A Pan-Aryan website corrects their errors? K. E. Eduljee and the Aryan Lapis Lazuli Lie

  Dear K. E. Eduljee: 

Strabo in Geographia 11.8.2 states: "But the best known of the nomads (Saka) are those who took away Bactriana from the Greeks, I mean the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari (Tarim basin, Khotan),
http://www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/saka/saka4.htm
But that is not what Strabo stated - he made no reference to the Tarim Basin as the Tochari he referred to lived in Bactria.

These people were called "Tocharian" by late-19th century scholars who identified them with the Tókharoi described by ancient Greek sources as inhabiting Bactria.

Please correct this error,
thanks,
drew hempel, M.A.

Now "corrected"?

Aryan Saka, Scythia & Scythians - Zoroastrian Heritage

www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/saka/saka4.htm

Strabo in Geographia 11.8.2 states (translation by Jones, our notes in []): "But the best known of the nomads [Saka] are those who took away Bactriana from the Greeks, I mean the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari [commonly thought as originating in Tarim Basin, Khotan], and Sacarauli [see Sarikoli, the language spoken in Tashkurgan ...

Nope it's still not corrected:

File:Afanasevo provisional.png

The geographic area the Afanasevo culture covered

J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair argue that the Tocharian languages were introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north. The Afanasevo culture (c. 3500 – 2500 BC) displays cultural and genetic connections with the Indo-European-associated cultures of the Central Asian steppe yet predates the specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture (c. 2000 – 900 BC) enough to isolate the Tocharian languages from Indo-Iranian linguistic innovations like satemization.^[8][9]
 
http://infogalactic.com/info/Tocharians

So Tocharians were Indo-Europeans but not Aryans.

Dear K. E. Eduljee: Strabo is referring to a different people than the Tarim Basin.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages

Identifying the authors with the Tokharoi people of ancient Bactria (Tokharistan), early authors called these languages "Tocharian". Although this identification is now generally considered mistaken, the name has stuck.

. Ptolemy's Tócharoi are often associated by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan empire.^[8][9] It is now clear that these people actually spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, rather than the language of the Tarim manuscripts, so the term "Tocharian" is considered a misnomer.^[10][11][12]

So the OP erroneously claims an "old Aryan empire" that includes the Tarim basin mummies.
 
But the Tarim basin mummies are definitely not Aryan!
 
(notice I didn't enlarge the font - for extra emphasis I kept the font normal size).
 

 
 
Now notice the Indo-Iranian (i.e. Aryan) is way down on the bottom while Tocharian is way up on the top.
 
If you raid Victor Mair's pdf - I'll link it
 
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=15&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwifhoKzuY7VAhXGzlQKHZAsAz4QFgh3MA4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsino-platonic.org%2Fcomplete%2Fspp259_tocharian_origins.pdf&usg=AFQjCNH-ruGF4sLDg3JgpNwD6MjG3BlfAg
 
So he says any Iranian (Aryan) influence with the Tarim Basin would not have been until 1000 BCE whereas the Tarim Basim - as the image shows - goes back to 3300 BCE.
 

So look at this image - it shows how Iranian (Aryan) is a later (I chose the format option of italicization instead of enlargement, I hope that is o.k. with the mods) "encirclement" of the Tokharians of the Tarim Basin.
 

  Quote

The critical element here is that there seems to be one issue that does receive widespread linguisitic support: Tocharian is in no way closely related the languages of its geographical neighbors, Indo-Iranian (Meillet 1914; Pinault 2002, 244).

 
I'm quoting Victor Mair's pdf
 
Emphasis of changing the font and bolding it is not in the original - so please don't harp on me mods for making that formatting change.

Dear K.E. Eduljee: Thank you for editing your quote of Strabo. You also state this incorrectly as being Aryan trade when in fact the "Aryans" did not trade lapis Lazuli until much later. Please correct this error:

Aryan Trade and Zoroastrianism. Silk Roads - Zoroastrian Heritage

www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/aryans/trade.htm

Jump to Badakshan Lapis Lazuli - By the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, Badakshan lapis lazuli (stone of blue) was being traded in countries as ...

Notice how there are no mentions of Aryans in this academic link on Lapis lazuli trade? https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/lithic-technology-behind-the-ancient-lapis-lazuli-trade/

And see how the Aryans moved into the area much later then second half of 4th millennium BCE?

 

  Quote

Deh Morasi Gundai was eventually abandoned about 1500 BC, perhaps because of the westward shift of the river on which it was built. Mundigak continued another 500 years. Two successive invasions by a nomadic tribe from the north forced the inhabitants to abandon the city after more than 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/afgh02-02enl.html
 

  Quote

Aryan Migration

After 2400 BC, throughout Central Asia the growth of urban societies was severely challenged. Within a span of some three hundred years, none of the major centers that developed during the first half of the 3rd millennium were still occupied. The precise reasons for this "urban collapse" remain a mystery. Yet toward the end of 3rd millennium, across northern Afghanistan and southern Turkemenistan and Uzbekistan, a series of events fueled the rise of cities and settlements that was to have a major impact.

