I somehow missed this when it was published. I grew up in a Hindu family in India, and I too have been reading about how India was peopled. Matt gets most of the column right (there is no proof that people from NW India went westwards to people West Asia and Europe. But what most likely happened is Indo-Aryans clashed with the people of the IVC (Indus Valley Civilization). Rigveda describes several of these battles.
For example, there is a mention of an antagonist named Krishna, who lived with 10,000 troops near the river Ansumati (often identified as the Yamuna). In Rigveda 8.96.13-17, Indra defeats this Krishna. Some scholars suggest this represents a historical conflict between Vedic people and local tribes (Aryas fighting Dasyus). But after these wars, peace was reached between the people - which is most likely why Krishna became a god, an avatar of Lord Vishnu, in Hinduism. Dasyus became Shudras (lower varna), but many of the elite Dasyus would have been invited into two new elite varnas, Brahmins (priests) and Kshatriyas (Ruling class); Aryas became the Vysyas (varna). Even the Lord Shiva is said to be an IVC god (google "Proto-Shiva" or Pashupati seal, a famous c. 2500 BCE Indus Valley artifact found at Mohenjo-daro, portraying a seated, horned figure interpreted as an early form of Shiva).
Another war mentioned in the Rigveda is the Dāśarājñá Yudha (Battle of Ten kings), said to have taken place before 1400 BC. The battle with Krishna occurred much earlier but we don't know when. When Indian Hindu nationalist assert their out-of-India theory, the Battle of Ten Kings is what they have in mind; the losers of battle moved westwards populating West Asia and Europe. This is plausible, but we don't have any evidence. Iran was populated by the same Indo Aryans who who went to India. So these kings who lost the Battle of ten kings could have gone to Iran, or could have gone to other nations in southern Europe, but no proof exists of that having happened.
Matt is right that Hindu nationalists find the Aryan invasion theory problematic because they fear the lower castes will blame the upper caste Hindus for creating the caste system. But, as we have discovered, caste system came from the IVC, and was not brought by the Aryans. Because had they had, they would have taken that system to Iran, and to Europe, but no one else has the caste (varna) system. Most likely the Aryans assimilated into the existing varna system, probably securing themselves a higher status by creating two new varnas: brahmins and Kshatriyas.
Overall, yes there were conflicts between the Indo Aryans and the IVC folks, which would have been natural between tribes of those time, but eventually they assimilated into one civilization. Aryan invasion is too strong a expression to explain what happened.
1. Modern scholarship does not necessarily support the (older) notion that the Dasas referred to in the Rig Veda, who it mentions as having been defeated/conquered by the Aryas ("Aryan" is a European word), are synonymous with southern Dravidian-language-speaking Indians. Instead, it's been postulated that "Dasa" is cognate with "Dahae", one of several Proto-Iranian tribes in Central/South Asia who likely overlapped with the Aryas' territory and had conflicts with them.
(If you are getting your historical genetics information from Razib Khan, note that he has suggested this too (don't have the links handy though).)
2. Regarding the politics, something you touch on but gloss over (and, to be fair, you are perhaps not too aware of) is the impact of the steppe theory (at least the way it is framed) on contemporary relations between northern and southern Indians.
First, the terms used for the two constituent genomes (Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian) are quite unfortunate. Presently there is no one living in India who has anywhere near 100% ANI or 100% ASI. Everybody has some substantial proportion of each. The averages vary across the country, but not by too much really. Southern Indians are as much (if not more) Hindu than northern Indians are today. Yet, this terminology can create the unfortunate impression that north Indians are the descendants of invaders from the steppe, while southern Indians were descendants of the conquered who had the Hindu traditions imposed on them.
The actual reality is that both north and south are mix of both invaders and aborigines, and that the Hindu traditions spread southward gradually by means of absorption and conquest. Today, the southern states are more prosperous than the north, and speak languages distinct from Hindi. These facts combined with unfortunate interpretations of the steppe theory may (and does) produce a lot of discord in India.
