Michael Witzel Quotes

Even a brief look at this list indicates that in northern India, by and large, only Sanskritic river names seem to survive.... [he notes that over 90% don't just look IA but] “are etymologically clear and generally have a meaning” [in Indo-Aryan]... [He attributes this unexpectedly large etymological transparency to] “the ever-increasing process of changing older names by popular etymology”. ... [Sindhu might be an] “Indo-Iranian coinage with the meaning ‘border river, ocean’ and fits Paul Thieme's etymology from the IE root *sidh, ‘to divide’”.

[the Sintashta-Arkaim culture on the W. Siberian plains east of the Urals,] "dated to c.2200/2100-1700/1600 BC", [where] "the earliest attested traces of Aryan material culture "and even of Aryan belief". ..[there we find] "remnants of horse sacrifices (aśvamedha) and primitive horse drawn chariots (ratha, raθa) with spoked wheels [....] a real tripura [....] adobe bricks (*išt) [....] frame houses (which reminds of Rgvedic kula 'hollow, family‘ [....]) [....] Most tellingly, perhaps, at the site of Potapovka (N. Krasnayarsk Dt., near Kybyshev on the N. Volga steppe), a unique burial has been found. It contains a human skeleton whose head has been replaced by a horse head, a human head lies near his feet, along with a bone pipe, and a cow‘s head is placed near his knees. This looks like an archaeological illustration of the Rgvedic myth of Dadhyanc, whose head was cut off by Indra and replaced by that of a horse. The bone pipe reminds, as the excavator has noted, of the RV sentence referring to the playing of pipes in Yama‘s realm, the world of the ancestors".

“Right from the beginning, in Ṛgvedic times, elaborate steps were taken to insure the exact reproduction of the words of the ancient poets. As a result, the Ṛgveda still has the exact same wording in such distant regions as Kashmir, Kerala and Orissa, and even the long-extinct musical accents have been preserved. Vedic transmission is thus superior to that of the Hebrew or Greek Bible, or the Greek, Latin and Chinese classics. We can actually regard present-day Ṛgveda recitation as a tape recording of what was composed and recited some 3000 years ago. In addition, unlike the constantly reformulated Epics and Purāṇas, the Vedic texts contain contemporary materials. They can serve as snapshots of the political and cultural situation of the particular period and area in which they were composed. […] as they are contemporary, and faithfully preserved, these texts are equivalent to inscriptions. […] they are immediate and unchanged evidence, a sort of oral history ― and sometimes autobiography ― of the period, frequently fixed and ‘taped’ immediately after the event by poetic formulation. These aspects of the Vedas have never been sufficiently stressed […]” (WITZEL 1995a:91).

Even now, however, three RV periods can be established, as follows: 1. early Ṛgvedic period: c.1700-1450 BCE: RV books 4, 5, 6. 2. middle, main Ṛgvedic period : c.1450-1300 BCE: books 3, 7, 8.1-47, 8.60-66 and 1.51-191, most probably also 2; prominent: Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu and Bharata chieftain Sudās and their ancestors, and 3. late Ṛgvedic period: c.1300-1200 BCE: books 1.1-50, 8.48-59 (the late Vālakhilya hymns), 8.67-103, large sections of 9, and finally 10.1-84, 10.85- 191; emergence of the Kuru tribe, fully developed by the time of Parīkṣit a descendant of Trasadasyu... With Indo-Aryan settlement mainly in Gandhāra/Panjab, but occasionally extending upto Yamunā/Gangā, e.g. Atri poem 5.52.17; the relatively old poem 6.45.13 [sic] has gāngya [...] Even the oldest books of the RV (4-6) contain data covering all of the Greater Panjab: note the rivers Sindhu 4.54.6, 4.55.3, 5.53.9 ̳Indus‘; Asiknī 4.17.5 ̳Chenab‘; Paru ṣṇ ī 4.22.3. 5.52.9 'Ravi‘; Vipāś 4.30.11 (Vibali) 'Beas‘; Yamunā 5.52.17; Gangā 6.45.31 with gāngya 'belonging to the Ganges‘ [...] G. van Driem and A. Parpola (1999) believe that these oldest hymns were still composed in Afghanistan [...]. This is, however, not the case as these books contain references to the major rivers of the Panjab, even the Ganges (see above).

Something of this fear of the horse and of the thundering chariot, the "tank" of the 2nd millennium B.C. is transparent in the famous horse 'Dadhikra' of the Puru king Trasadasya ("Tremble enemy" in RV 4.38.8) ……..The first appearance of thundering chariots must have stricken the local population with terror similar to that experienced by the Aztecs and the Incas upon the arrival of the iron-clad, horse riding Spaniards.

“The Indo-Aryan influence, whether due to actual settlement, acculturation, or, if one prefers, the substitution of Indo-Aryan names for local ones, was powerful enough from early on to replace local names, in spite of the well-known conservatism of river-names. This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus civilization, where one would have expected the survival of earlier names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England, with the name of the State of Massachussetts next to the Charles River formerly called the Massachussetts River, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc. next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri. The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population.” (p 107)

“in contrast to its close relatives in Iran (Avestan, Old Persian), Vedic Sanskrit is already an Indian language”. (p 108)

“The river Yavyavati is mentioned once in the RV; it has been identified with the Zhob in E. Afghanistan. At PB 25.7.2, however, nothing points to such a W. localisation. The persons connected with it are known to have stayed in the Vibhinduka country, a part of the Kuru-PañcAla land.” [....] “A dolphin lying on the sands, dried out by the North wind, could refer to the Gangetic dolphin, as in fact it does at 1.176...

I would not care, eg, if the IA-s could be shown to emerge from the proto-Masai culture of E-Africa.

"The structure of the text has been more extensively studied, already by Bergaigne (1878-83) and Oldenberg in the 19th century. From the latter's Prolegomena (Oldenberg 1888), it appears that the Ṛgveda was composed and assembled in the following stages, beginning 'at the centre' with books 2-7" (WITZEL 1995b:309).

“A better case for the early linguistic and ethnic history of South Asia can be made by investigating the names of rivers. In Europe river-names were found to reflect the languages spoken before the influx of Indo-European speaking populations. They are thus older than c. 4500-2500 BC (depending on the date of the spread of Indo-European languages in various parts of Europe). It would be fascinating to gain a similar vantage point for the prehistory of South Asia.” (p 104-5)