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How old is the Rig Veda? (Part 2) By- Arun Gupta Arun Gupta was educated in Electronics Engineering at IIT-Madras and in Theoretical Physics at Caltech. He is now a software systems analyst. His intellectual wanderlust does not let him rest easy. He wishes he knew everything about everything. To read his past articles on Sawf click here

The Rig Veda (RV) was composed no earlier than around 3500 years ago -- that is the consensus of Western scholarship. The reasoning that leads to that age was outlined in the conclusion to Part I. To recapitulate, the RV was composed no earlier than the arrival of Aryans in India, and thus no earlier than 1700 BC; and the RV was composed no later than the beginning of the Iron age (around 1000 BC). What could possibly be wrong with this reasoning ? What is there further to discuss ?

Before I answer that, I want to remind the reader that I am a layman far outside the disciplines like archaeology and linguistics that are involved in studying these matters. My education is in engineering and in physics, not in the humanities. So, please take all that follows purely as personal opinion. Consult the professionals when in doubt.

There is a culture gap between the hard sciences and the humanities. ("Hard" refers to the degree of precision and not the level of difficulty.) The Indology list, for instance, has the following caution :

"Curiously, a scientific background in mathematics or physics seems to be a particularly strong reason for someone not to participate in this discussion group. It is apparently a common misconception amongst scientists that a scientific training prepares one to talk authoritatively about the humanities: it doesn't. "

It is not just a matter of knowledge -- this caution applies even to a scientist with great knowledge in one of the fields. So, the layman from the science side of the human knowledge is likely to have a rough time.

The hard sciences deal with objective things -- atoms, stars, water waves are oblivious to the wishes and the values of those who study them. Ultimately everything is referred to experiment, and that which does not withstand the test of experiment is weeded out. Scientists too, are prone to error, to experimental bias, to clinging onto theories long after they have become unviable. The touchstone of experiment and independent verification by large number of researchers tends to rapidly eliminate errors.

Moreover, having an independent reference -- Nature -- out there, makes scientists care only about the correctness of particular ideas. We don't care what Newton's theology was; it does not in any way contaminate or invalidate his laws of motion. The biases, motives, cultural background of scientists is only of interest to the historian of science. Perhaps something in the milieu made a scientist more receptive to some idea, leading to her great discovery. But science is properly concerned with the content of the discovery. So, the hard sciences are in this sense independent of human values.

The humanities, on the other hand, study human activities; and humans cannot approach humans objectively. The observer sees the culture, society, religion under study through the distorting lenses of her own values. If an author's personal religious belief is against idolatry and polytheism, then it will affect her description of Hinduism. Different people can come to very different conclusions about, for instance, what the Bhagavad Gita means, or meant to people two thousand years ago. At a finer level, the etymology of a word, the translation of a sentence from an ancient language, the pronunciation of a word written in a long-vanished dead script -- all these are to some extent, no matter how tiny, a matter of opinion with no method to validate or invalidate such as is available to the hard scientists.

Nevertheless, the examination of a subject by numerous experts who bring different points-of-view and biases to the study is supposed to bring about a balanced final result, a certain objectivity, something that all reasonable people will agree with. The humanities has two more problems in this regard, from the point of view of a scientist. The first is that the amount of evidence is limited. There is only so much text available from the Rig Vedic period, and barring an unlikely new discovery, there never will be more. The second is that in comparison to the sciences, the resources available to the humanities and the rate of activity is puny. For both reasons, the time-scale on which errors are erased is much longer in the humanities than in the sciences.

An example of all this that is directly relevant to our topic, the age of the Rig Veda, may help make this clear. The Sanskritist Michael Witzel and historian Steven Farmer wrote an article on Frontline magazine (September 30 - October 13, 2000) in which they say :

"A third find relates to Indo-Aryan loan words that show up in the non-Aryan Mitanni of northern Iraq and Syria c.1400 BCE. These loanwords reflect slightly older Indo-Aryan forms than those found in the Rigveda. This evidence is one reason why Indologists place the composition of the Rigveda in the last half of the second millennium."

Mitanni is the name of a kingdom around Asia Minor which reached its high-point around 1500-1400 BC. The language of the people was Hurrian. Hurrian was written in cuneiform, which was the common script of that region for a few thousand years; many different languages were written in cuneiform, and the script is well understood. Hurrian is a non-Indo-European language, but, as mentioned above, there seems to be Indo-Aryan loanwords used in Mitanni documents.

