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Post by Pugnox on Dec 6, 2003 22:39:02 GMT -5
continued...
Is there a threshold beyond which decline is inevitable?
As an admirerer of Spengler, I would say that given our current historical knowledge, probably, even though I wish that it wasn't so. However, it way very well be that we simply haven't seen and been able to analyze the pattern of civilization's declines and falls enough to know that this is the case.
Can you demonstrate that the Sanscrit literature is the product of unmixed Aryans, since it has been transmitted orally for much longer that has been written down?
I'm unsure EXACTLY what you mean by this question so I'll answer it in two possible ways:
If you mean the Sanskrit LANGUAGE, I'll say:
Yes, and it appears that you have not taken Philology 101. Words in Sanskrit can all be traced to either an Indo-European root or stem or to various "Dravidianization", much like words from "black English" are currently entering the English language as we are continuing to mix our blood with them.
If, on the other hand you mean Sanskrit LITERATURE, then, no, absolutely not. The standard way that even non-"racist" scholars trace the development of Sanskrit literature is by the attitudes displayed by certain characters or certain general ideas. For example, Indra, the Aryan war good is honored in parts of the Vedas that are universally accepted as being the oldest parts while he is even made fun of in parts that are universally accepted asthe newest parts. It is obvious that an entire "trans-evaluation of values" to take a phrase from Nietzsche had occurred by the time the two races had mixed much as it is currently happening now in America and Western Europe. People now make fun of John Wayne (as we don't really have a "War God" in the modern West).
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Post by Pugnox on Dec 6, 2003 22:44:15 GMT -5
Now I have just one, two-part question for Artemidoros, and he won't have to take out twenty minutes of his precious time to answer it although it is highly probable that my time is much more objectively valuable than his time:
Artemidoros, what was the earliest age that you can remember yourself passionately hating Nazis? and what was the souce of your information?
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Post by Pugnox on Dec 6, 2003 22:53:24 GMT -5
And, also I'd add that 1850's London ( for example ) was a much worse place than modern Calcutta [/quote] AWAR- I think that you are simply misinformed as to the real conditions of modern Calcutta and the conditions of London in the 1850s. Do you get information about the later from Charles Dicken's books? This man had his own social agenda, don't forget. Please try to be honest with yourself as fiction actually has a very powerful effect on people even though the first reaction to this by a well-read person would be to assume that they have read history books describing the social conditions of 1850s London. As proof that London at the time was much cleaner, I need only point out that it was not the usual custom of Englishmen to both urinate and defacate in the street in broad daylight as is the case in modern Calcutta. This fact alone would lead 1850s London to being a more sanitary city.
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Post by AWAR on Dec 7, 2003 5:19:54 GMT -5
Damn! We censored Charles Dickens!
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Slaven
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SURG GASTOY I NAS - Cheers to the guests and us
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Post by Slaven on Dec 7, 2003 8:12:05 GMT -5
This might help:
Author: Kateeina Rexová et al.
Source: Cladistics
Volume 19, Issue 2 , April 2003, Pages 120-127
Accepted 15 July 2002. ; Available online 11 February 2003.
Abstract
The phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) language family is reconstructed by application of the cladistic methodology to the lexicostatistical dataset collected by Dyen (about 200 meanings, 84 speech varieties, the Hittite language used as a functional outgroup). Three different methods of character coding provide trees that show:
(a) the presence of four groups, viz., Balto-Slavonic clade, Romano-Germano-Celtic clade, Armenian-Greek group, and Indo-Iranian group (the two last groups possibly paraphyletic);
(b) the unstable position of the Albanian language;
(c) the unstable pattern of the basalmost IE differentiation; but
(d) the probable existence of the Balto-Slavonic–Indo-Iranian ("satem") and the Romano-Germano-Celtic (+Albanian?) superclades.
