The Vedic Harappans, The Disaster of  Michael Witzel  and Some Flowing Traditions.....

On Aryans and Colonial Archaeology Vedic Harappans
by Bhagwan Singh, Aditya Prakashan, F-14/65, Model Town II, New Delhi,1995
Jaspal Singh
South Asian History has been greatly distorted by the tendentious, colonial and eurocentric rendition of the development of the region. One of the most distorted areas of history has been the question of Aryans and the Indus Valley civilisation.
In this new work, Bhagwan Singh presents an important thesis on the origins of civilisation in South Asia. In the process, he also takes a hard look at the vast body of literature on the subject on this subject that has come down from colonialist scholars and their latter-day descendants.
Bhagwan Singh discusses the "Aryan" problem and settles this long-running debate with convincing arguments. As the title Vedic Harappans, itself suggests, Bhagwan Singh is not treading the old path. For him, the Vedic literature describes the Harappan reality. These are not two different or opposing tendencies. He states,
In short, if we discount the colonial legacy of docile self-denials and falling quickly in line with alien expectations, archaeology was at no stage at variance with the Aryan character of the Harappan civilization.
On the question of the Aryan invasion, he discusses in detail all the arguments put forward by the proponents of this theory. In a chapter titled The Myth Of Aryan Invasion, he points out that "there is neither any literary account of invasion of India by Aryans nor any archaelogical evidence to support such a hypothesis".
He forcefully argues this case: "As we have seen, the Vedic people did not come from outside. The Harappan cities, the first flowering of Indian civilisation, did not fall because of their invasion".
Bhagwan Singh argues with evidence:
Aryans were born with ar/al, the digging stick or hoe in their hands. It was neither their colour, nor their blood nor yet the size and sharpness of their nose which made them proud of themselves. They were proud of their being Aryans or cultivators at a time when the tribes surrounding them were at the stage of hunting and gathering.
It was the Aryans who discovered agriculture and initiated the agrarian revolution and a new mode of production. Earlier the Aryans were called Devas. The term derives from ti/di, meaning burn or shine, and refers to their control over fire. 
It was the discovery of fire including the technique of producing, maintaining and controlling it that revolutionised their thinking and prompted them to undertake new ventures.
He concludes that :
The Aryans were primarily agriculturists. They derived their name from this advancement at a time when people around them were lingering at the lower stage of gathering and hunting. Some of them formed their own kindered communities, refused to move ahead and censured them for their madness for ruining the natural sources which provided them liberally.
Later on these Aryans developed into great traders and travelled all over the known world of the time, taking their agriculture, trade, language and customs with them. 
Bhagwan Singh also examines the hypothesis of Proto Indo-European language in a chapter titled The Language The Harappans Spoke. He states:
Proto-Indo-European is not a fact but an idea floated in order to displace Sanskrit from the centre of discussion. it the product of a magical realism created for projecting the white man's racial superiority back into the hoary past.
He concurs with the view that Sanskrit is a refinement of different Prakrits which were spoken at the time in India. And that out of these Prakrits, natural languages, a refined and classical language-Sanskrit emerged. "It is admitted (Harmatta 1992) that Sanskrit and Vedic languages are refinements of the Prakrit languages." Bhagwan Singh has dealt with matter at length in his Hindi book, Arya Dravid Bhashyaon Ki Moolbhoot Eikta.
Vedic Harappans is a "must read" book for South Asians in general and those who are seriously interested in History of the region in particular. Bhagwan Singh has put to rest a lot of myths about the history of South Asia and deserves praise for this heroic effort.
yog

Bhagwan Singh versus Michael Witzel!

Michael Witzel: rattled rat at IIC

Bhagwan Singh

22 July 2009

I was really sorry for Prof. Michael Witzel. After all, he was our honoured guest! Dr. Singh should not have pounced on him so mercilessly, playing the cat and the rat game – the cat looking ascetically resigned tossing the rat, the rat pretending to be dead, breathlessly looking from the corner of his eye to judge the cat’s next move, running for his life, only to be pounced upon and tossed up again. The Chair kept smiling all through at this plight of the powerful brainy Harvard Professor of Sanskrit!

