An Outline of the Out of India Indo-European Migration

 

The Origin of Indo-Europeans is a perpetually interesting and engaging topic and has been so for nearly 250 years now. However we are nowhere close to finding what the place of origin or homeland of the Indo-Europeans was. I believe it is India or more specifically the north northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent and I believe now the archaeological evidence is sttrong enough to make a case for it.

While this is not the place or the time to give away all the data that make a case for the OIT or Out of India Theory of Indo-European origins, I wish to briefly give an outline to envisage an Out of India migration. 

Currently, the Indo-European languages are divided into many sub-branches, some of them extinct, all of which are listed below -

1. Anatolian
2. Tocharian
3. Indo-Iranian
4. Greek
5. Albanian
6. Armenian
7. Celtic
8. Italic
9. Germanic
10. Baltic
11. Slavic

Credit - Minna Sundberg

Anatolian and Tocharian are already extinct. But the rest of them still exist today and they, combined, are spoken by roughly 50 % of the world population. It is often said that India cannot be the Indo-European homeland since only Indo-Aryan languages, one half of Indo-Iranian, are spoken in India and that constitutes only a single branch out of a total of 12 branches of Indo-European languages (if we consider Indo-Aryan and Iranian as separate branches). 

So how do we account for the rest of the Indo-European diversity ? Shouldn't India, if it was the homeland, have the highest basal diversity which would mean in essence a presence of atleast a few Indo-European subfamilies like we see in Europe where we have Greek, Albanian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic & Slavic sub-branches instead of just the Indo-Aryan ?

This is, however, not a valid objection since the current hot favorite of western scholars, the East European steppe, is not exactly a hotbed of Indo-European linguistic diversity. It only has Slavic languages spoken there today, a single branch of IE whose ancestral proto-language could have existed as late as the 6th-7th century CE. 

Nevertheless, India and Indian subcontinent, is not devoid of Indo-European linguistic diversity. I have dwelt at length on this topic over here. Putting it briefly, the Indian subcontinent has all the 3 sub-branches of Indo-Iranian languages, spoken in its geoprahical vastness, which are Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani. 

As per Ethnologue, the most extensively used reference for languages, Indo-Iranian alone make up around 312 languages out of the total of 448 Indo-European languages in existence today i.e. around 70 % of all IE languages spoken across the world today happen to be Indo-Iranian. If one disputes the figures of Ethnologue, the other reference on languages, Glottolog, which allots a greater linguistic diversity to European sub-branches of Indo-European, Indo-Iranian make up 320 languages of the total of 583 IE languages i.e. roughly 55 % of IE is Indo-Iranian. Out of this, Indo-Aryan alone makes up about 220 languages of the Indo-European family. 

By comparison, as per Ethnologue again, Germanic has 47 languages, Italic 44, Slavic 22, Baltic 5, Greek 6, Celtic 6 and Albanian 4. This shows that Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages have a far greater diversity than the other designated branches of Indo-European. 

Nor is this diversity of recent origin. Linguists have noted for long now, that the Indo-Aryan languages are not descended from Rigvedic Sanskrit alone, but most of them descend from Prakrit languages which themselves descend from sister dialects of Rigvedic Sanskrit. Rigvedic Sanskrit itself is dated to around 1200 BC or earlier by western linguists. However there certainly is a possibility that it is much older than that, perhaps even older than 2000 BC due to various factors such as :-

• Ghaggar-Hakra, the river with maximum number of Harappan settlements that dried up around 1900 BC, being the likely dry bed of Rigvedic Sarasvati river.
• Widespread Iron working starting as early as 1800 BC in the Gangetic plains yet Rigveda having no knowledge of Iron.
• Vedic deities finding close parallels with Mesopotamian deities of the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE.
• And so on.

It is also quite remarkable that though the Rigvedic Sanskrit is of such great antiquity, linguists who proposed the Aryan Invasion and now the Aryan Migration theory, have argued that the Indo-Aryans must have come into India through multiple waves or at the very least 2 waves, with the wave that brought Rigvedic Sanskrit being the latter one. 