The results are compared with the phenetic approach to lexicostatistical data, the results of which are significantly less informative concerning the basal pattern. The results suggest a predominantly branching pattern of the basic vocabulary phylogeny and little borrowing of individual words. Different scenarios of IE differentiation based on archaeological and genetic information are discussed.
I cuted the Introduction and Materials and Methods heading.................
DISCUSSION
Phylogeny of Indo-European languages
Distant outgroups may lead to spurious relationships based on random similarity (Wheeler, 1990). This phenomenon may apply to the phylogenetic reconstruction of the IE family because the Hittite outgroup (see Ringe et al., 2002) is likely to affect the intra-IE relationships, either because of its phylogenetic distance or because of fragmentary knowledge of the Hittite basic vocabulary. Unrooted trees were therefore constructed for each data matrix and compared with the rooted ones. All the analyses agree that the IE linguistic groups (Indic, Iranian, Baltic, Slavonic, Celtic, Germanic, and Romance) are monophyletic. Moreover, all results indicate that Balto-Slavonic and Romano-Germanic groups are also monophyletic, that Celtic languages are close to the Romano-Germanic superclade (however, with a low support), and that Armenian and Greek languages are close to one another (however, they may form a paraphyletic assemblage). As concerns higher level relationships, there is a good agreement between the results obtained from the standard and altered multistate matrices––the tree topologies were thus robust to the method used for the identification of the primary homologies. In contrast, different coding of the character states (multistate vs binary) has considerably affected the results. The binary matrix provided a different basal pattern, which is attributable to the behavior of the most aberrant IE languages sharing few linguistic synapomorphies with the other IE languages (and hence numerous 0s in the 0/1 matrix). However, the major difference between both multistate matrices and the binary 1 consists in different tree rooting (near Armenian and Greek languages in the multistate matrices, near to Albanian and Indo-Iranian languages in the binary one).
Within each data matrix, no considerable differences in branching pattern were found in the results of the rooted and unrooted analyses. If the results were presented as unrooted trees, different datasets provide results that are much more compatible than those derived from the rooted analyses, which indicates that the Hittite language groups in a rather chaotic manner with different modern languages in different analyses. All the unrooted trees agree that there are four supergroups of IE languages (Balto-Slavonic, Romano-Germano-Celtic, Armenian-Greek, and Indo-Iranian); however, some of them are likely not to be clades. On the contrary, even the unrooted trees differ in relative position of the above four groups (Indo-Iranian group is close to Balto-Slavonic languages in the multistate matrices, while to Armenian-Greek languages in the binary matrix) and predominantly in position of the "wild card"-behaved Albanian language (close to Romano-Germano-Celtic languages in multistate matrices, close to Indo-Iranian languages in the binary matrix). Because of evident phenetic differences between Albanian and Iranian languages on the one hand and the rest of IE on the other hand, we interpret the basalmost position of Albanian and Iranian clades in the rooted binary tree as an "outgroup attraction" artifact and, therefore, restrict further discussion to results obtained from the multistate matrices. In general, it is possible to conclude that gross topology of the maximum parsimonious trees, constructed exclusively from the basic vocabularies of modern languages, is well compatible with the present-day Indoeuropeistic hypotheses.
On the contrary, although based on the same dataset, the phylogenetic analysis presented here disagrees considerably with the earlier lexicostatistical classification (Dyen et al., 1992) and with the tree constructed by Piazza et al. (see Cavalli-Sforza, 2000), both based on the phenetic approach. The Mesoeuropeic hesion, a taxon including Romance, German, and Balto-Slavonic subfamilies that has been suggested by Dyen et al. (1992) and has received bootstrap value 95% ( Cavalli-Sforza, 2000), is not supported by our results. On the other hand, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavonic–Indo-Iranian clades presented here are either missing or poorly supported in the phenetic classifications. The absence of an Indo-Iranian group in the lexicostatistical results is an obvious artifact of the phenetic methodology. As a result of long separation and extensive borrowing from local non-IE linguistic substrates and superstrates (e.g., from the Arabic, a language of religion and power), the Indian and Iranian languages share only a low percentage of characters. Nevertheless, their phylogenetic affinities were recognized by most linguists (e.g., Bloomfield, 1933; Schleicher, 1861–62; Voegelin and Voegelin, 1977), and this view is also supported by other cultural characters. There are, for example, obvious homologies shared by ancient Iranian and Indian religions ( Boyce, 1979). The IE classifications obtained by classical comparative linguistic methods (for a review see Ruhlen, 1987) produced less resolved grouping, and except the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavonic groups (supported by our results), they usually do not suggest any higher taxa above the well-defined traditional groups.