Frankly, I enjoyed the wild play. Prof. Witzel was in a state of trauma: nervous, edgy, twitching his lips, dropping his eyelids recurrently, looking askance to avoid his interlocutor, constantly using his hanky to rub his nose, murmuring something inaudible to explain his errors, occasionally seeking help from his votaries who were present in good number, but more ignorant than their demi-god, and hence themselves dazed. Singh smiled all the way, his smile mischievous, eyes sadistically aglitter, untrue to his true nature, but true to the occasion.

Rgveda

The occasion was a lecture on the Rgveda by Prof. Michael Witzel, at the India International Centre, on 10 July 2009. Presided over by Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, it was attended by scholars of different hues and expectations. No one suspected that Witzel with his claim to be a ranking Vedic scholar knew so little that he could not answer a single query. Indeed, he appeared blank as far as the Rgvedawas concerned. He rose nervously to speak on the Veda, but actually spoke on the Aryan migration from Afghanistan to Punjab !

The lecture merely reiterated what Prof. Witzel has written years ago: that north-western India was populated by Munda speaking people when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived on the scene. Old Indo-Aryan was influenced by the substrate Proto-Munda. He proposed a time bracket of 1500-1250 BC for composition of the Rgveda and suggested Book IV and Book VI were the oldest, advantage Book IV.

Witzel painted Rgvedic society as nomadic pastoralist, illiterate and with little interest in agriculture and sedentary life. There was virtually nothing in his speech that was not lifted from nineteenth century archives. He showed no awareness of recent researches in archaeology, anthropology, literature or historical linguistics, and presented even Kuiper with his pathological distortions.

Many archaeologists and professors of history attended the lecture, including your writer, Vedic scholar Bhagwan Singh. When the floor was thrown open for discussions, Bhagwan Singh introduced himself as the author of The Vedic Harappans, and said that his data contradicted each and every statement made by Witzel; he sought permission to exchange notes on a few issues. With the Chair’s permission, Singh said:

- You have reordered the Rgvedic strata, rating IV and VI to be the oldest and the rest belonging to intermediate and late stages. I have no objection to your sequence, but find your chronology miserably on the lower side. There is a reference to white pottery in one verse in Book IV (4.27.5). White pottery is a distinctive feature of Hakra Ware dated to 3000 BC. This goes against your dating of 1500-1250 BC for the Rgveda.

Witzel was dumbstruck. He murmured something inaudible, avoiding the audience, looking sideways. He tried to explain that the sequence arranged by him was based on the number of verses in a book, the smallest being the oldest. It caused Kapila ji and others to smile openly. I could not make out the reason and reminded him that Book IV is shorter than Book VI; but the shortest book is Book II! So here again, he was caught on the wrong foot.

He hesitantly managed, “There is no evidence of chariot or horse in India earlier than the mid-second millennium.”

-         But Professor, the aśva in Rgveda, whatever could it have been, was brought from sea bound areas, even the aśva in the horse sacrifice, mentioned in Book I, hymn 163.

Prof. Witzel had no choice but to bite his lips in desperation.

-         You say that the wheel and chariot were invented by Aryans when they were in Central Asia , but in the Book IV itself, Bhr.gus are given the credit for manufacturing wheels (4.16.20). Chariot and wheel was therefore not Aryan, but a Dravidian invention.

Witzel pretended that the inventors might have been Aryans and manufacturers Dravidians! He now forgot the antiquity of Book IV, which according to his suggestion, could have been written in Central Asia, older even than Book VI, composed entirely in Northern Afghanistan ; Dravidian speakers must have been there as well.

-         You talk of substrate effect of Proto-Munda and suggest no role of Proto-Dravidian at the early stage. But Kipper had concluded that three ethnic groups participated in a cultural process. The three are conspicuously present in the Rgveda, Bhr.gus Dravidian, Angirasas Mundari, besides the Sanskrit speakers.(Note 1)

Prof. Witzel mumbled something for a minute; his nervousness was apparent in his evasive gestures.

Kapila ji must have taken pity at his visible discomfort. She invited others to raise doubts, if they had any. Someone at the extreme end of the hall asked a question on the distorted reading of the Sankhyayan Śrautasutra, which had exposed his culpability half a decade back. Witzel responded by referring to an article written by him, without telling us what his defence was!

After a few worthless queries, the debate shrunk back to Michael Witzel, Kapila Vatsyayan, and Bhagwan Singh.

