Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC...

Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present.

The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south).

It is there in (Aryavarta) we must seek not only for the cradle of the Brahmin religion but for the cradle of the high civilization of the Hindus, which gradually extended itself in the west to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Phoenicia; in the East to Siam, to China and Japan; in the South to Ceylon, to Java and to Sumatra; in the North to Persia, to Chaldea, and to Colchis, whence it came to Greece and to Rome and at length to the distant abode of the Hyperboreons."

In order to account for this fact, we are bound to assume that the language of the original population of the towns of Central Asia, where Indo-Iranians must have arrived in the second millennium BCE, on the one hand, and the language spoken in the Punjab, the homeland of the Indo-Aryans, on the other, were intimately related.

"An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel. 38

Accordingly, archaeology cannot deny the possibility that Indo-Aryan and Iranian (which were preceded by Indo-Iranian) languages might have been spoken in the area of the Punjab, Pakistan/Afghanistan, southeast central Asia/northeast Iran since the second, third or even fourth millennium B.C.E. The problem is chronological. In fact, archaeologically at least, South Asian archaeologists often draw attention to a cultural continuum that can be traced as far back as Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium B.C.E. within which innovations and developments can be explained simply by internal developments and external trade. If there were no constraints stemming from the date commonly assigned to the Veda, this whole area could have included urbanites and agriculturists from the South, as well as nomads and pastoralists from the North, interacting together in the millennia B.C.E. as they always have been and still do in the present day. Both steppe dwellers and urban farmers could have been speakers of related Indo-Iranian dialects in protohistory just as they are today and have always been in recorded history. There could have been invasions, migrations, trade, cultural exchanges, all manner of interactions—cultural evolution and devolution (followed sometimes by renewed evolution)—as well as all manner of diversification in chronological time. And all within a large, heterogeneous ethnic and cultural area of people who nonetheless spoke related dialects—whether living in towns, mountains, or agricultural plains—just as has always been die history of the subcontinent.

Nonetheless, those who do find die aforementioned linguistic exigencies compelling must find some way of getting the Indo-Aryans speakers into the subcontinent by some means or another. Mallory (1998) feels comfortable enough ascribing some form of Indo-Iranian identity to the Andronovo culture but admits that, "on the other hand, we find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE" (191). Referring to the attempts at connecting the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures, he remarks that "this type of explanation only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" (192). He points out that suggesting an Indo-Aryan identity for the BMAC requires a presumption that this culture was dominated by steppe tribes. However, "while there is no doubt that there was a steppe presence on BMAC sites, . . . this is very far from demonstrating the adoption of an Indo-Iranian language by the Central Asia urban population" (192).

Approximately every two millennia, then, there has occurred a spread of a language family from a locus in the eastern part of the central Eurasian spread zone to cover the steppe and central Asia, extending partially or intermittently to the Danube plain, Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia. The loci of the historically attested spreads are near the edge of the spread zone rather than in the centre of it: the piedmont to the south (Bactria-Sogdiana) for Iranian, the north of Mongolia for Turkic and Mongolian. The trajectories of language spread run east to west along the steppe and through the desert to the Near East as shown .... To take clear and historically well-attested examples, the locus, trajectories, and range of IE must have been much like those of Iranian or Turkic. ... The placement of the locus specifically in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana is justified in .... A homeland reconstructed as locus, trajectory and range removes the dilemma: a locus in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana implies a spread beginning at the frontier of ancient Near Eastern civilization and a range throughout the steppe and central Asia, following the east-to-west trajectory, with occasional or periodic spreads into the Danube plain and Anatolia.

A much more convincing theory than that of the western Iranians having emigrated from North to South across the Caucasus is that of a slow, progressive East-West emigration, a gradual penetration as it were, over the centuries, from the end of the 2nd millennium to the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. ...

Of the other arguments, he knew a few but more have been added since: (1) linguistic paleontology: agreed here not to prove a cold homeland or any homeland at all; (2) common developments with Greek, and generally the geographical distribution of the isoglosses, is better explained by an Indian “extreme” homeland than by radiation from the Russian centre; (3) Finno-Ugric has hundreds of Iranian loanwords but imparted no words to Iranian or Indo-Aryan (the seeming exception of Guṅgu, “moon”, can either be a coincidental homonymy, date from an earlier Nostratic period, or was somehow a loan from Indo-Iranian), which is typical for a colonial situation, with Scythian Iranian imparting words and also borrowing some but not communicating them back to the homeland; (4) Mitannic can be shown to belong to the youngest layer of the Ṛg-Veda, so allowing for the language to emigrate and to become a dead substrate of Hurrian (and the similar case of Kassite), the Ṛg-Veda must have been complete by 1800 BC or so; 5) geographical distribution has the homeland typically in a far corner (Amerind superfamily, Bantu/Austronesian family, Turkic group, Arabic/Russian language), not in the centre (IE: Volga), which also is not the zone of greatest diversity, on the contrary; (6) Vedic literature contains a few astronomical passages datable because of the precession (ca. 1° in 71 years), e.g. Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa 2300 BC instead of ca. 1000 BC, Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa 1300 BC instead of ca. 400 BC, incompatible with an invasion scenario ca. 1500 BC; (7) kentum substrate in Bangani, India, e.g. dokru instead of expected daśru, “tear”; (8) Vedic and Puranic literature refers several times to emigrations, never to early immigrations, and the Northwest was not venerated as an area of origin; (9) the agricultural terminology proves, contra Masica, to be compatible with an Indian homeland.

Erdosy (1995a), who is prepared to find "some support" for small-scale migrations associated with the intrusive BMAC elements noted earlier, nonetheless states: "Several cultural traits with good Vedic and Avestan parallels have been found widely distributed between the southern Urals, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. However, even allowing for the uncertain chronology of Central Asian sites, few of these traits show the northwest-southeast gradient in chronology predicted by our linguistic models." Rather, in the manner of other traits commonly associated with the "Aryans" within South Asia, "they originate in different places at different times and circulate widely, undoubtedly through the extensive interaction networks built up in the mid-3rd to early 2nd millennia B.C." The main point is that "it is impossible, thus, to regard the widespread distribution of certain beliefs and rituals, which came to be adopted by Indo-Iranian speakers, as evidence of population movements" (12).

Prior to the Iranian expansion, in the early Bronze Age, IE spread to cover the entire steppe and the Danube plain (and subsequently all of Europe), with substantial speech communities also in Anatolia (Hittite and congeners) and northern Mesopotamia (surviving in Armenian) and, in all probability, coverage of much or all of western central Asia (probably by ancestral Indo-Iranian). What is historically attested of the IE spread fits closely the pattern followed later by Iranian, Turkic, and Mongolian.

While a good case can be made for an expansion of Pontic-Caspian pastoralists onto the Asiatic steppe, and perhaps also into the belt of central Asian urban centres (Parpola 1988), it is still difficult to demonstrate movements from the steppe into the historical seats of the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians of Iran itself.