The Neolithic Hypothesis

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>The only firm datum is the numeral <aika> "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. aeva-).
>For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of Indo-Iranian, which
>happened to have *aika- for "1", just like Indo-Aryan. >>

-- yeah, since the Hurrians must have picked up that vocabulary before around
the early-to-mid-2nd-millenium, when the Mitannian kingdom was founded, it
would be interesting to see how a form of Indo-Aryan that archaic looked.
Eg., presumably it wouldn't have the layer of Dravidian loan-words that Vedic
Aryan has.

The capital of Mitanni has never been excavated -- perhaps it will be fairly
soon (it was in what's now northeastern Syria).  All our Mitannian documents
come from the fringe areas of the kingdom, or international correspondence.
The actual archives of the Mitannian kings would be a treasure-trove.

Of course, they might not have written much if anything in the ancestral IE
language, since it's pretty obvious that the Indo-Aryan element was quickly
assimilated by the Hurrian. (Eg., the Mitannian kings seem to have had
Hurrian personal names and to have adopted Indo-Aryan ones as "throne names"
when they succeeded to the office.)

It would be nice to find out exactly how the Hurrians acquired this IE
superstrata, too; the Kassites, another people from the Iranian plateau, show
some indications of doing so as well.

How quickly one archaeological discovery can change things.  Many works
published in the 80's and 90's strongly deny that the chariot was introduced
into the Middle East by IE speakers, arguing instead that it was invented in
the Middle East in the 2nd millenium BCE.  Now we know it was present in the
Eurasian steppe no later than the 21st century BCE, and the IE-introduction
theory looks better than ever.