using indic texts to reconstruct indo-european

8/9/2019 Using Indic Texts to Reconstruct Indo-European

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Using Indic Texts to Reconstruct Indo-European Cultures: Issues and

Methodologies

Introduction

This is the first in a planned series of articles aimed at a general audience with scholarly

interests about issues in Indo-European (IE) studies. Because my specialty is the South Asian

branch of the IE language family many of the articles will be from that perspecti!e although

some of the articles will li"ely focus on other groups. As a result much of the material may be of

interest to those with a purely Indic or South Asian perspecti!e as well.

This article in particular introduces the difficulties in reconstructing Indo-European

cultures using the e#tant documents. It suggests that Indic te#ts might pro!ide !aluable cross-

cultural insights due both to the si$e of the corpus and the long time period that it has e#isted.

The article then in!estigates select methodological concerns using Indic te#ts as e#amples.

Tools for %econstructing Indo-European &ultures

'ne of the difficulties in reconstructing Indo-European (IE) cultures is the scarcity of

data. Although the roto-Indo-Europeans (IE) are considered to ha!e started di!erginganywhere from the th millennium B&E (%enfrew) to the *th millennium B&E (+imbutas) the

earliest significant te#tual e!idence is not found until around the ,th century B&E and much of

this is unclear in meaning.,/ 0ost importantly many of the important members of the languagefamily are attested only from a much later date for e#ample &eltic +ermanic Baltic and Sla!ic

only appear well o!er 1222 years later.

In addition some of these late te#ts which ostensibly reflect preliterate Eurasian society

were recorded under the influence of &hristian missionaries. As the history of &hristian polemicshas shown many writers did not accurately represent the teachings of e!en their fellow

&hristians with whom they disagreed (Ehrman) much less their pagan forebears (3o#). E!en in

Ireland and 4ales where the recorders of the te#ts were more sympathetic than in many other places in &hristendom there is e!idence of priestly editing. Ta"e for e#ample the Irish Book of Invasions or Lebor Gabála Érenn which purports to tell the !ery early history and mythology

of the pre-&hristian Irish. It begins not with the druidic cosmology but with the 5udeo-&hristian&reation Story the 3all of 0an the 3lood etc. Similarly the 4elsh Mabinogion includes as one

of its characters an archbishop who would presumably ha!e been an archdruid in the original

telling.

https://sites.google.com/site/indoeuropean3102/home/using-indic-texts#_edn1





Are there any other tools that might help us better understand these important pre-

&hristian Indo-European cultures6 'ne important tool is archaeology7 another is linguistics. But

as Indologist 0ichael 4it$el points out8 9pots don:t spea".9 (The Home of the Aryans ) Andwe might add8 synta# doesn:t sing the blues. There is a limited amount of information albeit

important that we can glean from these sources about the li!es and beliefs of the IE people. 1/ Archaeology ;uite often cannot e!en identify which language was spo"en – that has to come

from a comparison with other e!idence7 and a linguistic analysis alone rarely ma"es the hopes

fears and lo!es of the spea"ers come ali!e. Better at this is comparati!e mythology which was pioneered by +eorges <um=$il and who was followed by such scholars as 5aan uh!el and

populari$ed by 5oseph &ampbell. But as we ha!e seen !ery little of the mythology has been

preser!ed and almost none of it in an unedited form.

There is yet another field related to comparati!e mythology which we might callcomparati!e te#tual studies or perhaps comparati!e te#tual anthropology (Tatlow). It in!ol!es

studying the te#ts of different groups Indo-Europeans in order to try and fill in some of the gaps.

It is widely "nown especially through the wor" of <um=$il uh!el and others that the Indo-Europeans show not >ust remar"able linguistic similarities. They share significant cultural

similarities as well especially gi!en the !ery long separations in both time and distance from

neolithic India to early medie!al Ireland for e#ample.

'f course as has been pointed out in criti;ues of <um=$il and his followers (almer ,2-,?7 Thapar 7 Brough7 @ittleton/) we must be careful to distinguish between what was truly

Indo-European and what is simply parallel de!elopment that is to be e#pected by any culture

with a similar le!el of material culture in this case the eolithic and Early Iron Ages. Cet e!endata from non-IE cultures with similar le!els of cultural de!elopment may gi!e insight into IE

cultural processes.

