Part of the prestigious Debate series, this book brings together aa selection of pioneering essays. The introduction spells out the extremely topical Aryan debate. The central question behind this selection is, did the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans enter India from the Northwest in 1500 BC, or were they indigenous to India and identical with the people who inhabited the Indus Valley between 2800 and 1500 BC.
This book on the developing arguments concerning the Aryan Invasion Theory consists of adapted versions of papers the author has read:the first at the World Association of Vedic Studies (WAVES)conference on the Indus-Saraswati civilization in Atlanta 1996,the third at the 1996 Annual South Asia conference in Madison,Wisconsin and in a lecture at the Linguistics Department in Madison;the fifth contains material used in author?s paper read at the second WAVES conference in Los Angeles 1998;the second and fourth were read at lectures for the Belgo-Indian Association,Brussels,and at the Etnografisch Museum,Antewerp.
This work studies how Indian scholars have rejected the idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans, by questioning the logic assumptions and methods upon which the theory is based.
"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.
Who were the Aryans? Where did they come from? Did they always live in India? The Aryan problem has been attracting fresh attention in academic, social and political arenas. This book identifies the main traits of Aryan culture and follows the spread of their cultural markers. Using the latest archaeological evidence and the earliest known Indo-European inscriptions on the social and economic features of Aryan society, the distinguished historian, R. S. Sharma, throws fresh light on the current debate on whether or not the Aryans were the indigenous inhabitants of India. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of India and its culture.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire, at its greatest territorial extent under Darius I (r.522–486 BCE), held sway over territory stretching from the Indus River Valley to southeastern Europe and from the western Himalayas to northeast Africa. In this book, Matt Waters gives a detailed historical overview of the Achaemenid period while considering the manifold interpretive problems historians face in constructing and understanding its history. This book offers a Persian perspective even when relying on Greek textual sources and archaeological evidence. Waters situates the story of the Achaemenid Persians in the context of their predecessors in the mid-first millennium BCE and through their successors after the Macedonian conquest, constructing a compelling narrative of how the empire retained its vitality for more than two hundred years (c.550–330 BCE) and left a massive imprint on Middle Eastern as well as Greek and European history.
When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in Selective Remembrances reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, Selective Remembrances shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions. The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in Selective Remembrances will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.