One would also have to account for the separate migration of the Eastern Iranian speakers to the west of the Indus river as well as the Nuristani speakers in the Hindu Kush, whose languages are considered by linguists to be so archaic that they are thought to have been the first to break up from the rest of the Indo-Iranians. With the relatively recent discovery of the Bangani language in the remote Himalayan foothills of North India, a language that has distinct kentum features as opposed to the rest of the Indo-Aryan languages, the Indo-European pre-history of the Indian subcontinent becomes even more curious and complex. 

If that was not enough, Tocharian, a very archaic Indo-European language, also with kentum features, which is believed to be second only after Anatolian to have broken off from the rest of Indo-European, was also historically present, very close to the northeast of the historical Indo-Iranian region, in the tarim basin.

Quite fantastically, while in an Aryan Migration paradigm, the linguistic situation demands multiple migrations of Indo-Iranian speakers to the subcontinent, the archaeological evidence that can support the theory of even one migration from the steppe is wholly missing. Mallory sums up the situation very succinctly,

...even with an Anatolian origin we would be left with a model that requires that the Iranians, Indo-Aryans or all the Indo-Iranians to be explained by some form of major language shift. This is indeed the problem for both the Near Eastern and the Pontic-Caspian models and, following the logic of this analysis, the Bouckaert model appears to be in the same boat. All of these models apparently require the Indo-European languages (including their attendant agricultural vocabulary) to be superimposed/adopted by at least several major complex societies of Central Asia and the Indus. If one accepts this conclusion then a significant portion of the Indo-European world cannot be explained by agricultural expansions, even among those who support an early Neolithic homeland in Anatolia. And if one is forced to accept language shift over a series of complex societies in Asia, how can one argue that only the spread of agriculture could explain language shift among less complex societies in Europe? In any event, all three models require some form of major language shift despite there being no credible archaeological evidence to demonstrate, through elite dominance or any other mechanism, the type of language shift required to explain, for example, the arrival and dominance of the Indo-Aryans in India...But all theories must still explain why relatively advanced agrarian societies in greater Iran and India abandoned their own languages for those of later Neolithic or Bronze Age Indo-Iranian intruders.

With this, we are now confronted with a major problem that both the Steppe and the Anatolian Homeland theories face with regard to the Indo-Iranian and arguably the Tocharian migration. 

• How does one explain a migration of intruders either from the North or the West, who could have overthrown the established languages of such advanced civilizations such as the Harappan civilization, the Oxus civilization and Halil Rud and Helmand civilizations of Eastern Iran so much so that the languages of these intruders still overwhelmingly predominate, to this day, in this vast region ? How does one explain this magnificent success of the Indo-Iranians, since as we noted earlier, their languages number around 312 and make up around 55-70 % of all Indo-European languages spoken today and make up around 50 % of its speakers or almost 25 % of the world population ?

• And how does one even begin to explain it, when you have absolutely no archaeological evidence to back up such a proposal ?

It is here, I think, that we need to think a little differently and try out a different model of Indo-European origins. It is well-accepted by archaeologists that Europe, before the 17th-16th centuries BC, was a thinly populated and underdeveloped backwater when compared to the advanced Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East. However, in contrast, the great Eastern civilizations of the Bronze Age, the Harappan or the Oxus or those of Eastern Iran, were as advanced as their Near Eastern counterparts if not more and, as in the case of the Harappans, had a population which was likely much bigger. 

Therefore, taking the supporting evidence of the overwhelming material transformation, a language shift in Europe is quite plausible. However, for reasons adduced above, and taking the extreme lack of material intrusion into the Indo-Iranian region, a language shift in the region appears very very implausible. On the contrary, the archaeological evidence overwhelmingly supports cultural continuity in the region.  

With these factors taken note of, is it too far-fetched to suggest that perhaps the Indo-Iranian region hasn't undergone a language shift right from the rise of its great Bronze Age civilizations ? Could the Indo-Iranian speakers of the region merely be speaking the daughter languages of those that there were spoken by their ancestors from the early Bronze Age onwards in the same region ? In other words, was some early form of Indo-Iranian and therefore inevitably Indo-European language spoken across the great Bronze Age civilizations of NW India, Eastern Iran and southern Central Asia from atleast the 3rd millennium BCE and perhaps even earlier ?