-         The problem with you, Professor, is that you are not familiar with the content of Book IV even. Hymn 57 of Book IV gives a graphic depiction of advanced agriculture, with a plough almost similar to the one that was common in India up to the mid-twentieth century, drawn by a pair of bullocks and driven by a ploughman in service. And in one of the Ŗics, the poet talks of milking the earth as a cow, year after year. It testifies to advanced agricultural activities with sedentary population and belies the myth of nomadism, pastoralism, and barbarity.

The Chair could not hold her laughter; Witzel shook in dismay.

The last nail was hammered by Kapila ji herself. In a jocular vein, she said, “The theme of the lecture was Rgveda. Vedic poetry is known for its sublimity and rare beauty. I expected Prof. Witzel to speak something on it, but he did not say even a word on the theme.”

Witzel agreed that the Hymns on Uşā are really beautiful.

I interjected, “not only Uşā Sūktas professor, the entire Rgveda.Some of it could never be surpassed, such as the Nāsdīya Sūkta, with such expression as tama āsīt tamasā gūlhmagre, darkness was entrapped within darkness.

All in all, it was an interesting evening, if not for the presentation by Prof. Witzel, then for his discomfiture.

Prof. Bhagwan Singh is a Marxist scholar who accepted the archaeological evidence against the theory of Aryan invasion of India

yog

Note 1: There Is No Substratum In Vedic and i'm working on the issue and soon will dismiss it.....

The Traditions Still Flowing.......

1) BANGLE TRADITION


DANCING GIRL OF MOHENJO-DARO

HEADLESS FIGURINE FROM INDUS VALLEY

Compare these statues with modern day gypsy women of north-western India.Notice the similarities between bangles on their hands.

      

These women are Indo-Aryans,they speak Indo-Aryan languages and they have Indo-Aryan gypsy culture.This bangle tradition lives on from the times of Harappan civilization to this day.

2) THE GREAT BATH  OF MOHENJO DARO 

THE GREAT BATH

Similar bathing tanks were also discovered in Dholavira.

Compare  with modern day Hindu temple ponds.

Ritual bathing(Sanskrit Snana) is very important for Hindus from the times of Harappan civilization.For example,Kumbh mela is a very sacred festival of Hindus


3) VEDIC SYMBOLISM

The seals and arts of Indus valley offers many Vedic symbolism such as Chakra,Sacred Pipal leaf,Swastikas etc...which are sacred for Hindus and Buddhists to this day.

4) Yogic postures

Indus seals shows many Yogic postures which are practiced to this day.

5) YOGIC MUDRAS

                                                          

These figures in lotus postures from Harappan civilization shows "Anjali Mudra" or Namaste practiced by all major Indian(Dharmic) religions

6) Shiva Linga

This is a Shiva Linga from Kalibangan it is exactly the same as the one which Hindus use today.Many other Shiva Lingams were also found from Mohenjo-Daro.

7)Fertility Goddess cult

This is a fertility goddess figurine from Harappan  civilization, compare it with the figurines below.Notice the headdress and flowers,they represent the same goddess.

                                                                    Mauryan(400 BCE)
                                                                      
Gandharan (200 BCE)                                                                     


These figurines are from final 2500 YBP,which means this Goddess cult was active during Mauryan times and Gandharan times among Indo-Aryans.Mauryans and Gandharans were undoubtedly Indo-Aryans.This extinct cult must have been contemporary to the Hinduism Buddhism and Jainism at that times.It may be non-Vedic,but still it was practiced by Indo-Aryans.


8) Fire worship and fire altars.

These fire altars are from Kalibangan and Lothal respectively.These fire altars are exactly similar to the Vedic fire altars used fro fire sacrifices or Yajnas,which are core of the Vedic faith.It is conducted by learned Brahmins.At Kalibangan row,of 7 fire altars were found at a citadel.Sites like Rakhigarhi,Banwali also have presence of fire worship.

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AMT proponents are completely ignorant about these cultural similarities between Harappan civilization and Indo-Aryan culture.

Special thanks To Yajna...............................

Cracking the Indus Valley script?

Hema Vijay

Ancient Civilisation

The men whose hands etched out these rather linear signs on soapstone and terracotta tablets along the valleys of the mighty Indus river some 4000 years ago, would have had no inkling that they were leaving such an enduring and tantalizing puzzle for men of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A Harappan seal.Generations of scholars have tried to crack the script etched out on tiny Indus Valley seals, tablets and amulets. Numerous decipherments have been proposed; but none accepted by the scientific community at large. This is why Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher and part of the eclectic team that is trying to decipher the Indus script jokingly says, “The Indus Valley script must be the most deciphered script in the world.”

