Indo-Aryan peoples

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Indo-Aryan peoples
Indo-Aryan language map.svg
1978 map showing geographical distribution of the major Indo-Aryan languages. (Urdu is included under Hindi. Romani, Domari, and Lomavren are outside the scope of the map.) Dotted/striped areas indicate where multilingualism is common.
   Central
   Dardic
   Eastern
   Northern
   Northwestern
   Western
   Southern
Total population
~1.5 billion [ citation needed ]
Regions with significant populations
Flag of India.svg  India over 911 million [1]
Flag of Pakistan.svg  Pakistan over 190 million [2]
Flag of Bangladesh.svg  Bangladesh over 160 million [3]
Flag of Nepal.svg    Nepal over 26 million
Flag of Sri Lanka.svg  Sri Lanka over 14 million
Flag of the Taliban.svg  Afghanistan over 2 million
Flag of Mauritius.svg  Mauritius over 725,400
Flag of Maldives.svg  Maldives over 300,000 [4]
Flag of Bhutan.svg  Bhutan over 240,000
Languages
Indo-Aryan languages
Religion
Indian religions (Mostly Hindu; with Buddhist, Sikh and Jain minorities) and Islam, Christians and some non-religious atheist/agnostic

Indo-Aryan peoples are a diverse collection of peoples predominantly found in South Asia, who (traditionally) speak Indo-Aryan languages. Historically, Aryans were the Indo-Iranian speaking pastoralists who migrated from Central Asia into South Asia and introduced the Proto-Indo-Aryan language. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] The early Indo-Aryan peoples were known to be closely related to the Indo-Iranian group that have resided north of the Indus River; an evident connection in cultural, linguistic, and historical ties. Today, Indo-Aryan speakers are found south of the Indus, across the modern-day regions of Bangladesh, Nepal, eastern-Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and northern-India. [10]

Contents

History

Proto-Indo-Iranians

Archaeological cultures associated with Indo-Iranian migrations (after EIEC). The Andronovo, BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. The GGC, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard, OCP, and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryan migrations. Indo-Iranian origins.png
Archaeological cultures associated with Indo-Iranian migrations (after EIEC). The Andronovo, BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. The GGC, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard, OCP, and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryan migrations.

The introduction of the Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent was the result of a migration of Indo-Aryan people from Central Asia into the northern Indian subcontinent (modern-day Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). These migrations started approximately 1,800 BCE, after the invention of the war chariot, and also brought Indo-Aryan languages into the Levant and possibly Inner Asia.[ citation needed ] Another group of Indo-Aryans migrated further westward and founded the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria [11] (c. 1500–1300 BC); the other group was the Vedic people. [12] Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasoid people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin. [13]

The Proto-Indo-Iranians, from which the Indo-Aryans developed, are identified with the Sintashta culture (2100–1800 BCE), [14] [15] and the Andronovo culture,[ citation needed ] which flourished ca. 1800–1400 BCE in the steppes around the Aral Sea, present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Proto-Indo-Aryan split off around 1800–1600 BCE from the Iranians, [16] moved south through the Bactria-Margiana Culture, south of the Andronovo culture, borrowing some of their distinctive religious beliefs and practices from the BMAC, and then migrated further south into the Levant and north-western India. [17] [5] The migration of the Indo-Aryans was part of the larger diffusion of Indo-European languages from the Proto-Indo-European homeland at the Pontic–Caspian steppe which started in the 4th millennium BCE. [5] [18] [19] The GGC, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard, OCP, and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryans.

The Indo-Aryans were united by shared cultural norms and language, referred to as aryā 'noble'. Over the last four millennia, the Indo-Aryan culture has evolved particularly inside India itself, but its origins are in the conflation of values and heritage of the Indo-Aryan and indigenous people groups of India. [20] Diffusion of this culture and language took place by patron-client systems, which allowed for the absorption and acculturation of other groups into this culture, and explains the strong influence on other cultures with which it interacted.