Abo!e all one branch of Indo-European literature shows great promise in allowing us to

reconstruct Indo-European culture8 the Indic*/ te#ts of South Asia which are members of theIndo-Aryan (IA) subgroup which are in turn part of the larger Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-

European family. These te#ts are among the !ery earliest among the Indo-European corpus if

the words :te#t: and :literature: are the proper terms for what was an oral tradition for much of itshistory ('ng). The %ig Deda had a long history of composition and dates from ,22 B&E at the

earliest to as late as ,222 B&E and it is claimed that parts of it are e!en older (5amison and

4it$el ? fn. )F/ dating bac" to the Indo-Aryan so>ourn in &entral Asia before they entered

South Asia.?/

4hat is remar"able about the Indo-Aryan material is not only its anti;uity but howe#tensi!e and relati!ely complete it is. 4hile hardly encyclopedic compared to other IE groups

it portrays a multifaceted picture of the society at the time – as long as one was a male belonging

to the upper classes. The longest te#t is the Mahabharata which contains o!er ,22222 coupletsor appro#imately ,2 !olumes ma"ing it about ten times longer than the Gomeric Iliad and

Odyssey combined. 'ne web page (+%ETI@) lists o!er ,222 online documents in the ancient

Indo-Aryan corpus / with a wide range of dates many of them older than the Gomeric +ree"
















material and almost all of them older than the e#tant +ermanic myths.

&entral to this approach is the continuity of the Indo-Aryans (5amison and 4it$el fn.

*7 +onda Change and Continity in Indian !eligion). 0odern orth Indians still spea" IA

languages so we find an unbro"en tradition of three to four millennia. There is a clear andgradual transition well-documented in both the te#ts and archaeological record (Singh7

<oniger) stretching from Dedic times perhaps beginning around ,22-,F22 B&E to the Gindu

period which might be said to begin around F22 B&E (5amison and 4it$el 1) and on into themodern age. There was of course significant di!ersity in South Asian thought and many

heterodo# groups arose including Buddhists and 5ains but the core Indic pattern continued

unbro"en. E!en many of the di!ergent tendencies remained well within a recogni$ably Indo-Aryan pattern.

0ethodological Issues

There are certain issues in te#tual studies that need to be mentioned. 0any of these will

be applicable to all of the IE cultures whereas others might be specific to the Indo-Aryans.Some of these re;uire an essay of their own to do them >ustice and will be treated in greater

depth in future publications.

3irst of all because of the large separation in time and distance between these cultures

the correspondences will not be e#act. <iscrimination must be used. At the same time a certainsymbolic sensiti!ity must be shown. <iscrimination can pre!ent ma"ing sloppy identifications

between cultures where no true connection e#isted. Symbolic sensiti!ity howe!er such as that

shown by scholars li"e uh!el allows us to tease out !alid connections that may not be ob!ious by >ust a surface reading.

Secondly these te#ts are incomplete in many ways so they do not gi!e an e#act picture

of their societies (+onda Change and Continity in Indian !eligion ,-122 12? *). Starting

with the %ig Deda it must be borne in mind that most of these are priestly te#ts (Thapar 1). Inaddition they were preser!ed orally for many centuries before being written down. There would

ha!e been other traditions that were not preser!ed because they were not deemed crucial by the

Brahmin intelligentsia (%ocher7 Hane7 +onda History of "edi# Literatre $%amhitas and Brahmanas&' +onda The !ital %tras&( Tradition states that there were 1, main !ersions of the

%ig Deda (<eussen)./ 'nly one and part of another ha!e been preser!ed. 4e ha!e e!idence

that there were !ariations now since lost e!en within the one !ersion that remains (+onda The !ital %tras F?). There were said to be hundreds of branches of Sama Deda but only twosur!i!e (+onda History of "edi# Literatre $%amhitas and Brahmanas& , , 1, 11).