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Slaven
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Post by Slaven on Dec 7, 2003 8:20:54 GMT -5
Cladistics and language phylogeny
The level of character fit on a tree is indicated by consistency and retention indices (CI and RI). The character fit of the presented parsimony trees of IE languages is high (CIs of standard multistate, altered multistate, and binary trees are 0.89, 0.84, and 0.49, respectively), compared with CIs of the biological trees, derived from morphological, molecular, or ecological–behavioral data (Sanderson and Donoghue, 1996). It suggests a predominantly branching pattern of the basic vocabulary phylogeny and little borrowing of individual words. The only alternative to the branching phylogeny of languages is a complete acculturation of local population after its admixture with a more aggressive linguistic component––then, the linguistic tree would be incompatible with the biological one, but it would still have high CI.
This conclusion is compatible with the results presented by Holden (2002) on the Bantu and Bantoid African languages (75 languages, 92 items of basic vocabulary, CI=0.65 in the unweighted tree), while the parsimony tree of 77 Austronesian languages ( Gray and Jordan, 2000) provided a considerably lower fit (CI=0.25). Although it is difficult to interpret these results, we can conclude that the "word introgression" is less frequent than generally supposed, at least in some linguistic families, and that the amount of reticulate evolution of the languages is not considerably higher than that of the biological species.
Both IE and Bantu languages display a strong correlation between phylogenetic proximity and geographical distance between the languages. In combination with the high consistency indices of both trees, it suggests either that the populations are sedentary, remaining near their areas of origin (see Holden, 2002), or that most of the linguistic differentiation took place after migration of the basal populations. Both scenarios are testable by comparison with the archaeological and/or genetic data on the Indo-European history (see below).
In general, the phylogeny of the languages based on lexicostatistical data indicates that language evolution can successfully be reconstructed by the cladistic methods. Naturally, the same rules that we know from the biological cladistics applies to the linguistic cladistics as well––predominantly, the combined analyses are usually better than partial analyses. From this point of view, all the trees derived from basic vocabularies of Austronesian, Bantu, and IE languages should be considered preliminary, and more characters (e.g., grammar) and more taxa (including extinct speech varieties) should be included. On the other hand, lexical items are generally believed to be the least reliable evidence for relationships because they are easily borrowed rather than inherited. This paper is an attempt to test whether lexical data (when containing meanings that seem to show low tendency to be borrowed and when treated by cladistic method) provide results similar to those of classical linguistic classification. The general agreement between our trees and the traditional IE classification suggests that the raw lexical data represent not so labile feature of the language evolution. This conclusion is useful for classification of some non-IE languages for which only lexical data are available.