At the outset, taking the broad region stretching from NW-North India in the East to Eastern Iran in the West and from southern Central Asia in the North to the Gujarat region in the South, as the probable early Bronze Age expansion zone of Indo-Europeans, helps us solve several major problems that trouble the great disciplines of archaeology and linguistics today -

• What were the languages spoken by the great Bronze Age civilizations of North India, Eastern Iran and Central Asia and whether they still exist today?
• How does one explain the overwhelming presence of Indo-Iranian languages in this vast region since many millenia if there is no archaeological evidence of foreign intrusion through which their forebears could have come here?

I, therefore propose, based on the principle of material continuity likely mirroring language continuity, that the Indo-Iranian region in question, may also be taken and tested out as an early Indo-European expansion zone where not only Indo-Iranian but by necessity (due to the great antiquity), also the early Indo-European languages expanded and diversified before breaking up and migrating to great distances to reach their eventual destinations. 

How does one explain the origin and migration of the Western Indo-Europeans ?

The proposal made here helps us solve the origin of the Indo-Iranian languages, that make up around 55-70 % of Indo-European languages, which neither the Anatolian nor the Steppe theory has been able to. It also helps us solve the presence of Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin. This is a big reason why this proposal needs to have a serious relook and rethink. 

This proposal also helps us in understanding why the Indo-European languages could have had linguistic contacts with Semitic, Caucasian and even Sumerian languages as shown by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov as well as other linguists. 

However, we need to show how the Anatolian, Armenian, Greek and other European Indo-European languages could have spread from the Bronze Age Indo-Iranian region to their eventual destinations in the Near East and Europe. For a long period, this might have been thought off as a hopeless exercise but evidence coming out in the very recent past is quite positive and encouraging.

The Path of Westward Migration

Let it be known that the early Bronze Age Indians or the Harappans, had extensive trade networks with the Near Eastern world. That network reached all the way upto the Aegean as these two images below exemplify.

There is now a suggestion that some of the monkeys depicted in Minoan frescoes are actually Hanuman langurs from India.

The evidence of extensive trade contacts of Harappans with Mesopotamia is quite well documented and I shall avoid going into it right now. Harappans are known to have had settlements, for purposes of trade or otherwise, at Bronze age cultures of Magan (coastal Oman) and Dilmun (Bahrain & its surroundings). Trade between Eastern Iran and West Asia is also documented as is the trade between the Oxus and the west though on a lesser scale and likely via Harappan intermediacy. 

Such being the case, one can legitimately surmise that if there was a crisis that forced the Harappans or its Eastern Iranian and Central Asian neighbours to migrate, they could migrate westwards to these regions where their trade relationship flourished. 

Likely path of migration of the Roma

A westward path of migration is also supported by the historical path of migration of the Roma people who are known to have their origins in NW India and over the period of many centuries, they travelled across Iran and West Asia and through the Anatolian-SE European region, entered Europe before spreading across Eastern and then Western Europe. 

A sudden migration towards the steppe northward is extremely unlikely because the northern regions were harsh and unfamiliar lands and it is unlikely that people of settled civilizations would venture into these regions where the weather was so alien and the land so unknown or untraveled. It is likely that the Indo-Europeans, especially the Iranians and perhaps the ancestors of Baltic and Slavic languages gradually mixed with people of the steppe and spread their language and culture into these lands over a period of time and then in the 1st millennium BCE, when the Scythian nomads arose as a political force, these languages spread further north and west towards Europe via the steppe region. 

The Cause of the Migration

There is good reason why the people of the Indo-Iranian region would be forced to migrate westward. It has to do with the great 4.2 kya event which devastated all the Bronze Age civilizations of its time. But it appears to have hit the Harappans most severely. The great Saraswati or the Ghagghar-Hakra as it is known today, where the vast majority of Harappan settlements have been found, dried up around 4,000 years ago. It is believed there were centuries long droughts in the region. 

