standardization visible in the decimal measurements and in the orderly geometrical lay-out of the Harappan cities is evident in the rigorous structure of the Vedic hymns; in the attempt in the later Vedic literature to categorize all types of phenomena in neat little systems (from verbal conjugation classes listed by the grammarians through the Manu Smrti's artificial genealogy of the occupational castes in society to the Kama Sutra's varieties of sexual intercourse); and in the laborious ritual and architectonic details laid down in Brahminical texts for the proper construction of Vedic altars.

Sergent correctly notes that statuettes of mother goddesses have been found in large numbers in the Harappan cities, that mother goddesses are equally common in popular Hinduism, and that these are very uncommon in the historic IE religions. He also adds that in Europe, mother goddesses originated in the neolithic Old European culture, and remained popular all through the IE Pagan period to be picked up for christianization as Our Lady, suggesting a parallel: in India like in Europe, the popular pre-IE mother goddess survived and even asserted itself against the male-dominated IE official religion.

But clearly, IE religion was not hostile to the goddess cult: when the Church sought to win over the devout by accepting their goddess worship in a christianized form, most of Europe had been IE-speaking for several thousand years. All memory of a pre-IE period had vanished, yet these Celts and Romans and Germans venerated goddesses. In their mythologies, goddesses played only a supporting act, but this is the same situation as in Puranic Hinduism, in which goddess worship is widespread eventhough most myths have the male gods in the starring roles. It is like in real life: men need to dramatize their importance with all kinds of heroism, women simply are important without making such fuss over it. The Virgin Mary is by far the most popular Catholic saint, still present on every rural street corner around my village, much more popular than Jesus and His Father, yet the parts about her in the New Testament and the stories confabulated about her are very few. Therefore, our view of IE religion may be distorted by the fact that we rely on textual sources and myths, which belong to the public and official part of the religion; while by contrast, of Harappan religion we only have cult objects, showing us religion as it was lived by the people.

Sergent mentions the association of gods with animals as their respective "vehicle" (vahana: Vishnu's eagle, Shiva's bull, Saraswati's swan etc.) as an element of Hinduism which is commonly attributed to the pre-Aryan Harappans. But he minimizes this contribution, pointing out that such associated animals are common throughout the IE pantheon, e.g. Athena with her owl, Wodan with his raven, Jupiter who can appear as an eagle, Poseidon as a horse, Demeter as a cow. (p.115) In one case, the correspondence is even more exact: like Hindu goddess Saranyu (mother of the Ashwins), Celtic goddess Epona is imagined as either mare or rider.

Several more astronomy-based amendments to IE customs are mentioned as effects of Harappan influence, e.g. the fixation of the goddess festival (which existed in other parts of the IE world as well -- see that the Indo-Europeans had goddess cults of their own?) at the autumnal equinox. Very significant is the "stellar vestment": the shirt worn by the famous Harappan "priest-king" shows little three-petaled designs (also in evidence on other Harappan depictions), which Sergent, following Parpola, interprets as depictions of stars, exactly like in the scriptural description of the tarpya coat which the king must wear at some point in the Rajasuya ceremony. (p.121, with reference to Asko Parpola: Deciphering the Indus Script, p.201-218) In post-Harappan centuries, Mesopotamian kings are known to have worn such stellar vestments, and the China court ritual was likewise full of celestial symbolism.

What we see happening in the Harappan period is that a particular IE culture transforms itself under the impact of the florescence of what I would call a first scientific revolution; there is no indication of a foreign impact. Sergent has the facts under his own eyes without realizing their significance: "Shiva, Varuna, Yama, Durga-Parvati, we already said it, are deities of IE origin, the rituals concerning fire, soma and the person of the king are equally of IE if not Indo-Iranian origin. But it is now obvious that the Indo-Aryans, upon arriving in India, have amply harvested the Harappan heritage and included its ritual customs (construction of hearth-altars, rites inside buildings, use of the stellar vestment, ritual baths, fixation of feasts on the stellar equinoxes...) in their own religion." (p.124) Well, building facilities had been vastly improved, astronomical knowledge had been developed, so these innovations are not a matter of syncretism, merely of material and intellectual progress.

What more continuity was there? Apart from numerous material items, we note Harappan depictions of men wearing a tuft of hair on their backheads like Brahmins do, and of women wearing anklets. Some pictures suggest the notion of the "third eye". Most importantly, the Harappan people have remained in place: "the Italian anthropologist has emphasized not only that the skulls of Mohenjo Daro resemble those of today's Sindh and those of Harappa resemble those of today's Panjab, but even that the individual variability is identical today to what it was four thousand years ago." (p.128, quoting Mario Cappieri: "Ist die Indus-Kultur und ihre Bevölkerung wirklich verschwunden?", Anthropos 60:22, 1965, p.22)

Though Sergent considers it exaggerated to say that "the Indus civilization is still alive today", I would comment that it is not very exaggerated. (p.128; the quoted phrase, which Sergent dismisses in footnote 146, p.425, as "a Hindu nationalist myth", is from Dharma Pal Agrawal: L'Archéologie de l'Inde, CNRS, Paris 1986, p.2) But the point for now is that we really have seen very little evidence of the incorporation in Vedic tradition of elements which are foreign to it and which are traceable to the Harappan civilization. Compared with the limited but very definite list of items borrowed by Hindu tradition from cultures of East-Asian origin, the harvest in the case of the Harappan contribution is of a different type, larger but murkier. In spite of the ample archaeological material (quite in contrast with the zero objects identified as Vedic-age Austro-Asiatic), we don't get to see a sequence of "now it's in Harappa, and now it enters Vedic tradition". We don't get to see that clear contrast between Harappan and Vedic which most scholars have taken for granted. What we see is on the one hand plenty of elements which are simply in common between the Vedic and Harappan cultures, and on the other certain late-Vedic innovations which match the Harappan data and which constitute a departure from the common IE heritage: they are perfectly explainable through internal developments, particularly in proto-scientific knowledge and material control of the environment.