The goal of Hindu nationalists is to nip such discord in the bud, because they want to create a pan-Indian nationalism rooted in shared geography and history. Hence, they find the steppe theory as currently framed an impediment to that project.
Interesting that the consensus has changed since Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel in the late nineties. He believed in the Steppe origins of PIE, but I thought he was wrong on that point because so many other scholars pushed the Anatolian farmers theory.
good article - but massive gell-mann reading the comments, heh.
and a genuine nervous-laugh realizing how badly folks in the "west" writ large have no idea what 1.4 billion means in terms of just sheer scale of people, opinions, actions. china having a walled off internet has insulated everyone from this.
You are missing out a few invasions of England, the hunter-gatherers were invaded by neolithic farmers, who were invaded (or killed by disease and famine) by the first steppe nomads, who were then invaded by the Celts. The Romans did completely change the language of Southern England, just Romano-British culture, church and language was displaced by Saxons.
It doesn't seem unusual to me to think that leftists would also be cultural imperialists. They have always believed that their values (which largely orginate in Europe) are universal and that local values which conflict with their values should be crushed and swept aside. Look at what Mao did in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
I don't think Matt was saying agressor languages always spread. Or maybe he implied it and I missed it.
But in the case of PIE, it seems like they spread their language by a mix displacing and / or ruling over the people they encountered as they spread. A historically documented parallel might be something like the Spanish in Latin America.
In a similar vein, parts of Asia also tend to subtly champion the "Out of Asia" theory for human beings as a whole, as compared to the generally more accepted "Out of Africa" theory for the spread of our species.
Slow, but definitely not boring! This, to my naive and simplistic mind, highlights the idiocy of nationalism. Take Australia as a counter-example: Anglo-Australians whose families have been there for multiple generations have a good chance of having criminal ancestors. I suspect that few if any are bothered by this. Pride of origin is normal and not to be dismissed, but what matters far more is who you are and what you are accomplishing today.
Matt, perhaps you've already read it, but if you haven't, you must read Edwin Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture which is a serious, sober-minded look at the "Out of India" hypothesis - not just its politics but the actual technical evidence the "indigenous Aryans" theorists from India provide for their claims. I will admit when I first started reading the book, it would be about the *politics* of the "out of India" hypothesis but it turned out to be an unexpectedly technical book that looks in detail at the archaeological and linguistic evidence for both the "steppes" and the "out of India" hypotheses. And Bryant goes out of his way to be sober and fair-minded and not just dismissing it as political. One of the things I realized after reading it (it took me multiple starts to finish and I only finished it a few months ago because it was so damned technical) is how fragile the evidence is for the stories that we hang on to pre-history. Bryant shows, I think, that even if the "out of India" hypothesis cannot really be squared with the linguistic evidence, the "steppes" hypothesis is also built out of pretty thin archaeological evidence.
One thing though that's not in the book (it was published in the 2000s) is genetic evidence. I emailed Bryant a fan letter and asked him if he was going to update the book with genetic evidence and he replied that he'd moved on: the issue was just too politicized!
Which brings me to the politics. I think the Aryan migration story is somewhat controversial in India is not just because it fed into the theories of race science that Europeans were building through the 18th and 19th centuries. But the bigger reason is that social movements *in India* took it up as well. In my home state of Maharashtra, the 19th century social reformer Jyotiba Phule used the Aryan invasion hypothesis as justification for his critique of the caste system: Phule argued that the Brahmins were descendants of the Aryan invaders who had conquered the indigenous people and instituted the caste system to keep them subjugated. Of course, Phule inverted the European value system; he argued that the Aryans were actually barbarians and the indigenous people (now the middle and lower castes) were the ones who had a radically equal polity before the barbarians took over. All of which is to say that the Aryan migration theory is not just about how Indians think about Europeans but about how Indians think about each other, about how the messy politics of caste plays out in India.