To quote J.P. Mallory, "In Search of the Indo-Europeans"(1989) :

"....there can be little doubt that there was a distinctly Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni kingdom.

In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the king of the latter swears by a series of Hurrian gods and then adds a series of names that are transparently the names of major Indic deities -- Mi-it-ra (Indic Mitra), Aru-na (Varuna), In-da-ra (Indra) and Na-sa-at-tiya (Nasatya). A Hittite text on horse-training and chariotry, whose author is identified as Kikkuli the Mitanni, employs the names of Indic numerals for the courses that the chariot makes about a track -- aika (Indic eka 'one'), tera (tri 'three'), panza (panca 'five'), satta (sapta 'seven') and na (nava 'nine'), while a Hurrian text from Yorgan Tepe employs Indo-Aryan words to describe the colour of horses, for example, babru (Indic babhru 'brown'), parita (palita 'grey') and pinkara (pingala 'reddish'). The Mitanni word marya is precisely the same as the Vedic marya, 'warrior'.

To these examples we may add a series of names for the Mitanni aristocracy and other names for divinities which associate the Indic element in the Mitanni language with the personal names and gods of the ruling dynasty...... These provide clues that form the basis of the most widely accepted theory: an element of Indic-speaking chariot warriors superimposed themselves on a native Hurrian-speaking population to form a ruling dynasty that endured for several centuries."

This theory of an Indo-Aryan elite that ruled Mitanni always had some unresolved problems. For instance, only the male members of the ruling dynasty had Indo-Aryan names (e.g, Tasaratha ) and not the queens. But still, the evidence seems quite firm.

Then a Norwegian scholar, Bjarte Kaldhol, delivered a series of bombshells on the Indology list. In a remarkable series of posts, starting with this one, he proceeded to show that current scholarship in Hurrian rejects this theory. No one has provided a refutation, so I can only assume that he is correct. Here is a longish quote from one of his posts , more than just the state of affairs, it points to how that might have arisen (the $ is a "th"-like sound, my comments in {}).

"Just to give you an idea of how almost invisible the Indo-Aryans are at Nuzi and in the whole kingdom of Arrapha:

Among the five or six hundred names indexed in AASOR 16, I could find only five that have an Indo-Aryan "ring". Less than one percent. They are all found on two pages out of twenty-three, so, there are twenty-one non-IA pages. If I ask you to explain these names etymologically, I believe I shall have to wait ad Kalendas Graecas. Here they are - they can be read in many more ways than indicated:

1. Parda$sua? Farda$sua? Barda$sua? Farda$swa? Farda$sfa? etc.

2. Biria$$ura? Piria$$ura? Firia$$ura? Friya$$ura?Firya$$ura? Pria$$ura?

3. Biriazzana? (zz = ts?) Piriazzana? Firiazzana?Friyazzana? Priatsana?

4. Purasa (not $), Purusa, Frusa? Purrasa? Prusa? etc.

5. $aima$$ura? $aim-A$$ura? $aima$-$ura? $aima$$u-ra? (not asura)

{The point being that seeing Indo-Aryan in these names may simply be reader's bias.}

Except for Biriazzana, son of the Hurrian Pai-Tilla, and Purusa father of Hudib-Abu, both Hurrians, nothing is known about their families, I think. They are all men.

We have thousands of Akkadian administrative and legal texts from Nuzi, some of them at Harvard. They are full of Akkadianized Hurrian words. I do not remember to have seen any Indo-Aryan Rechtstermini among them. Where is the Indo-Aryan ruling class? This may sound polemical, but I would like to see some facts.

Also, I would like to point out that marianni does not mean "Streitwagenkaempfer" {chariot fighter}. It is simply a term denoting a social class - women and children could also be mariannena. There are mariannena who do not even possess a cart or a horse. One might object that this could have been a late development, but that would be speculative. Is marianni really a Hurrianized Indo-Aryan word? Or is it Hurro-Urartean marij-anne, as Diakonoff thought?