History of Indo-Europeans
The only IE studies having used a phylogenetic method (Ringe et al., 2002; Warnow, 1997, and methodological discussion and references therein) are devoted to relationships among the oldest known IE languages, supplemented with modern Albanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Welsh. The latter study is based on 22 phonological, 15 morphological, and 333 lexical characters from 24 languages. In the preferred tree, the Hittite–Luvian–Lycian clade and Tocharian were the successive basal branches, followed successively by four superclades of modern IE languages, viz., by Romano-Celtic, Germanic-Albanian, Armenian-Greek, and Balto-Slavonic–Indo-Iranian ("satem") languages. The rough correspondence to our results is evident; however, it is difficult to judge, as Ringe et al. (2002) provided no formal parameters of the trees nor their support. The position of Germanic languages, which contradicts our findings, is reported as uncertain ( Ringe et al., 2002): the authors found that the Germanic languages shared states with disparate language subgroups and believed that Germanic was originally a near sister of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages, that at a very early date it lost contact with its more eastern relatives and came into close contact with the western, Romano-Celtic languages. Consequently, Ringe et al. (2002) suggested removing the Germanic languages from analysis. In the best tree with Germanic omitted, Albanian is a sister group of all modern IE languages, while the rest of the tree remains unchanged. Unfortunately, Ringe et al. (2002) did not provide partial phonological, morphological, and lexical trees to show the contributions of different character partitions.
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Slaven
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Post by Slaven on Dec 7, 2003 8:22:40 GMT -5
The evolutionary history of IE populations has been extensively studied using genetic methods. The early studies based on protein polymorphism have shown a remarkable correlation between genetic and linguistic similarity matrices (Sokal et al., 1992). This relationship is evident on the level of higher taxa, i.e., linguistic families and/or superfamilies like the Nostratic superfamily (comprising IE, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, Uralo-Altaic, and Dravidian languages). However, the linguistic-genetic accord has become weak at lower hierarchic levels (for a review, see Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). Europe is obviously the continent where the increase in genetic dissimilarity per unit of geographic distance is lowest. Most genetic variation among European populations (its first principal component) is arranged along the southeast/northwest cline ( Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). This cline can be explained by the spread of Neolithic farmers accompanied by demic diffusion ( Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1984; Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Cavalli-Sforza, 1997). This view was supported also by HLA allele frequencies ( Sokal and Menozzi, 1982). The putative Neolithic expansion of genes was probably associated exclusively with speakers of the IE family (cf. Renfrew, 1987 and Renfrew, 1991). Two other genetic clines from north to southwest and from the Ukrainian steppes west are usually attributed to the impact of the Uralic-speaking populations of the Asian origin and to repeated expansions of steppe nomads westward, respectively ( Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). Unfortunately, protein data that reflect variation in the recombining nuclear genes are not very useful to solve the question of relationships between European populations and IE-speaking populations in the Middle East and India. The Iranian and Indian populations together with the non-IE-speaking Middle East populations are successive "sister" branches of Europeans in the published genetic phenograms, but their position is likely to be affected by hybridization with neighboring populations ( Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994).
Recently, most research effort has been devoted to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation, which is the best tool for phylogeographic analyses. Mitochondrial DNA has diverged only slightly in non-African human populations (Hedges, 2000; Ingmann et al., 2000; for a review see Avise, 2000), including those from Europe ( Malyarchuk and Derenko, 2001; Rando et al., 1998; Simoni et al., 2000). Despite remigration events recorded in the mtDNA pool of extant populations, it is still obvious from the sequence data that Europe was probably colonized from the Middle East and/or the neighboring areas (e.g., Caucasus and/or eastern Europe, see Richards et al., 2000). The majority of the extant mtDNA lineages entered Europe as a few waves during the Upper Paleolithic long before linguistic differentiation. Unfortunately, the immigrant Neolithic component is likely to represent less than one-quarter of the mtDNA pool of modern Europeans ( Richards et al., 1998 and Richards et al., 2000).
The phylogeography of the non-recombining part of the Y chromosome has shown almost the same results as mtDNA. A considerable part of the sequence variation may be attributed to the Paleolithic migration events (Gibbons, 2000; Semino et al., 2000; Underhill et al., 2001), and the Y-chromosomal diversity within Europe is clinal and influenced primarily by the geography ( Rosser et al., 2000). Nevertheless, some Y-chromosome markers clearly suggest the sharp differentiation between European west and east ( Malaspina et al., 2000), which may confirm our distinction between western and eastern language clades.
