...the Vedic index. This book is an encyclopedia of historical and sociological knowledge extracted by study of the Vedic texts. It is based on a tho… - A. Berriedale Keith

It is certain ... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India., .. If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river, south of the modern Ambala.

The word seems beyond doubt to be connected with the root seen in the Greek pernemi, and the sense in which it was used by the poets must have been something like 'niggard'. The demons are niggards because they withhold from the Aryan the water of the clouds: the aborigines are niggards because they refuse the gods their due, perhaps also because they do not surrender their wealth to the Aryans without a struggle. The term may also be applied to any foe as an opprobrious epithet, and there is no passage in the Sarnhita which will not yield an adequate meaning with one or other of these uses. But it has been deemed by one high authority?" to reveal to us a closer connexion of India and Iran than has yet suggested itself: in the Dasas Hillebrandt sees the Dahae, in the Panis the Parnians, and he locates the struggles of Divodasa against them in Arachosia. Support for this view he finds in the record of Divodasa's conflicts with Brisaya and the Paravatas, with whose names he compares that of the Satrap Barsentes [of Alexander's time] and the people Paruetae of Gedrosia or Aria [in the same period]. Similarly he suggests that the Srifijaya people, who wereconnected like Divodasa with the Bharadvaja family, should be located in Iran, and he finds in the Sarasvati, which formed the scene of Divodasa's exploits , not the Indian stream but the Iranian Harahvaiti. Thus the sixth book of the Rigveda would carry us far west from the scenes of the third and seventh which must definitely be located in India. But the hypothesis rests on .too weak a foundation to be accepted as even plausible

By taking the linguistic evidence too literally one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet but not rain or hands!