Genetically, most Indo-Aryan-speaking populations are descendants of a mix of Central Asian steppe pastoralists, Iranian hunter-gatherers, and, to a lesser extent, South Asian hunter-gatherers—commonly known as Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI). Dravidians are descendants of a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers and Iranian hunter-gatherers, and to a lesser extent, Central Asian steppe pastoralists. South Indian Tribal Dravidians descend majorly from South Asian hunter-gatherers, and to a lesser extent Iranian hunter-gatherers. [21] [22] [23] Additionally, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burmese speaking people contributed to the genetic make-up of South Asia. [24]

Indigenous Aryanism propagates the idea that the Indo-Aryans were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages spread from there to central Asia and Europe. Contemporary support for this idea is ideologically driven, and has no basis in objective data and mainstream scholarship. [25] [26] [27] [28] [29]

List of historical Indo-Aryan peoples

Contemporary Indo-Aryan people

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indo-Iranian languages</span> Branch of the Indo-European language family

The Indo-Iranian languages constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family. They include over 300 languages, spoken by around 1.5 billion speakers, predominantly in South Asia, West Asia and parts of Central Asia.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historical Vedic religion</span> 1500–500 BC Indo-Aryan religious practices of northwest India

The historical Vedic religion, also called Vedicism or Vedism, and sometimes ancient Hinduism or Vedic Hinduism, constituted the religious ideas and practices prevalent amongst some of the Indo-Aryan peoples of the northwest Indian subcontinent during the Vedic period. These ideas and practices are found in the Vedic texts, and some Vedic rituals are still practiced today. The Vedic religion is one of the major traditions which shaped modern Hinduism, though present-day Hinduism is significantly different from the historical Vedic religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indo-Iranians</span> Historical group of Indo-European peoples

The Indo-Iranian peoples, also known as Ā́rya or Aryans from their self-designation, were a group of Indo-European speaking peoples who brought the Indo-Iranian languages to major parts of Eurasia in waves from the first part of the 2nd millennium BC onwards. They eventually branched out into the Iranian peoples and Indo-Aryan peoples.

The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages. These are the predominant languages of today's Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, North India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asko Parpola</span> Finnish Indologist (born 1941)

Asko Heikki Siegfried Parpola is a Finnish Indologist, current professor emeritus of Indology at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in the Indus Valley Civilization, specifically the study of the Indus script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the horse in the Indian subcontinent</span>

The horse has been present in the Indian subcontinent from at least the middle of the second millennium BC, more than two millennia after its domestication in Central Asia. The earliest uncontroversial evidence of horse remains on the Indian Subcontinent date to the early Swat culture. While horse remains and related artifacts have been found in Late Harappan sites, indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times, horses did not play an essential role in the Harappan civilisation, in contrast to the Vedic period. The importance of the horse for the Indo-Aryans is indicated by the Sanskrit word Ashva, "horse," which is often mentioned in the Vedas and Hindu scriptures.

The Armenian hypothesis, also known as the Near Eastern model, is a theory of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, initially proposed by linguists Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, which suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 5th–4th millennia BC in "eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia".

Some loanwords in the variant of the Hurrian language spoken in Mitanni during the 2nd millennium BCE are identifiable as originating in an Indo-Aryan language; these are considered to constitute an Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni. The words are theonyms, proper names and technical terminology related to horses (hippological).

Vedic Sanskrit has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include: phonologically, the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals, and morphologically, the formation of gerunds. Some philologists attribute such features, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia (Bactria-Marghiana) and within the Indian subcontinent during Indo-Aryan migrations, including the Dravidian languages.

Indigenous Aryanism, also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT), is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view on Indian history, and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model, which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dravidian peoples</span> South Asian ethnolinguistic group

The Dravidian peoples, Dravidian-speakers or Dravidians, are a collection of ethnolinguistic groups native to South Asia who speak Dravidian languages. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore, Mauritius, Malaysia, France, South Africa, Myanmar, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proto-Indo-European homeland</span> Prehistoric "Urheimat" of the Indo-European languages

The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and formed the proto-communities of the different branches of the Indo-European language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vedic period</span> Ancient South Asian historical period

The Vedic period, or the Vedic age, is the period in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age of the history of India when the Vedic literature, including the Vedas, was composed in the northern Indian subcontinent, between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation, which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. The Vedas are liturgical texts which formed the basis of the influential Brahmanical ideology, which developed in the Kuru Kingdom, a tribal union of several Indo-Aryan tribes. The Vedas contain details of life during this period that have been interpreted to be historical and constitute the primary sources for understanding the period. These documents, alongside the corresponding archaeological record, allow for the evolution of the Indo-Aryan and Vedic culture to be traced and inferred.

