“H. Oldenberg showed that in spite of the genetic closeness of religious beliefs, the Vedas and Avesta differ considerably, and that in the Avesta ma… - Elena Efimovna Kuzmina

A migration that is identified, however, is east-to-west: “a part of the Timber-grave tribes moved [from Uzbekistan or even the Amu Darya basin] to the North Caucasus because of the crisis; they had already begun appearing and settling in the Caucasus at an earlier time”. (p.454) [This must be the Scythian migration, which only added to the already existing Iranian presence near and beyond the Urals. Intermittently, groups of Iranians must have moved from Bactria to the Urals and even to Ukraine for more than a thousand years. (One of the later migrating tribes were apparently the Hrvat, now known as the Croats. Before migrating west and adopting the Slavic language of the Serbs, they belonged to the Harahvaita tribe in Afghanistan mentioned as tribute-payers to the Persian empire in an Achaemenid document.)]

In contrast, she holds that on many essential points Andronovo pottery techniques are absolutely similar to those practiced by the Vedic Aryans (as reconstructed by Rau): "Ceramic finds trace the gradual infiltration of the farming oases of Marghiana and Bactria by the late-Andronovo tribes and their emergence on the mountain passes leading into the Indian subcontinent, which may provide the clue to the problem of the origin of the Aryans" (24-27). Kuzmina is forced to concede, however, that "in the Andronovo culture it was mainly the womenfolk who engaged in the making of pottery. ... in the case of the Vedic Aryans it was the male paterfamilias." Moreover, "The second major distinction is the richness of the impressed decoration of the Andronovo pottery, whose geometrical designs include triangle, meander, swastika, lozenge and herringbone" (26). Vedic pottery is supposed to be plain. Neither southern nor northern routes, then, have fully fulfilled Rau's Vedic pottery criteria.

According to Kuzmina, the fact that the essential equipment of the Indo-Aryan charioteers in the Mitanni kingdom and in India has no prototypes or analogies in either the Near East or Harappan India, but rather does show affinity with the items in the Sintashta- Petrovka burials mentioned earlier, "corroborates the hypothesis that locates the Indo- Iranian homeland on the Eurasian steppes between the Don and Kazakhstan in the 16th— 17th centuries BC." She adds, appropriately, that "to dispel all doubts we have only to find warrior burials similar to those of the steppes in Mitanni and in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent" (Kuzmina 1994, 410). These have yet to be found.