Although [the domestic horse] has occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites, for example Surkotada and Kalibangan, no one would credit the earl… - James Patrick Mallory

Mallory ended his overview of the “IE problem” (1973: 60) with this perceptive statement: “a solution to the problem will more than likely be as dependent on a re-examination of the methodology and terminology involved as much as on the actual data themselves.”

Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier.

It is not easy to make a simple appeal to the Andronovo culture to resolve all the issues of Indo-Iranian origins... When the archaeological evidence becomes so opaque then our only refuge... is probability and a little intuition.