The Coming of the Greekslower Indus Valley (the one ancient army known to have trav-
eled this route was Alexander's, which barely made it
through). 6 ' However, if the Aryans started on their journey
from Armenia, an infinitely easier route for them to have taken
to the Indus Delta would have been through Mesopotamia to
the Persian Gulf, and then through the gulf to the Indian
Ocean. The sea route through the gulf and along the coast of
the Indian Ocean had been used, in the early second millen-
nium, by Mesopotamian merchants in their occasional traffic
with the cities of India. 62
Linguistic evidence in fact suggests rather strongly that the
Aryans who came to India came by way of Mesopotamia. One
must note, first of all, Kammenhuber's conclusions about the
Aryan glosses in the Kikkuli text: the words came from a de-
velopmental stage of Aryan earlier than the bifurcation of In-
dian and Iranian, and they came from the dialect ancestral to
Sanskrit (rather than the Proto-Avestan dialect). Now, if the
language of the Aryan speakers of Mitanni was ancestral to the
language of the conquerors of northwest India, it is difficult to
escape the conclusion that the Aryan speakers who went to In-
dia went by way of Mesopotamia. Also relevant here are con-
clusions reached by a distinguished linguist and Indo-Europe-
anist, Oswald Szemerenyi. Noting that there now is general
agreement among Indo-Europeanists that Proto-Indo-Euro-
pean phonology was built on a five-vowel system, Szemerenyi
investigated the exceptions to that rule, and specifically the
- Fairservis, The Roots of Ancient India, 352-77, presents the ar-
chaeological evidence that might conceivably be relevant to the two hy-
potheses. Cf. the caution of A. B. Keith, Cambridge History of India, i: 78-
79: "It is easy to frame and support by plausible evidence various hy-
potheses, to which the only effective objection is that other hypotheses are
equally legitimate, and that the facts are too imperfect to allow of conclu-
sions being drawn. It is, however, certain that the Rigveda offers no assist-
ance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Indians entered India." - A. L. Oppenheim, "Seafaring Merchants of \Jr,"JAOS 74
(1954): 6-17.