What is exciting Dr Wells and linguists like Dr Steve Bonta from the Pennsylvania State University, who have been trying to crack the code, is the scintillating results of a study by a group of academicians and scholars. The study has discovered through computer statistical methods that the Indus script shows distinct patterns in the placement of symbols in sequences. This even gives this team a chance to accurately guess and fill in on the missing parts in the tablets discovered so far.

It is a geographically spread out team that conducted the computer analysis — Rajesh PN Rao, University of Washington; Nisha Yadav and Mayank Vahia of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai; Hrishikesh Joglekar of Mumbai; R Adhikari of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai; and Iravatham Mahadevan of the Indus Research Centre in Chennai. Their study was published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the research was funded by the Packard Foundation, the Sir Jamsetji Tata Trust, the University of Washington and the Indus Research Centre.

These researchers used the Markov statistical model that analyses sequences and estimates the likelihood of a future event. This model has actually hit on the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script, which is a massive boost for efforts in deciphering the script. The Markov analysis suggests that the Indus script exhibits rich synactic structure and the ability to represent diverse content. In short, the results suggest that the Indus script symbols fall into the purview of language. “I think that using Markov model has been a turning point,” says Dr Ronojoy Adhikari. The Markov model is generally used for sequences like DNA analysis, speech recognition, and economics.

The Indus Valley civilisation, also known as the Harappan civilisation (following the discovery of the bygone-existence of this civilisation at a site called Harappa, by English general Alexander Cunningham in the late 19th century) once spanned over half a million square miles. These people had an amazing trade network that extended as far as the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some in places as far away as Mesopotamia.

The Indus script sequences in seals are typically five to six symbols long, and read from right to left (understood from the cramping of signs towards the left of the seals). Each seal has an animal icon (predominantly the one horned rhino) accompanied by another symbol at the base. The seals are rather small, and the largest discovered one is just over a foot tall.

What is intriguing is that the seals with Indus symbols have been found in far away paces like Mesopotamia and the site of modern-day Iraq. Even more curiously, the West-Asian sequences seem to be ordered differently from sequences on artifacts found in the Indus Valley, suggesting that Indus traders in West Asia may have used the script to represent different information than the information they represented in the Indus region. In that case, these signs certainly can’t have been just symbols, quashing the contention that the Indus symbols were not part of a language.                  

The number of principal signs in the Indus script is estimated to be between 400-600 and scholars term these characters to be logo-syllabic, meaning midway between the syllabic and logo graphic scripts. To make it clear, typically, syllabic scripts have about 50-100 signs like the Tamil or English scripts, whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs, like the Chinese language. “It looks like some signs in the Indus script have phonetic sound, while others don’t,” Dr Wells says.

Arguably the most ancient of the urban civilizations in the world, these people lived, traded, sculpted and carved their thoughts in an enigmatic script, which have been teasing linguists. Perhaps not for much longer, though. There seems to be a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel now.

In two to five years, we might even be conversant with what these men had etched out on these tablets. The team is very hopeful of this, considering that current digs at sites such as Farmana by Prof V Shinde, are throwing up a huge number of seals and tablets, offering these researchers more material to work on.

So why has it been so difficult to crack the code so long? There are actually three reasons. “For one thing, we haven’t been lucky enough to be left with a Rosetta stone (a bilingual text that provides a translation for a script) such as the one that helped crack the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Secondly, the the average length of the inscriptions found so far is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 17 signs, and a sealing of combined inscriptions of just 27 signs, which makes decoding that much more tricky. Thirdly, we don’t have information about the kings and places of that time, which has helped in cracking many other ancient scripts,” Dr Bonta explains.

But even now, Dr Bonta has interesting theories about the fish sign that appears on many of these seals. He reckons that it represents a system of weights. Substantiating this theory is that the fish is ‘Min’ in most Dravidian languages (pronounced meen). The Mina is actually a common system of weights that existed across a belt of regions from Harappa to modern day Bahrain. Dr Bonta also notes that the jar sign appears only in the predicate position.

Many controversies surround the script. There are scholars like Dr Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki) who believe that the Indus sign system represents an ancient Dravidian language. Others like Natwar Jha consider that the inscriptions found on the artifacts were a form of Vedic Sanskrit.

