EARLY CIVILISATIONS OF THE NORTHWESTend in northwest India around the sixteenth or fifteenth century BC.
However this ‘absorbed’ population may have become the upholder of an
Indo-Aryan cultural synthesis, combining Indo-Harappan (and therefore
perhaps also Dravidian) elements with their Central Asian Aryan heritage.
It is quite likely that this population was responsible for the continuity of
certain traits of Harappan civilisation like the worship of animals and trees
which changed and enriched the Vedic culture during the subsequent two
millennia.
However, the first clearly documented historical evidence of these Vedic
Aryans comes neither from Central Asia nor from India but from upper
Mesopotamia and Anatolia. About 1380 BC a Mitanni king concluded a
treaty with the Hittite ruler Suppiluliuma I in which the Vedic gods Mitra,
Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas were invoked. Moreover, among the
tablets which were excavated at Boghazköy, the Hittite capital, a manual
about horse training was found which contains a large number of pure
Sanskrit words. There can be no doubt about the very direct cultural and
linguistic relationship of the ruling elite of the Mitanni kingdom with the
Vedic Aryans in India. But this does not necessarily mean that these ‘West
Asian Vedic Aryans’ originated from India. It is more likely that Vedic
tribes started more or less simultaneously separate migrations from their
mutual homelands in southern Central Asia to India and West Asia. As in
the case of the Vedic Aryans in India, their ‘brothers’ in West Asia, too,
appear to have had some earlier Aryan predecessors. In the early sixteenth
century BC, the names of the Kassite rulers of Babylon may have been of
Aryan origin, but they show no link with Sanskrit, the language of Vedic
Aryans.
The arrival of several groups of a new population in South Asia which
were speakers of Indo-European languages therefore can be dated quite
safely in the first half of the second millennium around 2000 to 1400 BC.
The terminal points in time of these movements were, on the one hand, the
‘intrusive traits’ in Late Harappan strata which indicate a close
relationship with the Central Asian and Iranian Bronze Age culture of the
Namazga V period and, on the other hand, the Rigveda as the oldest Vedic
text in India which clearly reveals a semi-nomadic ‘post-urban’ civilisation.
Linguistically and culturally the Rigveda is directly linked with the
fourteenth-century evidence from West Asia. But due to a few references to
iron, the latest portions of the Rigveda cannot be much older than the
eleventh century BC when iron was in use in South Asia.
The general chronological framework of these migrations has thus been
considerably extended in the course of the last decades. But a large number
of questions still remain unsettled. This is particularly true with regard to
the cultural and historical background of the migration of the Vedic
Aryans. Their early hymns do not contain any reference to toponyms of
Central Asia or Iran while they do mention some names of rivers in eastern