Aryan, or Arya in Proto-Indo-Iranian, is a term originating from the ethno-cultural self-designation of the Indo-Iranians, and later Iranians and Indo-Aryans. It stood in contrast to nearby outsiders, whom they designated as non-Aryan. In ancient Iran and India, the term was used by the Indo-Aryan peoples of the Vedic period, both as an endonym and in reference to a region called Aryavarta, where their culture emerged. Similarly, according to the Avesta, the Iranian peoples used the term to designate themselves as an ethnic group and to refer to a region called Airyanem Vaejah, which was their mythical homeland. The word stem also forms the etymological source of place names like Alania and Iran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peopling of India</span> Immigration patterns of different lineages of people of India

The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations, over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago, whereafter complex migrations within South and Southeast Asia took place. West Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).

<i>The Horse, the Wheel, and Language</i> 2007 book by David W. Anthony

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a 2007 book by the anthropologist David W. Anthony, in which the author describes his "revised Kurgan theory." He explores the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe throughout Western Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. He shows how the domesticated horse and the invention of the wheel mobilized the steppe herding societies in the Eurasian Steppe, and combined with the introduction of bronze technology and new social structures of patron-client relationships gave an advantage to the Indo-European societies. The book won the Society for American Archaeology's 2010 Book Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indo-European migrations</span> Migrations out of the Proto-Indo-European homeland

The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the derived Indo-European languages, which took place from around 4000 to 1000 BCE, potentially explaining how these related languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia spanning from the Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau to Atlantic Europe, in a process of cultural diffusion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vasant Shinde</span> Indian archaeologist

Vasant Shinde is an Indian archaeologist, who has done excavations at Rakhigarhi from 2011 to 2016. He was the first author on the long-awaited 2019 paper "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," on DNA-research on a single skeleton from Rakhigarhi which shows that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation had no steppe (Indo-Aryan) genetic ancestry, in line with the Indo-Aryan migration theory. The day after the publication Shinde publicly endorsed the Out of India theory, contradicting the conclusions of this paper.

References

  1. ↑ "India". The World Factbook. 16 November 2021.
  2. ↑ "Pakistan". The World Factbook. 4 February 2022.
  3. ↑ "Bangladesh". The World Factbook. 4 February 2022.
  4. ↑ "Population of Lhotshampas in Bhutan". UNHCR. 2004. Archived from the original on 16 October 2012. Retrieved 23 March 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 Anthony 2007.
  6. ↑ Erdosy 2012.
  7. ↑ "How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India". bbc. 23 December 2018. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  8. ↑ "New reports clearly confirm 'Arya' migration into India". thehindu. 13 September 2019. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  9. ↑ "Aryans or Harappans—Who drove the creation of caste system? DNA holds a clue". theprint. 29 June 2021. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  10. ↑ Danesh Jain, George Cardona (2007). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. p. 2.
  11. ↑ Anthony 2007, p. 454.
  12. ↑ Beckwith 2009, p. 33 note 20.
  13. ↑ Beckwith 2009, p. 376-7.
  14. ↑ Anthony 2007, p. 390 (fig. 15.9), 405–411.
  15. ↑ Kuz'mina 2007, p. 222.
  16. ↑ Anthony 2007, p. 408.
  17. ↑ George Erdosy (1995). "The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity", p. 279
  18. ↑ Johannes Krause mit Thomas Trappe: Die Reise unserer Gene. Eine Geschichte über uns und unsere Vorfahren. Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 148 ff.
  19. ↑ "All Indo-European Languages May Have Originated From This One Place". IFLScience. 24 May 2018. Retrieved 26 December 2019.
  20. ↑ Avari, Burjor (11 June 2007). India: The Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from c. 7000 BC to AD 1200. Routledge. pp. xvii. ISBN   978-1-134-25161-2.
  21. ↑ Reich et al. 2009.
  22. ↑ Narasimhan et al. 2019.
  23. ↑ Yelmen, Burak; Mondal, Mayukh; Marnetto, Davide; Pathak, Ajai K; Montinaro, Francesco; Gallego Romero, Irene; Kivisild, Toomas; Metspalu, Mait; Pagani, Luca (5 April 2019). "Ancestry-Specific Analyses Reveal Differential Demographic Histories and Opposite Selective Pressures in Modern South Asian Populations". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 36 (8): 1628–1642. doi:10.1093/molbev/msz037. ISSN   0737-4038. PMC   6657728 . PMID   30952160.
  24. ↑ Basu et al. 2016.
  25. ↑ Witzel 2001, p. 95.
  26. ↑ Jamison 2006.
  27. ↑ Guha 2007, p. 341.
  28. ↑ Fosse 2005, p. 438.
  29. ↑ Olson 2016, p. 136.

Sources

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