The Harappans likely never recovered. The settlements were abandoned and there is archaeological evidence that there was eastward migration towards the Gangetic plains. I argue, that there is very likely to have been a westward migration as well since the regions to the west were also well-known to the Harappans. Around the same time, the Eastern Iranian civilizations were also abandoned and not long after even the Oxus civlization collapsed. It is not unreasonable to suggest that a significant portion of people from these civilizations would have been forced to migrate westward. The evidence for a such a likely migration shall be discussed in the next section.

Importance of cattle for Indo-Europeans and the signature of Zebu ancestry in cattle of many Indo-European cultures

Cattle was a very important means of subsistence for the early Indo-European people. According to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov,

The economic function of the cow as a dairy animal can be reconstructed for a period of great antiquity, either for the Proto-Indo-European stage or for very ancient dialect groupings…The abundance of such dialect words for milk, milk products, and milking, and the names for domestic animals, especially young ones, formed from them testify to an elaborate livestock-breeding terminology and a developed dairying economy by Proto-Indo-European times. Another consequence of this culture is the Proto-Indo-European metaphor by which the udder and the milk cow were poetic symbols for any kind of abundance. Even by Proto-Indo-European times images symbolizing abundance with milk had become features of poetic and religious speech, as is reflected in Indo-European literary, mythological, and ritual traditions…Parallel metaphors in Sanskrit, Greek, and Old Irish traditions permit reconstruction of an image whereby a hero was equated to a bull and women or girls to cows (Campanile 1974); cf. also the equation of a woman to a heifer (GUD) in the Hittite tradition (in the prayer of queen Puduhepa to the goddess Arinna, KUB XXI 27). Taken together, all these facts clearly show the great antiquity of the function of bulls in worship, transport, and the economy of Proto-Indo-European society. Only in the later Proto-Indo-European tradition, after the introduction of the horse, did the bull yield its cultural primacy.

Having thus established the primacy of the cow and the bull for the early Indo-Europeans, it is therefore quite strange that if the Aryan Migration Theory were to be true, the taurine cattle that predominates in Anatolia and the Steppe never made it to the Indian subcontinent, which is dominated by the bos indicus or humped Zebu cattle, domesticated in the early Neolithic culture of the subcontient. It is rendered even more strange when we consider that Indo-Iranians were a very dairy intensive culture who managed to preserve most of the the cattle and dairy related terms from the Proto-Indo-European period. 

On the other hand, as we shall see, Indian Zebu cattle did manage to spread its ancestry far out into the old world. 

Already in 2002, Roger Matthews, based on figurines and faunal remains, had observed the sudden increase of Zebu figurines and bones during the 2nd millennium BCE across Mesopotamia, Levant and Anatolia and he had even made a working hypothesis to explain this phenomenon,

On the basis of the evidence summarised above I wish to propose, as a working hypothesis, that the spread of zebu in Bronze Age western Asia is associated with episodes of climate change involving aridification.

 

Zebu depiction on a palace fresco from Mari (Early 2nd millennium BCE)

Hittite drinking vessel in the shape of a Zebu

The sudden and massive spread of Indian origin Zebu cattle in West Asia has recently also been confirmed through ancient DNA of cattle remains from the region. According to Verdugo et al,

...after ~4000 yr B.P., hybrid animals (median 35% indicine ancestry) are found across the Near East, from Central Asia and Iran to the Caucasus and Mediterranean shores of the southern Levant (table S2 and fig. S1). During this period, depictions and osteological evidence for B. indicus also appear in the region (9, 13). 

...This sharp influx may have been stimulated by the onset of a period of increased aridity known as the 4.2-thousand-year abrupt climate change event (9, 15–17). This multicentury drought coincided with empire collapse in both Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as a decline in the Indus civilization...

