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2. DATES OF VEDAS
to be guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse Muller and other scholars of - writing history to suit their ideology.
* Prof. Michael Witzel (Age of the Veda) gives the date of Rig Veda between 1700 BC and 1200 BC based on the following. Rig Veda is a pre-iron age (copper/bronze) age text of the Greater Panjab (incl. parts of Afghanistan). SamaVeda, which is slightly later than Rig Veda, mentions iron. This sets a late date of c. 1200 for Rig Veda, the earliest iron in India.
* The date of the demise of the Indus civilization is c. 1900 BC. Rig Veda is post Indus Civilization. Chariots of Indo Aryan type first occur around 2000 BC west and east of the Ural mountains
* Horses are indeed not found in South Asia before 1700 BC
http://www.friesian.com/notes/note-n.htm Philosophy of History Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.
Strange Claims about the Greeks, and about India
The most easily disposed fallacy of the thesis about the Indo-Europeans in India, however, is in the linguistic evidence. The oldest Indo-European language of India, Vedic Sanskrit, is not related to the Dravidian languages of India in any conventionally ascertainable way. Vedic Sanskrit, however, is nearly identical to Avestan, the oldest attested form of Persian.
There are new theories that Indo-European and Dravidian (and Semitic, etc.) languages may be ultimately related, but this connection would be much more remote than the theory of common origin in India would allow. What is clear, however, is that Vedic Sanskrit has already borrowed some Dravidian vocabulary and some Dravidian phonology.
The languages of India become a sprachbund, which means a group of unrelated languages that borrow features from each other because of geographical proximity (as in the Balkans).
All the languages in India have a characteristic set of "retroflex" or "lingual" consonsants, t., t.h, d., d.h, n., and s., corresponding to the ordinary "dentals," t, th, d, dh, n, and s. These do not occur in other Indo-European languages, which is hardly possible if Indo-European languages had originated with those sounds in India. Ockham's Razor requires the simpler theory that, if no Indo-European
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