As for this team, they are having an open mind about the script’s origin. Dr Adhikari sums up, “We don’t want to slot it into a category; that would limit possibilities. We just want to understand what these seals say.” We do too.

yog

My View:

 “We don’t want to slot it into a category; that would limit possibilities. We just want to understand what these seals say.” We do too.''

Seriously?.

Indus Script: A Study of its Sign Design

Nisha Yadav and M. N. Vahia

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

The Sindhu Unicorn

The Abstract:

The Indus script is an undeciphered script of the ancient world. In spite of

numerous attempts over several decades, the script has defied universally

acceptable decipherment. In a recent series of papers (Yadav et al. 2010; Rao et

al. 2009a, b; Yadav et al. 2008a, b) we have analysed the sequences of Indus

signs which demonstrate presence of a rich syntax and logic in its structure. Here

we focus on the structural design of individual signs of the Indus script. Our study

is based on the sign list given in the concordance of Mahadevan (1977) which

consists of 417 distinct signs. We analyse the structure of all signs in the sign list

of Indus script and visually identify three types of design elements of Indus signs

namely basic signs, provisional basic signs and modifiers. These elements combine

in a variety of ways to generate the entire set of Indus signs. By comparing the

environment of compound signs with all possible sequences of constituent basic

signs, we show that sign compounding (ligaturing) and sign modification seem to

change the meaning or add value to basic signs rather than save writing space. The

study aims to provide an understanding of the general makeup and mechanics of

design of Indus signs.

The Svastikas

From Conclusions:

The signs have been designed with care and combining signs with

other signs or modifiers seems to have been a practice known to all sites.

Indus people seem to employ several interesting techniques such as using

a set of modifiers to modify the basic sign and sign compounding. We also

find instances of doubling and mirroring in the design of Indus signs. The

usage of a similar set of constituent basic signs in different configuration in compound signs seem to convey different information. The designers of the

Indus signs also placed a special emphasis on symmetry and there seems to

be an underlying effort to retain the overall aesthetic value of Indus signs.

All this makes it clear that like all other writing systems, Indus writing is

an intellectual exercise of great significance and a lot of thought, planning

and utility issues have been taken into consideration while designing these

signs. The Indus civilisation was spread over an area of about a million

square kilometres and yet, the sign list over the entire civilisation seems to

be the same indicating that the signs, their meaning and their usage were

agreed upon by people with large physical separation. This arrangement

worked satisfactorily for about 700 years. Hence the understanding of

Indus signs and their meaning must have been robust and yet versatile and

easy to use. This is also reaffirmed by the fact that Indus script has been

found on seals discovered in West Asia with a different grammar (Rao et

al., 2009b). The usage of modifiers at almost all sites (Table 4) suggests

that the manner of sign modification was universally agreed over the entire

area of the Indus valley civilisation and was not intended for a small group

of people.

yog

If some one asks me I will say beside the uniquenesses that can be found from the above research and other related ones,the script was most probably a hybrid script where the principals of Hieroglyphs and Linguistic grammar were combined....

Blogging on Bloggers: some brilliant posts from Sanscrito e civiltà dell'India the Italian Indology blog by Giacomo Benedetti.

Giacomo Benedetti the indologist who is changing the face of Indology also has some great posts in his Italian blog, here i post few of them with the help of Google Translate.