But that's also why I am a little uncomfortable with how Matt has summarized the genetic research: "the Ancestral North Indians have genetic links to the steppe, and today, you see a higher share of ANI ancestry both in speakers of Indo-European languages and also in members of higher castes. The Ancestral South Indians ancestry is more prevalent with Dravidian speakers and members of lower castes." This literally makes it sound as if the lower castes/Dravidians can trace their ancestry to the "indigenous" people of the sub-continent (4500 years ago!) which is clearly not true (and I'm sure that's not what Matt meant). What we're talking about here is some kind of similarity metric that has been applied to gene sequences. But it's really hard to take the politics out of the technical stuff.
"Meanwhile, the caste system as it exists for the last 175 years is a British administrative project, a rigidity born from rationalism and bureaucracy."
Is that really true? My understanding is that the genetic evidence shows the caste system was quite rigid, at least wrt marriage, for the last 2,000 years. I can believe the British added layers to it, reinvented it in some ways or shaped it to suit their own interests, but when they arrived it seems like it was already firmly in place and quite rigid.
Not your typical column but I really, really enjoyed. No world history in our Memphis school system from the early 70's until 10th or 11th grade. No AP world history but there were a few AP courses back in the Boomer day.
This is really funny. Lots of ethnic groups celebrate the fact that they conquered the country from a weaker, more indigenous population. Hungarian nationalism, for instance, openly states that their ancestors didn't show up until like 1,000 years ago. In the Old Testament, the promised land is conquered, etc.
I somehow missed this when it was published. I grew up in a Hindu family in India, and I too have been reading about how India was peopled. Matt gets most of the column right (there is no proof that people from NW India went westwards to people West Asia and Europe. But what most likely happened is Indo-Aryans clashed with the people of the IVC (Indus Valley Civilization). Rigveda describes several of these battles.
For example, there is a mention of an antagonist named Krishna, who lived with 10,000 troops near the river Ansumati (often identified as the Yamuna). In Rigveda 8.96.13-17, Indra defeats this Krishna. Some scholars suggest this represents a historical conflict between Vedic people and local tribes (Aryas fighting Dasyus). But after these wars, peace was reached between the people - which is most likely why Krishna became a god, an avatar of Lord Vishnu, in Hinduism. Dasyus became Shudras (lower varna), but many of the elite Dasyus would have been invited into two new elite varnas, Brahmins (priests) and Kshatriyas (Ruling class); Aryas became the Vysyas (varna). Even the Lord Shiva is said to be an IVC god (google "Proto-Shiva" or Pashupati seal, a famous c. 2500 BCE Indus Valley artifact found at Mohenjo-daro, portraying a seated, horned figure interpreted as an early form of Shiva).
Another war mentioned in the Rigveda is the Dāśarājñá Yudha (Battle of Ten kings), said to have taken place before 1400 BC. The battle with Krishna occurred much earlier but we don't know when. When Indian Hindu nationalist assert their out-of-India theory, the Battle of Ten Kings is what they have in mind; the losers of battle moved westwards populating West Asia and Europe. This is plausible, but we don't have any evidence. Iran was populated by the same Indo Aryans who who went to India. So these kings who lost the Battle of ten kings could have gone to Iran, or could have gone to other nations in southern Europe, but no proof exists of that having happened.
Matt is right that Hindu nationalists find the Aryan invasion theory problematic because they fear the lower castes will blame the upper caste Hindus for creating the caste system. But, as we have discovered, caste system came from the IVC, and was not brought by the Aryans. Because had they had, they would have taken that system to Iran, and to Europe, but no one else has the caste (varna) system. Most likely the Aryans assimilated into the existing varna system, probably securing themselves a higher status by creating two new varnas: brahmins and Kshatriyas.
Overall, yes there were conflicts between the Indo Aryans and the IVC folks, which would have been natural between tribes of those time, but eventually they assimilated into one civilization. Aryan invasion is too strong a expression to explain what happened.
