1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.
2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).
3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.
All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.
I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
For all we know, we might never get a complete picture and there might be many other aspects which we are not aware of behind PIE.
It's not that it "matters" in a political or nationalistic sense. That's an error in interpretation of the motivation for this kind of work.
It is important because the more we know about how we got where we are, the better.
Science is useful, if it is not immediately obvious, then future generations will surely find an use for it, as it has happened time after time with mathematical ideas.
I would even say it is you who are putting a modern political spin on this by rejecting it.
- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period
- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe
- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.
The problem of IE is of course very abstract, while the problem of, e.g., Celts is much more concretely paradoxical (continental and island Celts share the language family but not a lot of archaeology and a dubious amount of genes). However, it is still a more or less commonly accepted fact that at some point in the past PIE peoples spread like wildfire, bringing their dialects, genes, and culture to a very large area, and it is of huge historical interest to know where they started from.
The fact the IE epic and mythological traditions have zero memories of all this, I would say, is interesting but does not prove or disprove anything.
How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?
And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.
Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.
The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrate population replacement on its own, but lacking Starlink or even homing pigeons, some kind of migration was clearly involved.
The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened.
All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.
Here’s an article that goes deeper into this:
https://eruditus.substack.com/p/sons-of-the-indus-the-indian...
Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a generation or two for some individuals to get from the steppe to e.g. Britain.
As I understand it, the Bronze-Age Minoan civilization spoke an unrelated language (as evidenced by Linear A) and has a material culture relatively continuous with Neolithic Crete, not imported from the Kurgan culture. They would have been the ones experiencing the steppe-nomad-descendant invasion, the steppe nomad descendants in question being the Mycenaeans around 01450 BCE, who were at that point millennia removed from both the steppes and nomadism but presumably still rode horses at least sometimes.
It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-translated and the connection to other indo-european cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.
> It is unclear as to when the Rigveda was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE.[3][78] According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800–1000 CE.[79] The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period).[33][80] Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the Smriti rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel.[33] The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.[81]
As I understand it, the Tipitaka, Panini, Patanjali, etc., were also first written down around the end of the first millennium BCE or the beginning of the first millennium CE, as writing was adopted relatively late in India.
But actually there are rather solid reasons for believing that the alterations in the Rig Veda over the last 3000 years have been minimal, going far beyond what is commonly described as "pure speculation". Some of them have been described already in this thread, but there is an extensive academic literature on the topic, much of it linked from the Wikipedia article you started reading.
You had several priestly functions, like the Hotar, who recites the invocations of the Veda, and there is also the Brahman. The Brahman checks if everything is done to precision and no mistakes are made. If there are, they need to do corrections.
This is another reason why one can say it has been passed down without much change. There is a critical edition by scholars that reconstructs the changes in meter that might have occurred, but nothing else.
Any recommendations for an overview of the field?
A bit more classical but thorough is a History of India by Herman Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund.
And the best one to go into detail is “The Rigveda : a guide” by Joel P Brereton & Stephanie W Jameson.
Were there such events?
> How much effort do
Not a lot. Since they don’t need to because of writing. As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.
Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.
There certainly were; quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_Normandy (28 August 0932 – 20 November 0996):
> Richard either introduced feudalism into Normandy or he greatly expanded it. By the end of his reign, the most important Norman landholders held their lands in feudal tenure.
Normandy, as you may or may not know, is in France.
Then, a century later, his great-grandson, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, subjugating the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, et al., under a French-speaking noble elite. If Jarl Rikard had been cut down by bandits in his youth, or had merely failed to enlist the Norman landholders' swords under his banner (and that of his son, grandson, and great-grandson), the Norman invasion would not have happened. Similarly, if Richard's son Richard had been unable to escape from the court of King Louis IV in 0946, or unable to then win back Normandy from the king by force of arms, his grandson William would have been in no position to conquer—and it is unlikely that the subdivided Duchy would have been able to raise an army to successfully invade England, a feat that has not been repeated in the ensuing 959 years. And so on.
> Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.
Yes, your comment was written in reply to a comment naming one of the most surprising examples of such preservation, as a result of non-literate societies, as you said, "put[ting] put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions". Nevertheless, they seem to preserve massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.
That’s rather indirect. But you do have a point.
However we do know quite a bit about those events? So any English speaker who cares can learn about them.
> How much effort do they typically devote
Well unlike illiterate societies they don’t need to because of books.
> massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.
Well obviously, we can’t really compare them with more literate societies. Then again we’re just very lucky that there was no complete societal collapse in the Greco-Roman world since the 500-600s BC. or so. Some highly literate civilizations like Carthaginians or the Etruscans were effectively entirely erased because nobody bothered to copy their texts).
The problem with oral traditions is that they can preserve knowledge of events that might have happened > 500 years ago (e.g. Homer describes cities, weapons and other aspects of pre Bronze age collapse Mycenaean civilization but it’s all intermixed with contemporary(Greek dark age) stuff and it’s very hard to separate fact from fiction (even ignoring the supernatural bits).
What I was trying to get at is that, by the time the Rig Veda was composed, the diaspora from the steppes was over a thousand years into the past. You wouldn't expect the composers of the Rig Veda to necessarily know anything about it to be able to mention it. Instead, you'd expect them to know even less about the migrations of their nation from the steppes than modern English-speakers know about Jarl Rikard. So the fact that the Rig Veda doesn't mention any long migrations is (almost) no evidence that the migrations didn't happen, nor that they were in any sense gradual. Especially since, unlike Homer, it barely mentions historical events at all—it's almost entirely supernatural bits.
Irish have migration myths.
So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan movement, though).
To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It’s not inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing about them.
> wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time
Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points otherwise. IIRC we’ve found individuals as far as Britain who were closely related (a couple of generations) with remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups were very closely related paternally and moved very fast across Europe.
My recollection is that the complexity went the other way; Latin was more complex than the reconstructed languages, especially if the reconstruction didn't include Romanian, because the modern Romance languages became simpler over time in similar ways.
It's clear that the result is useful for understanding features of the ancestral language, but it's not perfect, and never will be.
On the other hand, comparative linguistics came long before genetics, and it is this field that first noticed a connection between the Indo-European languages.
Archaeological and especially genetic evidence now show the peoples of this language family (mostly) have shared (though distant and diluted) ancestry, so the field was broadly correct in noticing a connection.
It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages).
That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.
That's a very negative presumptions.
How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.
Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
[1] Hittite language:
The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.
That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language.
Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training.
Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey.
The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests.
The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.
It is likely that various kinds of "proto-writing" have been independently invented in a lot of places, but very few of them have evolved into writing systems.
"Proto-writing" is just a set of graphic symbols that are used to designate various things. Such a set of symbols can be used e.g. to write an inventory, to tag things to show ownership or purpose, to show on a map what can be found in certain places, and so on.
"Proto-writing" cannot be used to write human speech. All systems of "proto-writing" that have evolved into writing systems have done that by reinterpreting a part of the graphic symbols, or sometimes even all of them, to no longer be the names of some things, but to have a phonetic meaning, i.e. to represent some sounds of human speech (syllables in almost all cases), allowing thus the writing of the more abstract components of the speech, like various grammatical markers.
Therefore for a system of "proto-writing", it does not make sense to ask which is the language that has been written with it, because there exists no such language.
The only kind of information that can be known about a system of proto-writing is which is the thing denoted by each symbol. Even when the meanings of all symbols are known, that does not offer any information about the language used by those who have invented and used that system of proto-writing.
For now, there is no evidence that the Indus script was a writing system, because only very short strings of symbols have been preserved. It could have been a writing system, because by that time other writing systems already existed not far away, which could have inspired them, or it could have been just a proto-writing system, which would give no clue about the language of its users.