So it is generally accepted among the scientific and scholarly community that there was a sudden and massive spread of Indian Zebu cattle in West Asia and that this massive influx was driven by climate change which among other things led to the fall of Indus or the Harappan civilization. However, cattle before the Industrial Revolution, did not moved on their own but were invariably associated with human migration. Verdugo et al also touch upon and it is instructive to quote them,

Three features of this zebu influx after ~4000 yr B.P. attest that the influx was likely driven by adaptation and/or human agency rather than passive diffusion. First, the extent of indicine introgression does not follow a simple east-towest gradient; for example, it is pronounced in Levantine genomes from the western edge of the Near East. Second, the introgression was widespread and took place in a relatively restricted time interval after four millennia of barely detectable B. indicus influence. Third, it was plausibly driven by bull choice, as we observe up to ~70% autosomal genome change but a retained substratumof B. taurus mtDNA haplotypes (Fig. 2 and table S3)...Westward human migration has been documented around this time (19, 20) along with archaeological evidence for the appearance of other South Asian taxa such as water buffalo and Asian elephants in the Near East (21), suggesting the movement of large animals by people.

As Verdugo et al note, there is not just evidence of large scale diffusion of Indian Zebu cattle but also that of Indian origin Buffalo and Indian origin elephants. Why would the Harappans be sending or rather bringing these large animals into West Asia around the same time as their own civilization is collapsing ? Could it have something to do with the Harappans themselves migrating into these regions to escape the terrible calamity befalling them in their homeland ? While we await a conclusive answer there is already some evidence that Harappans may have migrated westward due to the collapse of the Indus/Harappan civilization.

Steffen Terp Laursen, in a lengthly scholarly paper, has argued that the sealing technology was introduced in the Dilmun polity, in the 21st century BCE, likely by a group of breakaway Harappans who were gradually acculturated with the local population. It hardly needs emphasizing that this is the very period when the decline of Harappan civilization had already begun and when one would expect the Harappans to have begun their emigration to escape the great collapse.

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The massive influx of Indian cattle into West Asia coinciding with the decline and fall of the Harappan civilization is likely to have been brought about by migrating Harappans and people of the Indo-Iranian regions in general who were trying to escape the dire situation in their homelands. Do we have records of these people from Bronze Age West Asia ? So far, apart from the evidence from Dilmun, we cannot make any definite claims. 

But do we know of any people who make their appearance in West Asia during the 2nd millennium BCE ? The answer to this is yes, and the group or groups of people who come on the scene are overwhelmingly Indo-Europeans whether it be Hittites and Luwians in Anatolia, Mycenaeans in Greece, Mitanni in Syria, Kassites in Babylon or quite possibly the Hyksos in Egypt. 

Here we may be reminded of what we had noted at the beginning of this section. The Indo-Europeans held cattle in very great importance. So if there was a major impulse of Indo-European migration into a region, as we see across the Near East and West Asia in the 2nd millennia BC, one could argue that they likely would have brought their cattle along with them from their homelands. The clear cut evidence for cattle influx in the West Asian/Near Eastern region is from the Indo-Iranian region from where the Zebu spread westward. This makes it very tempting to suggest that the Zebu influx in West Asia and the Near East was brought about by the incoming Indo-Europeans. If Zebu originated from the Indo-Iranian regions, it also implies that the point of origin of these Indo-Europeans in the Near East was the same Indo-Iranian area.

Nor is this such an implausible idea on linguistic grounds. Johanna Nichols had, in 1997, suggested that the locus from where the Indo-Europeans are likely to have expanded and spread to their eventual homelands should be in Bactria, which is part of our Indo-Iranian region and where in the Bronze Age, the Oxus civilization thrived. 

Buffalo migration

Genetic studies have found that Buffaloes too have migrated outward from the Indian subcontinent in the western direction and their path of migration and eventual spread and settlement parallels rather remarkably with the diffusion pattern of Zebu ancestry in the Near East and Europe.

Buffaloes are found in nearly all the places from West Asia to Europe where the Indian Zebu ancestry is found. This could suggest that the spread of buffaloes in those regions could have happened around the same time that the Zebu ancestry spread there i.e. in the 2nd millennium BCE. There is even an Akkadian era seal dating to the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BCE depicting two buffaloes, proving that Buffaloes had already spread upto Mesopotamia during that early period.

Evidence of Elephant migration from India into Syria

There is now also strong evidence that elephants from India were taken in the Syro-Anatolia region and thrived there between the 16th-8th centuries BCE before they were wiped off.