There are two main phylogeographic scenarios explaining the distribution of IE languages. The traditional hypothesis presumes the radiation of pastoral IE tribes immigrating from the ancestral area somewhere in eastern Europe via Russian steppes to western Europe and via Central Asia to Iran and India, during the Eneolithic period (Childe, 1926; Gimbutas, 1985; Mallory, 1989; Sergent, 1995). In contrast, the spread of IE languages from Anatolia westward to the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Europe, as well as eastward to Central Asia, synchronous with the early Neolithic expansion of the agriculture, is expected by Renfrew (1989). Weng and Sokal (1995) tested the above hypotheses by comparing the phenetic matrix of lexicostatistical distances with geographic distances and with matrices derived from the origin of agriculture according to the Renfrew and Gimbutas models, respectively. They refuted the Gimbutas "Ukrainian" model and reported that language differentiation and the origin of agriculture are positively correlated within the linguistic subfamilies (particularly among Germanic languages), while the opposite is true when subfamilies of IE languages are compared. They concluded that "differentiation of the major IE branches in Europe seems unrelated to the times of origin of agriculture" and that the "Renfrew hypothesis, if plausible, is far from proven."
Our results suggest a possible existence of the Balto-Slavonic–Indo-Iranian "satem" superclade that occupies most of the eastern territories from east Europe to India and the presence of several well-differentiated clades in Europe and eastern Mediterranean. Due to uncertain rooting of the tree and to the problematic position of Albanian and Germanic languages, it is still premature to give the final phylogeographic interpretation of our IE language cladograms. Nevertheless, the ability of the cladistic methodology to identify several higher taxa within the IE family represents a good prerequisite to reconstruct the history of European and western Asian humankind.
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 9:06:10 GMT -5
The pre-Aryan Dravidian civilizations that existed in India were more advanced then most European civilizations at that time..these were stone cities with flushable toilets and sanitary..which you might know You seem to judge Dravidians on their looks and behaviour while they had their thing going on in their times while your ancestors were cavemen/barbarians any Indian Sanskrit scholar will laught about your statements ;D Mediterannean skeletons and skulls have been found in graves in Mohenjo Daro and Harappa..besides Dravidians who are related to the Elamite people from the Bible.. www.harappa.com/har/har0.html
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 9:14:04 GMT -5
The Indus Valley civilization flourished around 2,500 B.C. in the western part of South Asia, in what today is Pakistan and western India. It is often referred to as Harappan Civilization after its first discovered city, Harappa. The Indus Valley was home to the largest of the four ancient urban civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. It was not discovered until the 1920's. Most of its ruins, including major cities, remain to be excavated. Its script has not been deciphered. Basic questions about the people who created this highly complex culture are unanswered. The Harappans used the same size bricks and standard weights for a thousand miles. There were other highly developed cultures in the area. Some are thousands of years older. Harappa was settled before the Harappans of the Indus Valley, and they were replaced by other still anonymous peoples. In fact, there seems to have been another large river which parallel and west of the Indus in the third and fourth millenium B.C. This was the ancient Ghaggra-Hakra River or Sarasvati of the Rig Veda. Its lost banks are slowly being laid out by researchers. Along its bed, a whole new set of ancient towns and cities have been discovered. Ancient Mesopotamian texts speak of trading with at least two seafaring civilizations - Makkan and Meluha - in the neighborhood of India in the third millennium B.C. This trade was conducted with real financial sophistication in amounts that could involve tons of copper. The Mesopotamians speak of Meluha as an aquatic culture, where water and bathing played a central role. A number of Indus Valley objects have been found buried with Mesopotamians. lol Don't you ever dare call Dravidians dumb people..when in these times your people had nothing...
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 9:32:12 GMT -5
Pre Aryan..thus Aryan/Dravidian achievements : So who says Aryan + Dravidian = a bad mix Not at all..
