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This article is just wrong. First, there were no Aryans in the Steppes; only Proto-Indo-Europeans. A branch of PIEs migrated south and southwest, and ended up in Iran and India. This branch is called the Proto-Indo-Iranians, or the Aryan branch of PIEs. This happened some time before 1500 BCE, because we have evidence of Vedic gods in things like the Mitanni treaties. Regarding the point about Aryans not caring about the content of scripture, this is again wrong. First, the Iranian branch came up with Zoroastrianism, where this deep focus on sounds never happened, and in fact Zoroastrianism is thought to have been the progenitor of the monotheistic view of later Abrahamic religions. Second, the “sounds” of the Vedas are accompanied with actual intricate ritual sacrifices. These ceremonies ran for multiple days, and involved a number of precise steps and timed incantations. Yes, there is a big focus on correct pronunciation of hymns, but these are only granted power by the actual execution of the ritual. The rest of the article talks a lot about a Indo-Aryans constantly viewing life as a struggle between themselves and others. Yes, the scriptures contain a large amount of text on struggles between Arya and non-Arya, but it’s not clear how much of this actually reflects the common person’s reality vs the attempts of priestly composers trying to maintain their hierarchy at the top of the caste system. (The idea is that, priests, being the arbiters of religion, decided what was Aryan and what wasn’t. It was thus in their interest to declare their own knowledge as Aryan, while declaring indigenous religion, or even religion of other PIEs in India, as non-Aryan) |