The other Hurrian social classes and groups are termed haniahhe, ehele, hup$e, unu$$uhuli etc. - all Hurrian words. There are no traces of an Indo-Aryan administrative language. Did it ever exist? Cord Kuhne, who in his article in Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrian, vol. 10, p. 203-221, "Imperial Mittani: An Attempt at Historical Reconstruction", starts by stating that "the haphazard and often ambiguous state of the historic documentation available allows only for an incomplete picture, resulting in many gaps that can be bridged only by hypotheses". But he proceeds to write history in a Herodotean vein, without reference to Hurrian glyptic art, religion, or archaeology, where he would have found nothing to substantiate claims like these:

"It seems probable that the 'Hurrian troops' meant by our annalistic texts were drawn from a recent wave of Hurrian invaders who had descended from the mountainous flanks of northwestern Iran and superseded the older Hurrian ethnic layers, eventually expanding the territory of settlement...

In support of a fairly recent arrival of a substantial part of these Hurrians is the convincing theory that their military and political success, and perhaps even their emigration, was due to the leading role of a group of Indo-Arians [sic et not aliter]... Perhaps they searched, together with their new partners, for better homesteads in the lush plains of Mesopotamia and provided successful leadership..."

This is where the cat escapes from the bag, as we say in Norwegian. The Hurrians, who were not Aryans, needed successful leadership.

{Demonstrating the importance of being Norwegian -- not having a German bias.}

My main objection (besides the curious idea that the steppes of Mesopotamia were "lush") is that there is nothing to substantiate the massive invasion envisaged. His linguistic argument - that the Hurrian language changed after the assumed invasion, is not tenable. In fact, the Akkadian language changed much more than Hurrian during the six hundred years from 1950 to 1350. Hurrian was spread over a vast area, and there were several dialects, but no Indo-Aryan influence can be detected either in vocabulary or syntax. No pure IA words are attested - only Hurrianized ones.

Kuhne does not refer to archaeology and religion, which demonstrate that the holy cities of the Hurrians were located in the Khabur triangle and in the area east of Tigris. Te$$ub is called The Great Lord of Kumme, which is thought to have been located in this area, and other Hurrian deities were connected to Ninuwa, Nagar/Nawar, and Halab, as well as to mountains and rivers in this part of Syria and Iraq.

None of the Hurrian kings who are claimed by some to have been Aryans, worshipped Indian or Iranian gods. Their gods are known. They were Syro-Mesopotamian deites, because the Hurrians were a North Syrian people rooted in this country, with very old traditions. In fact, if we turn to page 277 in op.cit., we find an article by Marie-Claude Tremouille, "La religion des Hourrites: etat actuel de nos connaissances", which concludes in the following way (this time translated for the benefit of lurkers, please forgive me if my English does not render the French text as well as it deserves):

"The documentation that we possess today shows that the Hurrians venerated the same gods and followed the same religious practices as did the other contemporaneous peoples in the Near East. Pressed to the extreme, one might even be led to ask oneself if there ever was a 'religion of the Hurrians'."

But she points to the excavations going on at Urgi$/Urkesh and Nagar (Tell Mozan and Tell Brak) and expresses the hope that they might bring us "quelques lumieres plus vives" {some light and clarity ?}. This is true. The capital of Mittani, Wa$$ukkanni/U$$ukkanni, has yet to be found. While Tell Brak tells the same story as Nuzi and Alalah, Wa$$ukkanni might tell another story. But I don't think it will be THAT different.

So, it appears that the Indologists were basing their view of Mitanni using scholarship from around World War II. But remember, the Nazis were proponents of a theory of racial superiority of blonde, blue-eyed supermen, Aryans, the originators of the Indo-European family of languages, and carriers of civilization. The Aryans supposedly went around conquering the world, subjugating and civilizing inferior people. Thus, the reading of Indo-Aryan into Hurrian may simply be an artifact of Nazi ideology (innocently and uncritically) adopted by later scholars. Or current Hurrian scholarship may simply be rejecting the Nazi past by stripping out a real Indo-Aryan presence from Mitanni. In any case, it has been a while since scholars of Sanskrit and of Hurrian have spoken to one another.

I hope the reader has found this to be a useful digression. Perhaps the reader has an increased appreciation of the difficulty of research in the humanities. "Truth" in the humanities has very different connotations from that in science.

What I've quoted from Bjarte Kaldhol does not touch on all the points raised by Mallory; but the arguments on these are similar. If the evidence of Indo-Aryan influence on Hurrian is unclear, then the argument about pre-Rigvedic forms of words found in Hurrian is more a matter of interpretation than of fact. With that understanding, we are in a position to examine why many arguments persist about how the Rig Veda is much older than the consensus view, and why they are not easily dismissed, even if they are wrong. We shall examine these arguments in part III.

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