Don't you know India was the richest country on earth untill the British came? Well the Brits get what they deserve don't they now?Their country is going down hard with the influx of immigrants and the growing rate of Indians and Pakistanis living there, most Indians have great jobs over there and their power is gaining considering there are Indians with positions in the British government now...
a. India invented the Number System. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta. India also invented decimal point.
b. The World's first university was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
c. India never invaded any country in her last 10000 years of history.
d. Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software - a report in Forbes magazine, July,1987.
e. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans. Charaka, the father of medicine consolidated Ayurveda 2500 years ago. Today Ayurveda is fast regaining its rightful place in our civilization.
f. Although modern images of India often show poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th Century.
g. The art of Navigation was born in the river Sindh 6000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit 'Nou'.
h. Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun: (5th century) 365.258756484 days.
i. Budhayana first calculated the value of "pi", and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century long before the European mathematicians.
j. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India. Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 10^6 whereas Hindus used numbers as big as 10^53 (10 to the power of 53) with specific names as early as 5000 BC during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera 10^12 (10 to the power of 12).
k. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world.
l. USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century old suspicions in the world scientific community that the pioneer of wireless communication was Prof. Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.
m. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.
n. According to Saka King Rudradaman I of 150 BC a beautiful lake called 'Sudarshana' was constructed on the hills of Raivataka during Chandragupta Maurya's time.
o. Chess (Shataranja or AshtaPada) was invented in India.
p. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted complicated surgeries like cesareans, cataract, artificial limbs, fractures, urinary stones and even plastic surgery and brain surgery. Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India. Over 125 surgical equipment was used. Deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etiology, mbryology, digestion, metabolism, genetics and immunity is also found in many texts.
q. When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu valley (Indus Valley Civilization)
r. The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100BC.
s. India is the only country other than Japan, to have built a super computer indigenously and US.
t. India is among the few countries in the world to have its own space program and satellites.
u. Pentium chip was invented by an Indian.
v. India is the largest English speaking nation in the world.
w. India has the second largest pool of Scientists and Engineers in the World.
x. India is the largest Democracy in the World.
y. India is one of the few countries in the World, which gained independence without violence.
z. India has largest number of Pager and Cell phone subscribers.
Some More Interesting Facts about India and Indians
Albert Einstein said: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."
Mark Twain said: "India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most structure materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only."
French scholar Romain Rolland said: "If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India."
d. Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA said: "India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border."
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 9:40:41 GMT -5
Indian economy besides is growing at an alarming rate..and alot of businesses offshoring their companty to the subcontinent..
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Post by AWAR on Dec 7, 2003 9:45:29 GMT -5
Pre Aryan..thus Aryan/Dravidian achievements : So who says Aryan + Dravidian = a bad mix Not at all.. I'm not too convinced about that. It was under Muslim rule, most of it. So, you're saying that Indians are causing the downfall of Britain? In the last 10.000 years India wasn't quite what it is today. It was divided into smaller kingdoms, only united by Ashoka, Moghuls and Brits. It's old, but Hittite seems to be even older. You already said that.
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 12:23:09 GMT -5
AWAR I do think Aryan + Dravidian is an essential mix....but you won't agree with me probably even though I can give you numbers of reasons why I think that..I do think that the Aryan Brahmins should stick to their own stock...some must survive.. The downfall of Britian is actully due several reasons..white British women tend to marry late and have less children then foreigners..also the influx of immigrants and the fact that Indians and Pakistanis tend to breed like rabbits will cause the downfall of Britain observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,363750,00.html Even though it consisted of different kingdoms, India never forcibly invaded a country for economic or religios reasons.. Hinduism and Buddhism were spread trhough the whole part of Asia without harming any human being. Hittite : hinduwebsite.com/general/hittite.htmThe Maharajas of Hindustan were richer then these Mogols who actually stole all the wealth,diamonds pearls and gold from India...India was rich under Mogols which doesn't matter..the British created the problems from which India is trying to recover..It's a hard job but they can do it. AWAR may I know where you from?
