The Coming of the Greekstablets from fifteenth-century Nuzi indicate that there "most
of the Indo-Aryans... are close relatives of persons with Hur-
rian names"). 26 The Aryan speakers of Mitanni were never
more than a minute minority and were soon completely Hur-
rianized. Even when the Great Kingdom was established, per-
haps ca. 1550 B.C., Aryan speakers may have numbered no
more than 2 percent or 3 percent of the population of Mitanni,
and by the fourteenth century Aryan was no longer a spoken
language in Mitanni. 27
Finally, we must also include in this list of takeovers—all of
which occurred in the middle centuries of the second millen-
nium—the Aryan conquest of northwest India. This conquest
has been strangely ignored in debates about the time of the
Indo-European dispersal, probably because its evidently late
date is incompatible with the general opinion that the dispersal
occurred no later than the third millennium. For orientalists,
there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Aryan takeover of
northwest India was related, somehow, to the appearance of
Aryans in Mitanni and the Levant. But this takeover, which
had probably occurred by ca. 1500 B.C., seems to have resem-
bled the others only in its objectives and not in the way in
which it was carried out. Even though its relationship to the
end of the Indus Valley civilization remains unclear, the Aryan
takeover of northwest India must have been far more violent
and destructive than the other takeovers reviewed here, and
must have been effected by a force far larger than those that
took over states in the Fertile Crescent. 28 The Aryan invaders
- Ibid., 65.
- O'Callaghan (ibid., 53) analyzes the prosopography of Nuzi, on
the eastern fringe of Mitanni: of 2,989 names mentioned in the Nuzi tab-
lets, some 1,500 are Hurrian, 631 are Akkadian, 53 are Kassite, only 27
are Indo-European, and 23 are Sumerian (the remainder cannot be classi-
fied). - For the date (rather precariously based on the Mitanni evidence,
a variety of conjectures from and about the Rigveda, and Indian archaeol-
ogy), see W. A. Fairservis, Jr., The Roots of Ancient India (New York: Mac-
62