The documents that still sur!i!e reflect primarily the concerns of higher class males – the

"ings and priests who were tas"ed with running society. As we ha!e seen a !ery large

percentage of e!en the brahminical te#ts ha!e been lost or destroyed so there may ha!e been

many important alternati!e priestly"ingly teachings that were not preser!ed. 'ther groups such





as women ascetics the trading and laboring classes etc. are hardly mentioned at all. In fact one

might say the the history of Indic literature is in part a record of increased recognition of the

other parts of society. To illustrate some of these points we:ll loo" at two e#amples8 ascetics andwomen.

The %ig Deda contains ,21 hymns ma"ing it about as long as the Bible. But it mentions

ascetics only in passing e.g. %ig Deda ,.,F.? ,2.1. ,2.,1.*-F and especially ,2.,?

de!oted to the Heshins. They probably li!ed on the fringes of society in the forests andmountains but they were held in awe e!en at this early date. These mnis (silent sages) already

show some of the signs by which they are still recogni$able today8 their transcendental wisdom

(,2.,1.*) celibacy (,2.,1.F) and long matted loc"s7 they may ha!e been na"ed (v) * tara+an)h , &or worn ocher or yellow ( -i+á g)&ṅ clothes and reputedly had supernatural powers li"e the

ability to fly through the air (,2.,?). By the time of the Jpanishads they ha!e often become the

main characters.

Similarly with women8 needless to say in %ig Dedic times we would ha!e found manywomen – all of those Dedic seers must ha!e come from somewhere. But that is not e!ident if one

>udges only by how often they were mentioned. 4hen we reach the period of the Jpanishads afew women sages are described./ In the later %amayana the heroine Sita albeit sub>ected to

the cultural limitations of women during the period when the te#t was compiled is also a

goddess-incarnate who can be !iewed as pulling the strings to ma"e e!eryone else dance to hertune (<oniger 11). By the medie!al period you ha!e uranic te#ts that declare the goddess to

be the supreme power o!er all the gods (Di>nanananda7 <oniger ,).Thus there is o!er time

the emergence or perhaps more accurately the recognition of women as students and teachers of the Dedas warriors,2/ and e!en sages. They had been there all along (Hlostermaier ,,ff.7

'li!elle ,* ,7 Hane 1-?). 4e will see woman sages and warrior ;ueens again when we

turn to the Irish and 4elsh material e#cept in this case it is the &elts who ha!e preser!ed whatmay ha!e been the original freer status of women among the Indo-Europeans. The contributions

from cross-te#tual studies do not always go in only one direction.

In fact one is led to wonder if women may not been e!en more widely represented in the

Indo-Aryan teachings of the early oral period perhaps ha!ing their own schools of thought. Thisis hinted at in the section of the !amayana when Sita studies with Anasuya the wife of the sage

Atri. Anasuya was a miracle-wor"ing sage in her own right.,,/ Ironically we see an increasing

mention of women in the te#ts around the same time as their social rights appear to be

decreasing (<oniger 11-2). The e!idence suggests that it was only later in post-Dedic timesthat women:s freedoms began to be se!erely curtailed (<oniger 2F). This process became e!en

more e#treme during the periods of 0uslim and &hristian in!asions.

The early to middle Gindu period was mar"ed by a conser!ati!e reaction. This wasreflected in some of the shastra te#ts,1/ and would ha!e corresponded roughly to the time when

writing became increasingly common. As a result these female-oriented teachings were not

recorded in writing and thus lost. This may ha!e been true for lower classes and Aryan

heterodo#ies as well.












The transition from an oral to a literate tradition can ha!e dramatic repercussions ('ng).

The attested date of a te#t generally refers to its final compilation. 0any of these te#ts were not

simple compositions howe!er. Studies of oral traditions pioneered by arry and @ordoriginally on the +ree" Gomeric material ha!e shown that the final !ersions are often the wor"

of many people adding to and amending the story. Sometimes especially with regard to te#ts ofgreat anti;uity this process went on for centuries. It is recogni$ed for e#ample that parts of theAthar!a Deda are actually older than parts of the %ig Deda (0ichaels F?) although the %ig Deda

is generally dated ;uite a bit earlier.

Thus te#ts cannot accurately be spo"en of as ha!ing a specific date8 they are

multilayered documents and scholars wor" diligently to tease out the different chronologicallayers in what may mista"enly appear at first glance to be a unified wor" (Gegarty).