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Post by HINDI on Dec 7, 2003 12:57:28 GMT -5
4.5.1. The Kassite and Mitannic peoples
An important anomaly in the AIT is the presence of the Mitanni kings in northern Mesopotamia, with their Vedic cultural heritage and language, as early as the 15th century BC, with absolutely no indication that they Were “the Aryans on the way to India”. In fact, the Vedic memories appearing in the Mitanni texts were already remote, with only four Vedic gods mentioned amid a long list of non-Vedic gods. This does not in itself prove that the Mitanni dynasty was post-Vedic, but it certainly confers the burden of proof on those who want to declare it pre-Vedic.
Their language was mature Indo-Aryan, not proto-Indo-Iranian. Satya Swarup Misra argues that the Mitannic languages already showed early Middle-Indo-Aryan traits, e.g. the assimilation of dissimilar plosives (sapta > satta), and the break-up of consonant clusters by interpolation of vowels (anaptyxis, Indra > Indara).37 This would imply that Middle-Indo-Aryan had developed a full millennium earlier than hitherto assumed, which in turn has implications for the chronology of the extant literature written in Middle-Indo-Aryan.
In the centuries before the Mitanni texts, there was a Kassite dynasty in Mesopotamia, from the 18th to the 16th century BC. Linguistically assimilated, they preserved some purely Vedic names: Shuriash, Maruttash, Inda-Bugash, i.e. Surya, Marut, Indra-Bhaga (Bhaga meaning effectively “god”, cfr. Bhag-wAn, Slavic Bog).
The Kassite and Mitanni peoples were definitely considered as foreign invaders. They are latecomers in the history of the IE dispersal, appearing at a time when, leaving India out of the argument, at least the area from Iran to France was already IE. They have little bearing on the Urheimat question, but they have all the more relevance for mapping the history of the Indo-Iranian group.
Probably the Kassite and Mitannic tribes were part of the same migration, with the latter settling in a peripheral area and thereby retaining their identity a few centuries longer than the Kassites in the metropolitan area of Babylon. According to Babylonian sources, the Kassites came from the swampy area in what is now southern Iraq: unlike the Iranians, who migrated from India through Afghanistan, the Kassites must have come by sea from Sindh to southern Mesopotamia. While the Iranians migrated slowly, taking generations to take control gradually of the fertile areas to the south of the Aral Lake and of the Caspian Sea, the Kassites seem to have been a warrior group moving directly from India to Mesopotamia to carry out a planned invasion which immediately gave them control of the delta area, a bridgehead for further conquests of the Babylonian heartland. They were a conquering aristocracy, and having to marry native women, they lost their language within a few generations, just like the Vikings after their conquest of Normandy.
If the earlier Kassite and the later Mitanni people were indeed part of the same migration, their sudden appearance falls neatly into place if we connect them with the migration wave caused by the dessiccation of the Saraswati area in ca. 2000 BC.
Indian-Mesopotamian connections relevant to the Urheimat question have to be sought in a much earlier period. Whether the country Aratta of the Sumerian sources is really to be identified with a part of the Harappan area, is uncertain; the Sumerian legend Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (late 3rd millennium BC) mentions that Aratta was the source of silver, gold and lapis lazuli, in exchange for grain which was transported not by ship but over land by donkeys; this would rather point to the mining centres in mountainous Afghanistan, arguably Harappan colonies but not the Harappan area itself. However, if this Aratta is the same as the Indian AraTTa (in West Panjab) after all, it has far-reaching implications. AraTTa is Prakrit for A-rASTra, “without kingdom”. The point here is not its meaning, but its almost Middle-Indo-Aryan shape. Like sapta becoming satta in the Mitannic text, it suggest that this stage of Indo-Aryan is much older than hitherto assumed, viz. earlier than 2000 BC.