Large numbers of nomadic invaders or migrants, pastoral citiless people travelling on horseback and by chariot, long known (conveniently, perhaps wrongly) as Aryans (derived from the Sanskrit word for "nobles"), migrated south from the Caspian Sea region across the Oxus (present-day Amu Darya) River to present-day Afghanistan during the late early 2nd millennium (by circa 1700 BC).

But this Lapis Lazuli trade was not "Aryan" until a couple thousand years later. So it is factually incorrect to claim that is Aryan trade at that early history.
 

  Quote

Deh Morasi Gundai was eventually abandoned about 1500 BC, perhaps because of the westward shift of the river on which it was built. Mundigak continued another 500 years. Two successive invasions by a nomadic tribe from the north forced the inhabitants to abandon the city after more than 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/afgh02-02enl.html


Dear K. E. Eduljee: Thank again for editing your previous error and please correct your false claim about an early Aryan trade in blue stone: 
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SxXz1ipGI8MJ:languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/%3Fp%3D33410&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0
 

  Quote

Archaeological evidence suggests that Middle Bronze Age Andronovo descendants of the Early Bronze Age horse-based, pastoralist and chariot-using Sintashta culture, located in the grasslands and river valleys to the east of the Southern Ural Mountains and likely speaking a proto-Indo-Iranian language, probably expanded east and south into Central Asia by ~3.8 ka.

 
3.8 ka = 1800 BCE which is the 2nd millennium BCE not 3rd millennium.

  Quote

Archaeological evidence suggests that Middle Bronze Age Andronovo descendants of the Early Bronze Age horse-based, pastoralist and chariot-using Sintashta culture, located in the grasslands and river valleys to the east of the Southern Ural Mountains and likely speaking a proto-Indo-Iranian language, probably expanded east and south into Central Asia by ~3.8 ka.

 
3.8 ka = 1800 BCE which is the 2nd millennium BCE not 3rd millennium.

Genetic evidence for the spread of Indo-Aryan languages

June 22, 2017 @ 9:19 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and genetics

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My own investigations on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age peoples of Eastern Central Asia (ECA) began essentially as a genetics cum linguistics project back in the early 90s.  That was not long after the extraction of mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) from ancient human tissues and its amplification by means of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) became possible.
 
By the mid-90s I had grown somewhat disenchanted with ancient DNA (aDNA) studies because the data were insufficient to determine the origins and affiliations of various early groups with satisfactory precision, neither spatially nor temporally.  Around the same time, I began to realize that other types of materials, such as textiles and metals, provided powerful diagnostic evidence.
By the late 90s, combining findings from all of these fields and others, I was willing to advance the hypothesis that some of the mummies of ECA, especially the earliest ones dating to around 1800 BC, may have spoken a pre-proto-form of Tocharian when they were alive (some people think it's funny or scary to imagine that mummies once could speak).  This hypothesis was presented at an international conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in April, 1996, which was attended by more than a hundred archeologists, linguists, geneticists, physical anthropologists, textile specialists, metallurgists, geographers, climatologists, historians, mythologists, and ethnologists — including more than half a dozen of the world's most distinguished Tocharianists.  It was most decidedly a multidisciplinary conference before it became fashionable to call academic endeavors by such terms (see " Xdisciplinary" [6/14/17]).  The papers from the conference were collected in this publication:

Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).  2 vols.

See also:

J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. (2000). Thames & Hudson. London.

"Early Indo-Europeans in Xinjiang" (11/19/08)

It is only very recently, within the last ten years or so, that Y-chromosome analysis has been brought into play for the study of ancient DNA.  See Toomas Kivisild, "The study of human Y chromosome variation through ancient DNA", Human Genetics, 2017; 136(5): 529–546; published online 2017 Mar 4. doi:  10.1007/s00439-017-1773-z.*  Since only males carry the Y-chromosome, this has made it possible to trace the patriline of individuals.  This, coupled with the massive accumulation and detailed analysis of modern DNA with increasing sophistication and the rise of the interdisciplinary (!) field referred to as genomics, has made studies on the genetics of premodern people, including their origins, migrations, and affinities, far more exacting than it was during the 90s when I did the bulk of my investigations on the early inhabitants of the Tarim Basin.
Now it is possible to draw on the results of genetics research to frame and more reliably solve questions about the development of languages from their homeland to the far-flung places where they subsequently came to be spoken.  One such inquiry is described in this article:

Tony Joseph, "How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate", The Hindu (6/16/17).

It is significant that this substantial article appeared in The Hindu, since there is a strong bias against such conclusions among Indian nationalists (see "Indigenous Aryans").  It begins thus:

New DNA evidence is solving the most fought-over question in Indian history. And you will be surprised at how sure-footed the answer is, writes Tony Joseph

The thorniest, most fought-over question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India sometime around 2,000 BC – 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.