'ne result of this is that e!en mainstream scholars often conflate i.e. mista"enly

combine genre with chronology (Goc" Chronology or Genre.). Bloomfield obser!ed that the

difference between the hieratic and the popular hymns is not necessarily one of date but also ore!en largely one of dialect style or sub>ect matter and we may add of origin i.e. the concerns

of a particular social or religious group. Ignoring the layered nature of te#ts to focus on the

whole may be fine if our concern is dating the final redaction of te#ts or their impact on societyin the periods after the te#ts were finally compiled. But in many cases we are more interested in

the "nowledge contained within the te#ts across all periods of their de!elopment and what they

tell us about those societies rather than >ust their final date. As +onda (Change and Continityin Indian !eligion F2) obser!es8 9'ne should not mista"e the date of the codification for theage of ritual practices themsel!es.9

The %ig Deda for e#ample contains hymns that may ha!e been collected and organi$ed

with ritual in mind (5amison and 4it$el 2ff.) – the Sama and Ca>ur Dedas carry this e!enfarther. But the use of the %ig Dedic hymns in rituals implies ritual practice largely discussed in

the Brahmana te#ts which are assigned a later date and the Shrauta Sutras which are later still(5amison and 4it$el F). It also implies a metaphysical understanding of the purpose of ritual

which is recorded in the Brahmanas and elaborated in the e!en later Jpanishads (5amison and

4it$el F7 Goc" An /arly 0-anis ,adi# !eader ). There are in fact Jpanishad-li"e speculationsin the %ig Deda itself (e.g. ,2.17 ,2.2).

All of this would ha!e been imbedded in a mythological world!iew (5amison and 4it$el

F1-?1). The %ig Deda shows e!idence of a well-de!eloped mythology although many of those

myths are referred to only in passing in the %ig Deda implying that the people of that time were

well aware of them and only needed a brief mention to understand the conte#t. Cet themythology was only systematically collected more than a millennium after the %ig Deda in te#ts

li"e the !amayana' Mahabharata and the 1ranas (<oniger 1,1 2). By this time they hadcertainly changed significantly although not enough to ma"e them unrecogni$able. This issue

has been widely recogni$ed (arpola F ,,7 4internit$ ,8 * ff.7 arpola “The -re2"edi# Indian Ba#kgrond of the %rata !itals” “ Inter-reting the Inds %#ri-t ”7 +onda History of"edi# Literatre $%amhitas and Brahmanas& ,F8,,*-,112 12?-1, F * ,

*2) The !ital %tras7 %ocher -) but there is a need for further wor" to better understand



these early influences.

Thus when attempting to spea" of the "nowledge of a particular area it is not entirely

accurate to spea" of a Brahmana period or an Jpanishadic period because e!en at the earliest

dates there would ha!e been oral traditions of proto-Brahmanas proto-Jpanishads and roto-uranas that dealt with ritual practice metaphysics and mythology respecti!ely.

4hile it might be ob>ected that the Indo-Aryan te#ts e!ince numerous e#amples of

modification through interaction with non-IE cultures which they do (<eshpande Genesis of !gvedi# !etrofle3ion4 "edi# Aryans' non2"edi# Aryans' and non2Aryans7 4it$el Ato#hthonos Aryans.& the same can be said of all of the IE material (Goc" and 5oseph F-?*). So that

argument does not in and of itself in!alidate the method. If we were to apply that criterion then

we could use none of the Indo-European corpusK 4hat is remar"able is that the Indo-Aryansha!e preser!ed e!idence of this change as it occurred from a !ery early date all the way up to

modern times (Goc" and 5oseph ?2-?,). In contrast many of the other IE groups show only the

relati!ely late final product of that long e!olution. So by !iewing the Indo-Aryan e!olution bothon the le!el of content and of structure,/ we may be able to better understand parallel

processes that occurred in other places across the Indo-European world and in other language

families as well.

In addition the remar"able similarities between some of the later Indo-Aryan materialand that of the other Indo-Europeans suggest that there may ha!e been ;uite a bit of information

from the roto- or Early Indo-European periods that was transferred among the different groups

of Indo-Europeans which is not directly reflected in the earliest attested te#tual e!idence.