Matthew, a couple of points:
1. Modern scholarship does not necessarily support the (older) notion that the Dasas referred to in the Rig Veda, who it mentions as having been defeated/conquered by the Aryas ("Aryan" is a European word), are synonymous with southern Dravidian-language-speaking Indians. Instead, it's been postulated that "Dasa" is cognate with "Dahae", one of several Proto-Iranian tribes in Central/South Asia who likely overlapped with the Aryas' territory and had conflicts with them.
(If you are getting your historical genetics information from Razib Khan, note that he has suggested this too (don't have the links handy though).)
2. Regarding the politics, something you touch on but gloss over (and, to be fair, you are perhaps not too aware of) is the impact of the steppe theory (at least the way it is framed) on contemporary relations between northern and southern Indians.
First, the terms used for the two constituent genomes (Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian) are quite unfortunate. Presently there is no one living in India who has anywhere near 100% ANI or 100% ASI. Everybody has some substantial proportion of each. The averages vary across the country, but not by too much really. Southern Indians are as much (if not more) Hindu than northern Indians are today. Yet, this terminology can create the unfortunate impression that north Indians are the descendants of invaders from the steppe, while southern Indians were descendants of the conquered who had the Hindu traditions imposed on them.
The actual reality is that both north and south are mix of both invaders and aborigines, and that the Hindu traditions spread southward gradually by means of absorption and conquest. Today, the southern states are more prosperous than the north, and speak languages distinct from Hindi. These facts combined with unfortunate interpretations of the steppe theory may (and does) produce a lot of discord in India.
The goal of Hindu nationalists is to nip such discord in the bud, because they want to create a pan-Indian nationalism rooted in shared geography and history. Hence, they find the steppe theory as currently framed an impediment to that project.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian also aren't Indo-European. It's not just Basque.
Interesting that the consensus has changed since Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel in the late nineties. He believed in the Steppe origins of PIE, but I thought he was wrong on that point because so many other scholars pushed the Anatolian farmers theory.
good article - but massive gell-mann reading the comments, heh.
and a genuine nervous-laugh realizing how badly folks in the "west" writ large have no idea what 1.4 billion means in terms of just sheer scale of people, opinions, actions. china having a walled off internet has insulated everyone from this.
You are missing out a few invasions of England, the hunter-gatherers were invaded by neolithic farmers, who were invaded (or killed by disease and famine) by the first steppe nomads, who were then invaded by the Celts. The Romans did completely change the language of Southern England, just Romano-British culture, church and language was displaced by Saxons.
It doesn't seem unusual to me to think that leftists would also be cultural imperialists. They have always believed that their values (which largely orginate in Europe) are universal and that local values which conflict with their values should be crushed and swept aside. Look at what Mao did in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
This was very fun
It is false that an "aggressor" language is always going to replace an existing language. I can think of two counter-examples that show this:
1) The Danes in England. Within 100 years, Danish emigrants were speaking the existing local language, Old English.
2) The Normans also in England ended up speaking English not French.
I think it is more reasonable that PIE spread rapidly not because an "aggressor" culture promoted it but for other reasons.
I don't think Matt was saying agressor languages always spread. Or maybe he implied it and I missed it.
But in the case of PIE, it seems like they spread their language by a mix displacing and / or ruling over the people they encountered as they spread. A historically documented parallel might be something like the Spanish in Latin America.
In a similar vein, parts of Asia also tend to subtly champion the "Out of Asia" theory for human beings as a whole, as compared to the generally more accepted "Out of Africa" theory for the spread of our species.
Slow, but definitely not boring! This, to my naive and simplistic mind, highlights the idiocy of nationalism. Take Australia as a counter-example: Anglo-Australians whose families have been there for multiple generations have a good chance of having criminal ancestors. I suspect that few if any are bothered by this. Pride of origin is normal and not to be dismissed, but what matters far more is who you are and what you are accomplishing today.