Nuts and dogs between India and Greece

In the great book by Bernard Sergent  Les Indo-Européens  is also a chapter on the games, which starts from nuts , called "the game far better attested in Indo-European cultures, and with such frequency and such an expansion that can not rest on a common heritage. " It is noted that this was in ancient Greece, Macedonia, India, Iran, at the Germans, in Lydia, in Rome, and that in almost all these peoples had the utmost importance. In Greece, the game is frequently referred in the literature. In Lydia, he attributed the invention: according to Herodotus (I.94), during a famine would the Lydians invented the game of dice, the knuckle, the ball, and so on (all except chess) a day to forget hunger on two. Finally, a party would have emigrated to Italy under the guidance of the Tyrrhenian Sea, to become the Etruscans. 
Located in Rome, continues Sergent, a legend arose the origin of the founder of the city in a game of dice between the priest of Hercules and his God. Among the Germans, Tacitus tells us (Germany 24), we played with such earnestness and perseverance, that when he had lost all that he had, he would like placed their freedom, reducing slaves in case of defeat. Something similar happens to Yudhisthira, the king of the Pandavas in the great Indian epic, Mahābhārata, where in a game of dice he brings into play the kingdom, his brothers,  himself  and his wife (see illustration above ,taken from a Persian manuscript). Again RV. X.34, the famous 'lament of the player' in str.4 mentions the player tied taken away as a slave. In Greece, the game needed to divination, the same at the Balti ancient divination in medical, and an ancient Indian text, without specifying Sergent says, describing an oracle achieved by means of nuts. Even the priests of the Slavic tribe of Retrani were oracles with nuts (and horses). The dice game looks like a game in Macedonia and in the royal Achaemenid Persia, as it was in India, where it was so important that the epochs of history are named after the dice points: Kali, the worst point, gives its name to our degenerate age.  
But what is the meaning of Kali ? The Dictionary of Monier Williams gives as the first just what the 'nut or nut side marked with a dot, the nut loser'. The dictionary poles of the Pali Text Society gives 'the nut unfortunate, unlucky throw a dice, bad luck, demerit, sin, sinful, sinner, saliva, spit'. These meanings in the poles, which was closer to the spoken language than Sanskrit, suggest a concept of bad luck and impurities, which has been identified with the nut loser of the game with walnuts Vibh Ithaca, from the tree Terminalia Bellerica , considered as infested by demons. If we consider that the dice were probably originally used for divination, and that the odd number of 'fate' (including nuts) was associated with bad luck (see here ), this interpretation acquires even more verisimilitude. The term kali can be etymologically traced back to the darkness and impurity: kalana means 'stain, blemish'; Kalanka 'spot, sign, dirt, slander';kaluṣa  'murky, disgusting, unclean, dirty, dirt, impurity and sin' ,  kalka 'dirt, impurity, falsehood, deceit, sin', and, incidentally, also designates the Terminalia Bellerica. A parallel one person you might also find in greek  Kelis  'spot, shame, shame', Latin caligo 'darkness', and calumnia . But the most interesting comparison is with the name given to the score  of the dice down in Latin, or canis or canicula , and in greek, Kyon , which always means 'dog'. He even found a nut, in Taranto, with written ky (on)  instead of either ace, reproduced here.

Now, back in Rgveda if a player was victorious and expert said śvaghnin 'killer of dogs or dog', which, comparing it with the greek-roman language, it could mean that he was able to avoid unlucky shots. Apparently the dog, probably as unfortunate animal was associated with loss in the nuts. In  Satapatha Brahmana XIV.1.1.31  it, along black bird (the crow), is identified with falsehood ( anṛta, the opposite of the RTA , the Truth-Order), with darkness and evil ( pāpman , which also means bad luck or sin). In Taittiriya Brahmana III.4, in the great ritual of horse sacrifice, it requires the killing of a dog 'from the four eyes', as it is explained, the dog is evil ( SVA Go Papma VAT ). What is this dog is discussed in the ' article by David Gordon White 'Dogs Die'. A p.285, note that this is usually explained as a dog with white spots above the eyes.A note to  Satapatha XIII.1.2.9 Brahmana  says, however, that such a dog was just a substitute for a dog with two faces (rare anomaly but not impossible). White, however, also cites a passage of the Avesta about a funeral rite in which you use a dog with four eyes, which according to dictionaries Avesta indicates a dog with two spots above the eyes. The significant thing is that even the hell hounds of Yama have four eyes, as in RV. X.14.10-11 . Perhaps here too it is understood that they have two faces, similar to Cerberus greek? Could confirm the comparison with RV. X.99.6 , where we find a demon 'with six eyes and three heads', a description which is also found in the Avesta, Yn. 9.8, for the dragon A ž the Dahaka. However, there is a strong affinity between Cerberus and the dogs of Yama is recommended, in addition to the role as guardians of the dead, etymology: the greek  Kerberos  is the name of the Vedic one or both dogs:  Sabala , which means 'variegated, spotted, stained'. At first glance, the correspondence may seem dubious, yet we have a number of terms in ancient Indian who approach very closely to the greek term, including karbara , which always means 'variegated, spotted', and is also the name of a demon. A very interesting aspect is that these variants of the same adjective (to be added karvara, karbura, Kavara ) reveal the existence of forms centum next to those, normal to the ancient Indian type  satem (in addition to Sabala, Savala, Sabara and SAVARA ). The thing, however, should not appear unheard of, since even in the language Himalayan Bangani are forms centum . Remarkable that, like other forms centum  in ancient India, it is attested in terms of post-Vedic works or even in lexicons, as if the satemization was a phenomenon typical of the Vedic language, which was closer to Iranian with which it shares this evolution while isolated areas far from the original Vedic region (northwestern India and the Indus valley) may have developed forms centum closer to  proto-indo-european, parallel to the Greek form. Which, for its part, appears to be an archaic residue, now incomprehensible to the Greeks themselves (see here), as handed down the names of the gods.