According to Chakirlar & Ikram (2016),

In Southwest Asia, the earliest representations of elephants appear in art and mythological literature, originating from eastern Lower Mesopotamia, and date to the end of the 3rd millennium BC (Potts 1997: 260–61). The style of depiction, though, seems to derive from that of the Indus Valley (Salonen 1976: 146–47). This strongly suggests a second-hand knowledge of elephants, rather than first-hand, real-life experience. From Greece to Arabia, no single reference to, or depiction of, an elephant or elephant parts, ante-dates these first finds from the end of the 3rd millennium BC… the Holocene elephants of Southwest Asia were not endemic to the region and that the Early Bronze Age peoples of the region knew about them only through their contact with India, or possibly Egypt. The latter is less likely as these animals were no longer indigenous there by that time, although remembered… Secondly, ancient accounts indicate that live elephants roamed and were hunted in the Orontes Valley, the Upper Euphrates Valley and the Middle Euphrates Valley around modern Ana in Iraq, at least between the end of the 16th and 9th centuries BC, possibly into the 8th century BC (Breasted 1906–07; Gardiner 1964: 179, 201; Moorey 1994: 117; Scullard 1974: 28). The core of this region comprises the area of influence of the Mitanni Kingdom, the main local political player in LBA northern Syria… Based on all the evidence reviewed above, and in the absence of fossil evidence, we also support the hypothesis that the Syrian elephant was not endemic, but arrived in Southwest Asia later in the mid-Holocene as an import from Southeast Asia that took hold locally. 

Quite remarkably, the Elephant was introduced from India and thrived in the very region which was under the rule of the Mitanni, whose language was undoubtedly of the Indo-Iranian language family and quite possibly close to Vedic Sanskrit. Even the time of their introduction in the region matches closely with when the Mitanni first rose to power in the region. This provides a strong evidence, if there was needed, to show that the Mitanni ruling elite not only had strong linguistic connection with the Indo-Aryans in India but that their links with India were sufficiently strong enough that they could bring Elephants from there into Syria. 

Scott et al recently also demonstrated that Indian or Harappan origin foods and spices were already reaching the Levant region in the 2nd millennium BCE and were being consumed by local populations. Domestic chicken is also likely to have spread from or via the Indian subcontinent into the Levant and the mediterranean around the same time. 

Such a major spread of animals and foods and other items with origin in the Harappan and the Indo-Iranian lands around the same time when Indo-Europeans make their entry on the Near Eastern Bronze Age gives us enough scope to make the case for the origin of these Indo-European groups within the geography of  the Bronze Age Indo-Iranian civilizations. In the case of Elephants, the evidence appears extremely strong and in the case of cattle too, the data is quite compelling. 

Transformation in Bronze Age Europe and its Indo-European connection

Having thus shown, in brief, how the potential Indo-Europeans from the Indo-Iranian region could have spread as far as the Levant and Anatolia, we will now show how they could have very well continued on the path and spread into Europe in that period of time. 

Beginning around 1700 BCE, Europe was increasingly brought into the commercial and cultural orbit of the great Near East powers of the 2nd millennium BCE such as the Hittites, Minoans and Mycenaeans. This resulted in a massive transformation of the European society. 

According to Horn and Kristiansen (2018),

The Bronze Age saw a remarkable rise in population throughout Europe…Europe’s population doubled between 2000 and 1500 bc. In absolute figures, we are talking about 13–14 million people by around 1500 bc: Europe would now hold nearly as great a population as the Near East…This population increase went hand in hand with an increase in settled land. Most arable soils and grasslands, including heathlands, became permanently settled during the Bronze Age, and settlements were in many regions continuous: one could travel through ‘civilized’ and settled landscapes from Denmark to Italy…Such large populations led to the gradual formation of more complex, ranked societies, and warriors were an essential ingredient in sustaining them…European communities adopted new, robust grains, such as millet, and vegetables, such as beans and peas, which helped to improve diets and feed more people (Stika and Heiss 2013). ...The early to mid-second millennium saw the universal adaptation of woollen dress and a wool economy with extensive trade in both raw wool and large pieces of cloth (Frei et al. in press). This healthier and warmer dress was undoubtedly important for improved health conditions. In terms of food preservation, smoked and salted meat was adopted…and trade in salt, along with wool and metal, created a new commercial economy that connected all regions (Earle et al. 2015; Harding 2013). These improvements in costume and food preservation made long-distance travel less hazardous because more varied food supplies could be carried along in case of unforeseen events or the need to travel through unsettled landscapes. For warriors and traders alike, these were a basic foundation for surviving under difficult conditions.

