The Neolithic Hypothesis

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>to explain the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (instead of Iranians,
>or some other Indo-Iranian group)

-- well, on the Iranian Plateau, actually.  The Hurrians extended that far.
It's unclear exactly what was involved in the founding of the Mitannian
kingdom and how an Indo-Aryan element came to be involved.

My own guess would be, judging by what little evidence there is, that the
Indo-Aryans started out as the southernmost of the proto-Indo-Iranian group.

They moved south through Central Asia into what's now northern Iran first.
Most of them went southeast, into Afghanistan and then the Punjab.  A
scattering went southwest, established themselves as overlords of some
Hurrian-speaking groups in what's now Kurdistan (bringing chariot technology
with them) and then were absorbed linguistically, leaving traces in
specialized vocabulary, personal names of the elite, and some religious
terminology. (Eg., Indra and Mithra, etc.)

The Hurrians in question were then instrumental in founding Mitanni in
northern Syria after the collapse of the Ur III empire.  There were already
Hurrians there, of course.

This took place sometime between 1800 and 1600 BCE.  Some time after that the
Iranians proper moved into Iran, starting in the northeast and arriving in
the western Iranian plateau sometime around 1000 BCE or a little later, where
the Assyrians first encountered the Medes.  This migration was more
substantial, and succeeded in Indo-Europeanizing the area linguistically,
slowly supplanting the previous (Elamite, Kassite, Hurrian) languages.

The process was incomplete in historic times -- eg., early Achaemenid
documents show that Elamite was still spoken widely in southern Iran.

This, I think, is a parsimonious explanation of what happened.