About archeology, according to a website dedicated to games, the first nut cubic identified dates from the late fifth millennium BC in Syria, which should not be connected with Indo-European civilization. Sergent, who has published the text in 1995, tells us that the earliest dice in the world amounted to Altyn Tepe, Turkmenistan, towards the end of the fourth millennium, but I have not found confirmation of this information. Looking into the network (see here ), the most widespread notion seems to be that Shahr-i-Sokhta, in southeastern Iran (Seistan) and the site of the discovery of the earliest dice, attributed to 3000 BC (but this does not seem to have precise references) and cubic (see here ). At the same site, they found dice with rectangular pieces and chessboard, in a tomb of the period III (2500-2300 BC), as reported in the book Vidale, already mentioned in another post ,  on the east of Sumer , pp.94- 95.

 Even in the Harappan sites are located in both cubic dice (such as those in the picture above) and rectangular with sides numbered 4, and the rectangular type also appears to Gonur Depe in Margiana (see here ), in the period Namazga V (2500-2000 BC ), where they are considered as imports from the Indus civilization. It's interesting that the Harappan cubical dice have two variants (as reported in this book ): some have, unlike our, 6 opposed to 5, and 1, as can be seen also in the picture, but another one of those Harappa has the numbering as modern ones, and (in part) greek-Roman. 
A Swedish study also shows the frequency of these items: a discovery out of ten at Mohenjo-daro is linked to games, and with a spatial distribution that suggests places dedicated, those who were called in India historic Sabhā . 

So it seems that the area between Turkmenistan, Seistan and India, we have plenty of dice in very old age, which may agree with the importance given to this game from the Indo-Europeans, known as Sergent. He also notes that in Scotland the dice were found in levels of the Bronze Age, and independently of influence from Greek or Roman. According to another French scholar,Thierry Depaulis ,oblong nuts are located at Indians, Celts and Germans, at least the Greeks and Romans. Where have inherited Celts and the Germans this game? Perhaps Central Asia itself, from which they came originally? These details, especially if you enter into an ideology shared, as shown Sergent, can reveal stories of far-reaching. The game is still on ... 

yog

Spoked wheels to the Indo-Iranian borders in the third millennium BC

In Rome, not far from Termini Station there is a beautiful museum, the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale 'Giuseppe Tucci' ( http://museorientale.beniculturali.it/ ) that houses, among other things, a large collection of objects Archaeological excavations at Shahr-i Sokhta , the 'Burnt City', an important site in eastern Iran on the Helmand River, on the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, discovered by Maurizio Tosi and dating back to the Bronze Age (from 3200 BC). I had already mentioned about the nuts particularly ancient discovered there, and here I show an image of a dice with pieces that I was able to photograph in the museum:

I:

But the object that struck me most in the collection (not for the aesthetic value) you can see in this display case.

To the right, there is a wheel with spokes, not precisely dated, but certainly earlier than 2200 BC, and previous to the famous spoked wheels of Sintashta , and probably contemporary with the similar toy wheels with spokes of the Harappan civilization have already been discussed in a previous post . This fact, which seems to escape the knowledge disseminated in this regard (see eg.  here  and the bookof Anthony), may be further evidence that the spoked wheels were invented between India and Iran in the third millennium BC, and then exported to Sintashta and other areas of Eurasia at the turn of the third and second millennium BC

And then, the supposed arrival of the Aryans with their chariots and horses from the Eurasian steppes to India and Iran would prove not only once more a myth, but a reversal of history (of similar reversals, and Sintashta like receptor pulse from Central Asia South Asia, if not actual colony Bactrian Bronze Age, see the last post in New Indology).

Also note the zebu left: animals of South Asian descent, already domesticated in the Neolithic Mehrgarh, spread in Central Asia at least at that time, reaching Azerbaijan, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and perhaps the Ukraine ( see this other post of New Indology).

yog
Edited on 05.08.2013