Joseph's paper is informed, sensitive, balanced, and nuanced.  This is responsible science journalism.
The scientific paper itself, “A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals” by Marina Silva, Marisa Oliveira, Daniel Vieira, Andreia Brandão, Teresa Rito, Joana B. Pereira, Ross M. Fraser, Bob Hudson, Francesca Gandini, Ceiridwen Edwards, Maria Pala, John Koch, James F. Wilson, Luísa Pereira, Martin B. Richards, and Pedro Soares, was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology (3/23/17) ( DOI: 10.1186/s12862-017-0936-9).
I'm skeptical of many of the claims put forward by geneticists concerning origins and dispersals, not just about humans, but also about horses, dogs, cats, plants, and so forth.  This study, however, is both cautious and solid.  Moreover, it fits well with the archeological evidence (more below).
Here are two key paragraphs from the scientific paper (numbers in square brackets are to accessible references):

Although some have argued for co-dispersal of the Indo-Aryan languages with the earliest Neolithic from the Fertile Crescent [88, 89], others have argued that, if any language family dispersed with the Neolithic into South Asia, it was more likely to have been the Dravidian family now spoken across much of central and southern India [12]. Moreover, despite a largely imported suite of Near Eastern domesticates, there was also an indigenous component at Mehrgarh, including zebu cattle [85, 86, 90]. The more widely accepted “Steppe hypothesis” [91, 92] for the origins of Indo-European has recently received powerful support from aDNA evidence. Genome-wide, Y-chromosome and mtDNA analyses all suggest Late Neolithic dispersals into Europe, potentially originating amongst Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya pastoralists that arose in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe by ~5 ka, with expansions east and later south into Central Asia in the Bronze Age [53, 76, 93, 94, 95]. Given the difficulties with deriving the European Corded Ware directly from the Yamnaya [96], a plausible alternative (yet to be directly tested with genetic evidence) is an earlier Steppe origin amongst Copper Age Khavlyn, Srednij Stog and Skelya pastoralists, ~7-5.5 ka, with an infiltration of southeast European Chalcolithic Tripolye communities ~6.4 ka, giving rise to both the Corded Ware and Yamnaya when it broke up ~5.4 ka [12].

An influx of such migrants into South Asia would likely have contributed to the CHG component in the GW [VHM:  genome-wide] analysis found across the Subcontinent, as this is seen at a high rate amongst samples from the putative Yamnaya source pool and descendant Central Asian Bronze Age groups. Archaeological evidence suggests that Middle Bronze Age Andronovo descendants of the Early Bronze Age horse-based, pastoralist and chariot-using Sintashta culture, located in the grasslands and river valleys to the east of the Southern Ural Mountains and likely speaking a proto-Indo-Iranian language, probably expanded east and south into Central Asia by ~3.8 ka. Andronovo groups, and potentially Sintashta groups before them, are thought to have infiltrated and dominated the soma-using Bactrian Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Turkmenistan/northern Afghanistan by 3.5 ka and possibly as early as 4 ka. The BMAC came into contact with the Indus Valley civilisation in Baluchistan from ~4 ka onwards, around the beginning of the Indus Valley decline, with pastoralist dominated groups dispersing further into South Asia by ~3.5 ka, as well as westwards across northern Iran into Syria (which came under the sway of the Indo-Iranian-speaking Mitanni) and Anatolia [12, 95, 97, 98].

The spread of R1a into South Asia had earlier been securely documented in Peter A. Underhill, et al., "The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a", European Journal of Human Genetics (2015) 23, 124–131; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.50; published online 26 March 2014.
The precise coalescence of R1a within South Asia was identified in Monika Karmin, et al., "A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture", Genome Research (2015); doi: 10.1101/gr.186684.11; published in advance March 13, 2015 (supplemental material available electronically).
This kind of male migration theory is proposed with arguments based on archeological evidence in the last pages of H.-P. Francfort, “La civilisation de l'Oxus et les Indo-Iraniens et Indo-Aryens”, in: Aryas, Aryens et Iraniens en Asie Centrale (Collège de France. Publications de l'Institut de Civilisation Indienne, vol. 72), G. Fussman, J. Kellens, H.-P. Francfort, et X. Tremblay (eds.) (Paris:  Diffusion de Boccard, 2005) pp. 253-328.  The complete paper is on academia website.
Michael Witzel has favored this, the (Indo-)Aryan Migration view, on linguistic and textual grounds since at least 1995 and was constantly criticized for saying so. See his papers of 1995, 2001:

"Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts."  EJVS (May 2001) pdf.

"Early Indian History: Linguistic and Textual Parameters."  In: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia. Ed. G. Erdosy (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 1995), 85-125; —  Rgvedic history: poets, chieftains and politics, loc. cit. 307-352 combined pdf (uncorrected).

and the substrate paper of 1999:

"Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages." Mother Tongue (1999, extra number) pdf

Some relevant Language Log posts:

"Dating Indo-European" (12/10/03)

"The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/09)

"Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European" (1/10/09)

"More on IE wheels and horses " (1/10/09)

"Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence" (1/13/09)

"The place and time of Proto-Indo-European: Another round" (8/24/12)

"Irish DNA and Indo-European origins" (12/31/15)

*For those who are interested in the development of aDNA Y-chromosome studies beginning in the 2000s, I have some additional documentation and several relevant papers that I can send to you.
[Thanks to Richard Villems, Toomas Kivisild, and Peter Underhill]
June 22, 2017 @ 9:19 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and genetics
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