As per Kristiansen (1999), 

From the eighteenth to the seventeenth century BC, two interlinked phenomenon spread across Europe: a new weapon complex that employed long sword, lance and chariot. It represented new military tactics…based upon the employment of chariots to supplement infantry. The new weapons meant heavier man-to-man fighting, and demanded new military skills and the employment of protective armour. It thus put new demands on the training of warriors, and subsequently on their social and economic support. The professional warrior, well-trained and organised, was introduced.

In temperate Europe, the new weapons were linked to the rise and expansion of a new, aristocratic warrior elite, above the traditional tribal warrior, which had employed bow and arrow and dagger/battle axe since the 3^rd millennium BC and earlier…the new warrior aristocracies set themselves apart by being buried in richly furnished graves, often in a barrow with sets of weapons…From the sixteenth to the fifteenth century BC, the new warrior chiefs became a common phenomenon at both local and regional levels in temperate Europe, social and military differentiation was recognizable…pattern of chiefly war-leaders with a retinue of lance warriors and a smaller group of chiefly warriors is seen to be consistent over wide regions from the sixteen century BC onwards.

Kristiansen also notes the characteristics of this new cultural phenomenon and the depth of its penetration across Europe,

The appearance of warrior aristocracies represents the formation of a new chiefly elite culture across Europe…It was embedded in new rituals, in new ideas of social behaviour and lifestyle (body care, clothing etc.), and in a new architecture of housing and landscape (Kristiansen 1998b). It centred around values and rituals of heroic warfare, power and honour, and it was surrounded by a set of new ceremonies and practices. They included ritualised drinking, the employment of trumpets or lurs in warfare and ritual, special dress, special stools and sometimes chariots… Thus, the new chiefly elite culture spread as a cultural package – a new social value system – rather than as separate elements. We may characterise it as a new social institution of chiefly leadership. It therefore became a penetrating phenomenon, crossing cultural boundaries throughout Europe.

Kristiansen observes that the Chiefly warrior culture and warrior aristocracies became an inherent feature of the social and ideological organisation of the European bronze age and remained so for the next 2 to 3 millenia. There can be little doubt that what we are talking about here is the spread of Indo-European cultural package across Europe. However, what is noteworthy is that all of this transformation is taking place in Europe only after 1700 BCE and it is through direct influence of Near Eastern civilizations which were around that time dominated by Indo-European people. 

Little of this came about through the steppe migrations of the 3rd millennium BCE. Potentially, the revolutionary transformation of European society from the 2nd quarter of the 2nd millennium BCE is the phenomenon by which the Indo-European languages are likely to have spread across Europe. Atleast one scholar, Robert Drews, believes that it is only with the transformation brought about through introduction of chariot warfare that Europe began the process of Indo-Europeanising around 1700-1600 BCE. 

As per Drews,

…the militarizing of the Carpathian basin and northern Italy was the occasion of their Indo-Europeanization, and I suspect that the militarizing of southern Scandinavia may have launched the Germanic subgroup of Indo-European…I will suggest that the militarizing of Transylvania, western Romania and eastern Hungary ca. 1600 BC may have been the starting point for the Keltic, Italic and Germanic subgroups of Indo-European, as well as for Albanian and for extinct but once-important languages such as Venetic and Dacian.

It is thus extremely probable that the spread of Indo-European languages into Europe could have begun via the Near East beginning around 1700 BC through the influence of already existent Indo-European groups in the Near East whose origins lay further east, rather than from the earlier steppe migrations that took place nearly a millenia earlier. This east, as has been argued here, was the Indo-Iranian region where great civilizations flourished in the Bronze Age.

 

Potential Influences Spreading into Europe from the Harappans

There is evidence to suggest the spread of things of unmistakably Harappan origin in Europe during this period, further fortifying our OIT hypothesis.

