Erdosy (1995a), who is prepared to find "some support" for small-scale migrations associated with the intrusive BMAC elements noted earlier, nonethel… - George Erdosy

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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).

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About George Erdosy

George Erdosy is a Canadian Indologist and professor at the University of Toronto.

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Additional quotes by George Erdosy

[Burrow] suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran.... It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion.

For example, Erdosy (1995) noted that cremation was pretty common in 2000 BCE Balochistan (Penano Ghundai II, Mughal Ghundai III, Dabar Kot, Mehi, Sutkagen-dor) but very rare in Central Asia: “If anything, on present evidence, cremations appear to have originated in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands and spread northwest (and southeast) thence, against the grain of postulated movements of Indo-Aryan speakers”.

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Indeed, if one accepts that the migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into South Asia already entered the realm of mythology at the time of the Rgvedic hymns, and that the latter were composed from ca. the 15th century B.C. onwards, the chronology suggested by the archaeological evidence already makes perfect sense.

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