4.5.2. The Sumerian connection
At the material high tide of the Harappan culture, Mesopotamia had trade contacts with Magan, the Makran coast west of the Indus delta, with Bad Imin, “the seven cities”, and with Meluhha, the Indus valley. The name Meluhha is probably of Dravidian origin: Asko Parpola derives Meluhha, “to be read in the early documents with the alternative value as Me-lah-ha”, from Dravidian Met-akam, “high abode/country” (with mel/melu, “high”, being the etymon of Sanskrit Meru, the cosmic mountain).38 Meluhha is the origin of Sanskrit Mleccha, Pali Milakkhu, “barbarian”39: because of the unrefined sounds of their Prakrit and because of their cultural impurity (whether by borrowing foreign elements or simply by an indigenous decay of existing cultural standards), the people of Sindh/Meluhha were considered barbarian by the elites of Madhyadesh (the Ganga-Yamuna doab) during the Sutra period, which non-invasionists date to the late 3rd millennium BC, precisely the period when Mesopotamia had a flourishing trade with Meluhha.
The search is on for common cultural motifs between the Harappan culture and Sumer. One element in literature which strikes the observer as meaningful, is this: according to the account given by the Babylonian priest Berosus, the Sumerians believed their civilization (writing and astronomy) had been brought to the Mesopotamian coast by s sages, the first of whom was one Uana-Adapa, better known through his Greek name Oannes. He was a messenger of Enki, god of the Abyss, who was worshipped at the oldest Mesopotamian city of Eridu. Like the Vedic “seven sages”, meaning both the seven clans of Vedic seers as well as the seven major stars of Ursa Maior, these seven sages are associated with the starry sky; like the Matsya incarnation of Vishnu, Oannes’s body is that of a fish. The myth of the Flood, wherein divine guidance helps the leader of mankind (Sumerian Ziusudra, Sanskrit Manu, Akkadian Utnapishtim, Hebrew Noah) to survive, is another well-known common cultural motif.
The antediluvian kings in Sumer are said by Berosus to have ruled for 120 periods of 3,600 years, or 432,000 years; epochs of 3600 years were in use among Indian astronomers, and the mega-era of 432,000 is equally familiar in India as the scripturally estimated (inexact) number of syllables in the Rg Veda, and as the “high” interpretation of the length of the Kali-Yuga .40 Rather than being a late borrowing, this number 432,000 may well be part of the common IE heritage. At least implicitly, it was present in Germanic mythology, which developed separately from Hindu mythology for several millennia before Berosus (ca. 300 BC): 800 men at each of the 540 gates of Wodan’s palace makes for a total of 432,000. This does not prove any far-fetched claim that “the gods were cosmonauts” or so, but it does show that early Indo-European had a world view involving advanced arithmetic (Sanskrit being the first and for many centuries the only language with terms for “astronomical” numbers), and that they shared some of it with neighbouring cultures.
We may be confident that a deeper search, more alert to specifically Indian contributions than is now common among sumerologists, will reveal more connections. Through the Hittites, Philistines (i.e. the “Sea Peoples” originating on the Aegean coasts and settling on the Egyptian and Gaza coasts in ca. 1200 BC), Mitannians and Kassites, elements of IE culture were known throughout West Asia. Even ancient Israelite culture was culturally much more Indo-European than certain race theorists would like to believe.
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Post by ProdigalSon on Dec 7, 2003 13:01:42 GMT -5
f. Although modern images of India often show poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th Century. How is this an achievement? Prove that please. prove that please. That's not an achievement, that's a legacy of colonialism. Do you have any sense of proportion whatsoever? I hope you realize that India is the second most populous country in the world. Irellevant. True, but you forgot to mention the slaughter that followed the India-Pakistan partition. Again, you have no sense of proportion. There is bound to be a large number of cell phone subscribers in the world's second most populous nation.
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