The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Ten

THE RIGVEDA'S REMOTE ANTIQUITY AND THE RIGVEDIC MARYANNI OF 1360 B.C.

With the Rigveda dated by us to 3500-3000 B.C. and the Mitanni documents put by all historians at c. 1360 B.C., how shall we explain the affinity of these documents with the Rigvedic language and religion? The large time-gap between the latter and the Aryan rulership of the Mitanni people as known to history from about 1500 B.C. poses a challenge.

Within that time-gap we have the post-Rigvedic Pre-Harappān Civilization and the Harappā Culture. With the Harappā Culture in the Indus Valley, the descendants of the Rigvedics in India would be further inland to the East and South. Both the language and the religion of these descendants would show notable developments. How, then, can a band of Aryans, linguistically and religiously Rigvedic, a colonizing stream from India, appear in Mesopotamia in so late a period?

To understand the persistence of the Rigvedic language in spite of the Rigveda's having been left far behind in time and in spite of Sanskrit's having changed considerably as a result, we may consider two analogies.

How are scholars like Jackson, Hertel and Herzfeld able to bypass the undeniable archaicness of the language of the Avestan Gāthās as compared to the language of the Achaemenid inscriptions and put Zarathustra in early Achaemenid times (6th century B.C.) instead of four hundred years earlier, as most scholars do, or a few thousand years before, as do some others? Again, how, among the Indo-European languages today, Lithuanian still has archaic speech-forms very close to the basic idiom reconstructed by Comparative Philology for the original Indo-European tongue? Jackson and company urge that the Gāthic language could be a dialect of the Old Persian which the Achaemenid inscriptions display. And the archaicness of Lithuanian can

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be attributed to one or more of the following causes: a language can remain archaic when those who use it are unprogressive or if they dwell in a locality where no fusion takes place with races speaking other languages or else if they develop a highly refined technique for preserving and employing archaic forms.¹

Now, we can look upon the Maryanni's speech-forms not only as a dialectal mode of the Sanskrit of the time but also as a variety of Rigvedic Sanskrit lingering in a pocket of Aryanism isolated on the outskirts of India where the inhabitants were semi-Iranian and bore Indo-Iranian-looking names. Up to the period when the inhabitants started moving westward - some time before 1500 B.C. - this pocket may have had a long but

uneventful life in a mountainous corner, affording the language little chance to change and progress, while in India proper the language underwent modification, even in a period long before 1500 B.C., and became post-Rigvedic Sanskrit.

Our hypothesis, legitimate in itself, gains further concreteness when we glance at the Indo-Iranian areas between the Hindu Kush and the Punjāb in our own times - that is to say, the districts about the rivers Kābul and Swat, referred to in the Rigveda as Kubhā and Suvāstu. Here a group of mixed tongues called the Piśācha languages are spoken. About them the Imperial Gazetteer of India has said: "They possess an extraordinary archaic character. Words are still in every-day use which are almost identical with the forms they assumed in Vedic hymns... In their essence these languages are neither Iranian nor Indo-Aryan, but are something between both."² The Maryanni could have come from the very localities where the Piśācha languages flourish.

Thus, linguistically, the Aryan rulers of the Mitanni could be an offshoot of Rigvedic Aryanism without forcing us to date the composition of the Rigveda to their epoch. But we

1.S. Srikanta Sastri's "Appendix" to "The Aryan Problem", The Vedic Age, pp. 216-17.

2.Vol. I, p. 356 (Oxford, 1907).

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have also to explain in the context of that epoch their religious affinity to the Rigveda. Here the pertinent query is: "How much later than the Rigveda's fourfold god-group -Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra, Nāsatyā - of Mattiwaza's treaty which is more or less of the same time as Kikkuli's handbook, continue in India?"

As the story of Śunaśepa testifies, the vogue of Varuṇa certainly persisted down to the Aitāreya Brāhmaṇa (VII.3). R.K. Mookerji informs us that among the deities mentioned by Kautilya's Arthaśāstra (XIV. 3) as popularly worshipped were: Aditī, Saraswatī, Savitā, Agnī, Soma and vājayanta (Indra),³ Rigvedic godheads all these - and the Arthaśāstra at its earliest is considered to be Mauryan and hence very much post-Rigvedic. Strabo (born c. 63 B.C.), in his Geography (XV. 718), cites a writer who, referring evidently to the time (c. 300 B.C.) of Megasthenes - the Greek ambassador to the court of the Indian king whom the Greeks named "Sandrocottus" - tells us that the Indians worshipped Zeus Ombrios, "Zeus of the Rain-storms", who can only be Indra. On the coins of the Kushāņas (early centuries A.D.) we get representations of "Mithro" (Avestan Mithra, Rigvedic Mitra) as well as of "Horon" (Sanskrit Varuṇa).⁴ In Gupta times we have evidence of worship of both Indra and Varuṇa.⁵ On the face of it, it is perfectly possible for the Maryanni to have derived from a stock of Rigvedic Aryanism in a very much post-Rigvedic age - especially if we look at them as hailing from a pocket on India's outskirts.

What such a pocket can do in the matter of religious tradition may be seen from a case of our own times: the Kalash-Kafirs. Up to at least 1960 they were a small tribe close by the Afghānistān border, numbering fewer than 2000 people and still living according to the traditions of one of the oldest cultures-in Central Asia. Isolated from other Kafir

3.Chandragupta Maury a and His Times (University of Madras, 1943), p. 314.

4.R.K. Mookerji, Ancient India (Allahabad, 1956), p. 247.