Matt, perhaps you've already read it, but if you haven't, you must read Edwin Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture which is a serious, sober-minded look at the "Out of India" hypothesis - not just its politics but the actual technical evidence the "indigenous Aryans" theorists from India provide for their claims. I will admit when I first started reading the book, it would be about the *politics* of the "out of India" hypothesis but it turned out to be an unexpectedly technical book that looks in detail at the archaeological and linguistic evidence for both the "steppes" and the "out of India" hypotheses. And Bryant goes out of his way to be sober and fair-minded and not just dismissing it as political. One of the things I realized after reading it (it took me multiple starts to finish and I only finished it a few months ago because it was so damned technical) is how fragile the evidence is for the stories that we hang on to pre-history. Bryant shows, I think, that even if the "out of India" hypothesis cannot really be squared with the linguistic evidence, the "steppes" hypothesis is also built out of pretty thin archaeological evidence.
One thing though that's not in the book (it was published in the 2000s) is genetic evidence. I emailed Bryant a fan letter and asked him if he was going to update the book with genetic evidence and he replied that he'd moved on: the issue was just too politicized!
Which brings me to the politics. I think the Aryan migration story is somewhat controversial in India is not just because it fed into the theories of race science that Europeans were building through the 18th and 19th centuries. But the bigger reason is that social movements *in India* took it up as well. In my home state of Maharashtra, the 19th century social reformer Jyotiba Phule used the Aryan invasion hypothesis as justification for his critique of the caste system: Phule argued that the Brahmins were descendants of the Aryan invaders who had conquered the indigenous people and instituted the caste system to keep them subjugated. Of course, Phule inverted the European value system; he argued that the Aryans were actually barbarians and the indigenous people (now the middle and lower castes) were the ones who had a radically equal polity before the barbarians took over. All of which is to say that the Aryan migration theory is not just about how Indians think about Europeans but about how Indians think about each other, about how the messy politics of caste plays out in India.
But that's also why I am a little uncomfortable with how Matt has summarized the genetic research: "the Ancestral North Indians have genetic links to the steppe, and today, you see a higher share of ANI ancestry both in speakers of Indo-European languages and also in members of higher castes. The Ancestral South Indians ancestry is more prevalent with Dravidian speakers and members of lower castes." This literally makes it sound as if the lower castes/Dravidians can trace their ancestry to the "indigenous" people of the sub-continent (4500 years ago!) which is clearly not true (and I'm sure that's not what Matt meant). What we're talking about here is some kind of similarity metric that has been applied to gene sequences. But it's really hard to take the politics out of the technical stuff.
Great comment. Really appreciate the mention about internal Indian politics.
They oppose AIT as imperialist because it justifies Britain’s invasion.
They oppose it as left-wing because it undermines the caste system.
Meanwhile, the caste system as it exists for the last 175 years is a British administrative project, a rigidity born from rationalism and bureaucracy.
"Meanwhile, the caste system as it exists for the last 175 years is a British administrative project, a rigidity born from rationalism and bureaucracy."
Is that really true? My understanding is that the genetic evidence shows the caste system was quite rigid, at least wrt marriage, for the last 2,000 years. I can believe the British added layers to it, reinvented it in some ways or shaped it to suit their own interests, but when they arrived it seems like it was already firmly in place and quite rigid.
Not your typical column but I really, really enjoyed. No world history in our Memphis school system from the early 70's until 10th or 11th grade. No AP world history but there were a few AP courses back in the Boomer day.
Matt, it’s the Caucasus Mountains. The Caucus Mountains are in Iowa.
This is really funny. Lots of ethnic groups celebrate the fact that they conquered the country from a weaker, more indigenous population. Hungarian nationalism, for instance, openly states that their ancestors didn't show up until like 1,000 years ago. In the Old Testament, the promised land is conquered, etc.