Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence

By analyzing the ancient texts in full detail, this book establishes the relative chronology of the Rigveda vis-à-vis the Avesta and the Mitanni inscriptions; the geography of the Rigveda; the internal chronology of the (different parts of) the Rigveda; and, finally, the first steps in the establishment of the absolute chronology of the Rigveda, i.e. the actual point of time BCE when the hymns of the text were composed. Moroever, it presents linguistic evidence for the Indian Homeland hypothesis as the only one that explains all the linguistic problems arising in the course of the quest for the Original Homeland. While the beginnings of the history of the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian Civilizations are known to lie at least as far back as the fourth millennium BCE on the basis of detailed decipherable and deciphered records, the beginnings of Indian Civilization as we know it could not really be traced far earlier than the Ashokan inscriptions of the third century BCE. The earlier records, the seals of the Harappan Civilization, are not yet convincingly deciphered; neither their language nor even whether they represent a language at all. However, ironically, decipherable records have been found in West Asia, dating to the mid-second millennium BCE, which record the presence of Indo-Aryan-speakers, especially in the Mitanni kingdom. The analysis of the textual data in this book shows that the culture common to the Rigveda, the Avesta and the Mitanni records developed in northern India in the Late Rigvedic Period, and that the earlier periods, Middle Rigvedic and Early Rigvedic, saw not only the Indo-Aryans but also the proto-Iranians as inhabitants of areas deeper within northern India, whence they only expanded westwards towards the end of the Early Rigvedic Period.