5.R.K. Mookerji, The Gupta Empire (Bombay, 1947), p. 137.

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tribes who had been compelled to embrace Islam, they had gods "linked to the old Indian pantheon".⁶ Under the one supreme Creator the local deities - "dewalog" - were several, and one of them was " Varin,... the Indian deity Varuṇa, not only in name but also in the function as the guardian of truth and right, and the punisher of evil".⁷ We may remind ourselves that in Mattiwaza's treaty Varuṇa and the other gods are called as witnesses just because he and they had a similar function. Perhaps the Maryanni streamed out towards Mesopotamia from the same Indian outpost as occupied by the Kalash-Kafirs?

What can be stated about the Maryanni, both linguistically and religiously, may apply also to the princes of the Kassites. Significantly, it is only in the post-Rigvedic literature that we get some Indian clues to them, clues that seem to be an argument for a colonizing venture from India to the West.

There is the tribe of the Keśis mentioned in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (XI. 8.4.6). Pusalker has the note: "[D.R.] Bhandarkar identifies the Keśis with the Kassis or Kassites" (Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Culture, p. 3).⁸ Moti Chandra links the Kassites with the Kāśyas, the founders of Kāśī, the region of Banāras first mentioned in the Paippalada version of the Atharvaveda and next referred to in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. He suggests: "Some idea of their migration may be gained from the enchainment of names extending from the Caspian Sea, Kaswin, Kāśyapur (Multan) to Kāshmir, in which their name has survived."⁹

It is possible that an offshoot of the Kāśyas from the region of Kāśyapur or Kāshmir moved into the Irānian hills - the historical location of the Kassites. The date of this movement may be guessed from the fact that though they

6.Peter Snoy, "The Last Pagans of the Hindu Kush", Natural History, November 1959, p. 526.

7.Ibid.

8."Aryan Settlements in India", The Vedic Age, p. 262, Reference 38.

9.The Illustrated Weekly of India, February 16, 1964, p. 17, col. I.

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emerge into history after 1800 B.C. they appear in Elamite texts as early as the time of Pazur-Inshushinak, contemporary of Naram-Sin of the Semitic Dynasty of Akkad founded by Sargon I,¹⁰ According to the recent revised chronology the reign of Naram-Sin would be in the twenty-fourth century B.C. The Kassites thus may be thought of as leaving the trans-Indus country before 2300 B.C.

We may think of the Maryanni too as moving westward in the same antiquity. And then the resemblance of some of their gods to the members of the Rigvedic pantheon would not look so much of a problem as when we situate the Mitanni documents against a Maryanni beginning on the Upper Euphrates in about 1500 B.C. Like the Kassites they may have remained unimportant in their new home until much later than the twenty-third century B.C. and continued there the semi-Rigvedic cult brought then from the purlieus of North-west India through the hills of Irān.

This is rendered all the more probable because the age of Naram-Sin appears to evince contact even with other Indo-Europeans than the Kassites. According to B. Hrozny, an ancient text whose historical value is not quite certain tells us that among the kings whom Naram-Sin fought there was the king of Amurru, Khuvaruvash, a name of Hittite and therefore Indo-European character.¹¹ Hrozny goes to the extent of remarking: "Naram-Sin had also to defend his empire against the attack of the Unman-Manda, 'troops of peoples' which came from the North, and in which then, as later, are to be seen in the front line Indo-European, Aryan peoples. One of these peoples may have been the later Aryans of Khurri-Mitanni."¹²

Lastly, what shall we say about the Hittites themselves, whose language Hrozny has identified as Indo-European and a king of whom struck the Mitanni treaty with Mattiwaza? Their first presence is attested in c. 1950 B.C. (or a little

10.E. Ghirshman, Iran, pp. 65, 53.

11.Encyclopaedia Britannica (1960), II, p. 607, col. I.

12.Ibid.

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later) as conquerors of commercial Assyrian colonies in Cappadocia (Anatolia, Asia Minor). The period suggests that they might be adventurers broadly from the same quarter as the Maryanni and the Kassites. Some religious and linguistic facts are also worth pondering. Although they practically merged with the "Asianic" peoples around them and fused foreign gods with their religion, the aruna (Varuṇa) of the Maryanni appears to be connected with the Hittite arunas (sea) and the latter to anticipate by its mythical associations the Greek Ouranos whose name, in turn, is almost identical with uruwana, the alternative to aruna.¹³ We may add that arunas (sea) brings to mind also the Rigvedic phrase for the celestial upper waters, the great ocean: maho arnas. Again, the Hittite innar (strength) can be taken as affined to the name "Indra".¹⁴ The designation the Hit-tites gave themselves - "Hatti" - from that of the land as known to the indigenous population before their arrival¹⁵ seems to show that it fitted their own ends. "Hatti" equates phonetically to "Khatti" (which becomes "Kheta" in Egyptian inscriptions) because of the laryngeal nature of the opening H, and "Khatti" can be aligned to the Pali "Khattiyo" for the Sanskrit "Kshatriya", meaning "warrior".¹⁶ Thus the chronological suggestion could be correct.

13.Cf. Jairazbhoy, op. cit., p. 16, incorporating, among other researches, those of Sommer, Kretschmer and Guterbock.

14.B.K. Ghosh, "Indo-Iranian Relations". The Vedic Age, p. 224, n. 23.

15.Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 209-10.

16.D.D. Kosambi, The Civilization and Culture of Ancient India (London, 1965), p. 77.

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