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Minoans from around 1700 BCE began using a very advanced hydrotechnology and sewerage system. This advanced system did not exist anywhere in the Near East or West Asia and only existed much farther away in the Harappan civilization. Khan et al point out several similarities in the hydrotechnologies of the Harappans and Minoans such as the construction and use of 

• Aqueducts
• Numerous wells
• Dams
• Network of terracota piping for potable water
• Baths & Tiolets
• Drains & Sewers
• Ritual cleaning

Such amazing similarities between the hydrotechnologies of both the civilizations are unlikely due to chance since the knowledge of this subject during the Bronze Age would have been of extreme specialization. Since the Harappans had developed these systems more than a millennium earlier than the Minoans the diffusion could only have been from the Harappans to the Minoans. The independent development of this system by the Minoans is highly unlikely since, as we have already seen, in the 2nd millennium BCE, a variety of Harappan influences were spreading westward and had reached the Eastern Mediterranaean as well, such as the use of Lapis Lazuli and Carnelian beads and the depiction of Hanuman langurs on Minoan frescoes. Therefore, the Minoans were in reasonable enough communication with the Harappans and the most parsimonious explanation of the origin of the Minoan hydrotechnology is through the acquired knowledge and expertise of the Harappans in this domain.

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There is evidence of Harappan influence even in Bronze Age Nordic regions. Scholars, Oma & Melheim, have argued that there was yoga practiced in Nordic Scandinavia during the Bronze Age and that this is strong evidence of some direct links with the Indian subcontinent. 

As per Oma & Melheim,

Following, amongst others, Anders Kaliff (2005), we suggest that the Vedas might be a valid analogy for Scandinavian Bronze Age ritual practices (cf. also Kaliff & Oestigaard 2004; Melheim 2004; 2006; 2013; Kristiansen 2010; 2013). Considering that yoga is described in the Vedas, it seems likely that yoga was established as a discipline in the Indus Valley before 2000 BC, and there is also the possibility that it may have spread to Europe at such an early point in time.

The practice of Yoga by Harappans is evidenced from several seals and its origin among Harappans has been well argued by Yan Dhyansky.

The spread of the knowledge of yoga in Nordic Bronze Age suggests that Harappan influence was spread as far as Northern Europe.

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Horned Helmeted figurines and depictions believed to be a manifestation of some Gods or Godlike persons become common across Europe from the late Bronze Age onwards (Vandkilde & Matta et al 2021). The European scholarship attributes this diffusion to have come from Mesopotamia. However a much more likelier place of origin is the Indo-Iranian region where horned deities are more commonly found on seals.

Besides the above seal, there are many other seals with depictions of horned deities in the Harappan domain. Even Harappan masks and figurines with horns have been found. Horned deities are also found on chlorite vessels of the Halil Rud civilization in Eastern Iran.

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We may end this by returning to the Indian Zebu cattle again. A recently published paper by Senczuk et al showed that Zebu ancestry was spread among the ancient Podolian cattle of Europe in a wide region stretching from Eastern Europe to Southeastern and Southern Europe and includes cattle of Italy, Greece, Hungary, Turkey, Ukraine and almost all the countries of Eastern Europe. The map below is a cropped image taken from Senczuk et al and the blue portion in each pie chart indicates the Zebu ancestry in that breed of cattle. The likely spread of Zebu admixture in these regions was also estimated by them to have been around the same time Zebu ancestry spread in the Near East i.e. in the 2nd millennium BCE. 

What we have seen above is unmistakable signs of Harappan cultural elements spreading into Europe at the time when Europe was getting thoroughly transformed through its contacts with Indo-Europeans of the Near East and was likely in turn becoming Indo-European. These evidences therefore support the argument for spread of Indo-European languages from the Indo-Iranian Bronze Age civilizations into Europe via the Near Eastern route.

Conclusion

There is still more evidence of Harappan influence in Bronze Age Europe but this is not the time and place to discuss all of it. The above data should be sufficient, however, to show how potentially, the Indo-European languages could have spread from the Indo-Iranian and Harappan domain all the way upto Europe and this therefore constitutes a potential model for OIT which can be further worked upon and refined.