In future articles we will e#amine the chronological e!idence for the earliest dates of the

!arious stages of de!elopment in the Indo-Aryan branch and compare them to the ma>orsubgroups of the larger Indo-European language family.

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http8www.people.fas.har!ard.eduOwit$elAryanGome.pdf.

4it$el 0ichael. 0ay 122,. Autochthonous Aryans6 The E!idence from 'ld Indian and Iranian

Te#ts.” Electronic 5ournal of Dedic Studies . ,-,,. rint.

http8www.people.fas.har!ard.eduOwit$elE5DS--.htm

[1] '!er 1F222 tablets were disco!ered in the 12th century at Boga$"oy. Bee"es (1,) says8 The

script is a form of the Babylonian-Assyrian cuneiform. This causes many difficulties since it is asyllabic scriptU. it is not always clear what is intended.V

[2] 0allory is an e#cellent o!er!iew of the e!idence from all of these fields although I don:t

agree with some of his conclusions.

[3] @ittleton while critical of some of <um=$ilWs wor" ultimately defended his approach

holding that o!erall it was still !alid.

[4] It is still common for scholars of ancient South Asia i.e. Indologists to continue to use the

words IndiaV and IndicV to refer to the larger historical and cultural group although in this

post-colonial era the term refers geographically to the modern states of India a"istanBangladesh epal and parts of Afghanistan Burma and Tibet.

[5] Goc" ( An /arly 0-anis ,adi# !eader 1) dates the %ig Deda at 1222-,222 B&E.

https://sites.google.com/site/indoeuropean3102/home/using-indic-texts#_ednref1












[6] There are also what we might call Gindu eo-traditionalists (e.g. Talageri7 Agarwal7

3euerstein Ha" and 3rawley) and a few 4estern scholars li"e Elst who suggest that the Dedas

and perhaps materials from other Indo-European groups are not only much older but perhapsoriginated in India. They claim they may date from the re-Garappan period. This debate can

become ;uite heated at times. Two particularly balanced and in-depth discussions of thee!idence are Bryant and Bryant and atton.

[7] http8gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.degretil.htm +%ETI@ lists about ,22 Sans"rit documentsalthough the actual number of te#ts is slightly smaller because some of the te#ts are bro"en up

into more than one document. There are also se!eral hundred te#ts in later Indian languages

many of which are rele!ant to IE studies.

[8] <eussen (1) refers to the tradition that there were 1, schools of %g!eda ,222 of theSama!eda ,2 of the Ca>ur!eda and F2 of the Athar!a!eda.

[9] otably the Brihad Aranyaka 0-anishad 1.* on 0aitreyi and .? and . on +argi.

[10] Dispala may be the first recorded warrior ;ueen in the world (%ig Deda ,.,,1,.,,?-,,

,2..) This is based on the medie!al commentator Sayana (died ,) and translator +riffith7also Hlostermaier ,,ff. Translator +eldner (,F1-,1) interprets the name as referring to a

horse.

[11] !amayana Boo" 1 (Ayodhya Handa) sections (Sargas) ,,?-,,.

[12] A future article will ha!e further discussion of these te#ts.

[13] (Goc" :1hilology and the Histori#al Inter-retation of the "edi# Te3ts; 2) points out thatsome might ;uestion the !alidity of using the Dedic te#ts in a historical conte#t because they are

said to be a-arsheya or uncreated by humans and thus beyond time. It should be pointed

out howe!er that from early times there has been the concept of at least three !alid le!els ofinterpretation8 adhyatma' adhidaiva' and adhibhata<adhiya=na (Goldrege F1-F). The

modern teacher 0aharishi 0ahesh Cogi has gi!en the concepts renewed emphasis although he

called them respecti!ely rishi' devata and #handas (0aharishi ,F). In addition a three-fold

understanding of the uni!erse although perhaps not this e#act interpreti!e schema is found asearly as the hymns of the %ig Deda. Thus while the concept of a-arsheya is applicable from

the adhyatma perspecti!e that does not in!alidate the more mundane adhibhata le!el of

interpretation e!en for traditionalists.

















using indic texts to reconstruct indo-european

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