[kragen]

The Rig Veda is only 3000–3500 years old, contrary to folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included a lot of warfare, mostly nomads living in tents, without writing.

How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?

And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.

Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.

[philwelch]

I think it’s not so much that the Rigveda by itself gives us a direct insight into Proto-Indo-European culture, but rather that if we compare it to Western texts it can help us reconstruct elements of a shared ancestral culture, or at least a shared ancestral language (from which we can perhaps infer something about culture).

[kragen]

Certainly. But what I was commenting on was the claim that, because "there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions," we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time." I don't think that conclusion is justified.

[wqaatwt]

> we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.

Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a generation or two for some individuals to get from the steppe to e.g. Britain.

[empath75]

I don't think that's different from what I said. Surely there was a lot of migration. I think the evidence is that wasn't a big bang migration, but rather a series of smaller, disconnected migrations.

[wqaatwt]

Well I specifically disagreed with “wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time”. So it would seem it’s quite different from what you said. If you happen to live in the Pontic Steppe for most of your life yet your e.g. grandchildren are born in Britain that’s quite noticeable.

[philwelch]

What about centaurs? One theory about the centaur myth is that it originated from the confused perceptions of a culture that had never seen men on horseback being suddenly invaded by steppe nomads.

[kragen]

It's widely believed, but the only sources we have for these confused perceptions within written history are possibly-unreliable accounts of how the Aztecs perceived the Spaniards. In particular, I think the Mycenaean Greeks from which we get the best-known versions of the centaur myth were descendants of the Proto-Indo-European horseback-riding steppe nomads we're talking about here.

As I understand it, the Bronze-Age Minoan civilization spoke an unrelated language (as evidenced by Linear A) and has a material culture relatively continuous with Neolithic Crete, not imported from the Kurgan culture. They would have been the ones experiencing the steppe-nomad-descendant invasion, the steppe nomad descendants in question being the Mycenaeans around 01450 BCE, who were at that point millennia removed from both the steppes and nomadism but presumably still rode horses at least sometimes.

[FlyingSnake]

I’m not sure if you’re talking about my comment, but I didn’t make that claim. I simply asserted that Rigveda might be not a good source of data if we’re looking for evidence of a migration.

[kragen]

No, I was talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43005206, the ancestral comment containing the phrases I quoted from it, between quote marks.

The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrate population replacement on its own, but lacking Starlink or even homing pigeons, some kind of migration was clearly involved.

[FlyingSnake]

Ah ok. I agree with you.

The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened.

All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.

[kragen]

Do we know it's steppe ancestry because of DNA comparisons with Kurgan grave DNA, or from some other evidence? To me it seems a priori difficult to know where a gene hails from originally.

[singularity2001]

The actual surviving texts are even less than 2000 years old. one just beliefs that the oral tradition was written down pretty unaltered but that's questionable in my opinion

[empath75]

There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying it and reciting it well past the point where they even understood what many of the words meant any more, and they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas about how the sounds themselves carried religious power, divorced of any meaning. That's not to say that they didn't understand it at all, but surely if it were going to be altered, they would have updated the language to something more understandable at some point. Instead they wrote commentaries about the text, reinterpreting it over time.

It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-translated and the connection to other indo-european cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.

[singularity2001]

So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?

[prox]

You also have to remember the context in which the “chants” were passed down. It is better to see the Rig Vedas and the Vedas as a ritual manual for doing a successful rite. And the success of the rite was paramount. One wrong action, one wrong word would spell disaster for the efficacy of the whole endeavor. People prepared for a long time to do the ritual.

You had several priestly functions, like the Hotar, who recites the invocations of the Veda, and there is also the Brahman. The Brahman checks if everything is done to precision and no mistakes are made. If there are, they need to do corrections.

This is another reason why one can say it has been passed down without much change. There is a critical edition by scholars that reconstructs the changes in meter that might have occurred, but nothing else.

[kragen]

No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.

[singularity2001]

am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me different articles? According to my Internet the oldest surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.

[elureleahcim]

The oldest written copy may be from 1040, but this is a written copy of a written copy of a written copy of ... etc, going back another millennia or so, before we get to the oral tradition.

[empath75]

The Rig Veda was written down thousands of years ago.

[Justta]

Proof that oral tradition started 2000 years before it was written?

[kragen]

Probably more like 1000–1500. There is an extensive academic literature on the topic.

[prox]

I have been reading a LOT on the topic. The date ranges usually from 1700-1200, mostly skewing towards 1700-1500. Mostly they date it based on stylistic reasons and things mentioned in them, that seem to correlate with those timeframes.

[kragen]

1700–1500 BCE, for the original composition?

Any recommendations for an overview of the field?

[wqaatwt]

> events in early 10th century France

Were there such events?

> How much effort do

Not a lot. Since they don’t need to because of writing. As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.

Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

[kragen]

> Were there such events? [That is, events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf]

There certainly were; quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_Normandy (28 August 0932 – 20 November 0996):

> Richard either introduced feudalism into Normandy or he greatly expanded it. By the end of his reign, the most important Norman landholders held their lands in feudal tenure.

Normandy, as you may or may not know, is in France.

Then, a century later, his great-grandson, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, subjugating the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, et al., under a French-speaking noble elite. If Jarl Rikard had been cut down by bandits in his youth, or had merely failed to enlist the Norman landholders' swords under his banner (and that of his son, grandson, and great-grandson), the Norman invasion would not have happened. Similarly, if Richard's son Richard had been unable to escape from the court of King Louis IV in 0946, or unable to then win back Normandy from the king by force of arms, his grandson William would have been in no position to conquer—and it is unlikely that the subdivided Duchy would have been able to raise an army to successfully invade England, a feat that has not been repeated in the ensuing 959 years. And so on.

> Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

Yes, your comment was written in reply to a comment naming one of the most surprising examples of such preservation, as a result of non-literate societies, as you said, "put[ting] put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions". Nevertheless, they seem to preserve massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

[wqaatwt]

> There certainly were

That’s rather indirect. But you do have a point.

However we do know quite a bit about those events? So any English speaker who cares can learn about them.

> How much effort do they typically devote

Well unlike illiterate societies they don’t need to because of books.

> massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

Well obviously, we can’t really compare them with more literate societies. Then again we’re just very lucky that there was no complete societal collapse in the Greco-Roman world since the 500-600s BC. or so. Some highly literate civilizations like Carthaginians or the Etruscans were effectively entirely erased because nobody bothered to copy their texts).

The problem with oral traditions is that they can preserve knowledge of events that might have happened > 500 years ago (e.g. Homer describes cities, weapons and other aspects of pre Bronze age collapse Mycenaean civilization but it’s all intermixed with contemporary(Greek dark age) stuff and it’s very hard to separate fact from fiction (even ignoring the supernatural bits).

[kragen]

I agree with everything in your comment except for your description of the Etruscans :-)

What I was trying to get at is that, by the time the Rig Veda was composed, the diaspora from the steppes was over a thousand years into the past. You wouldn't expect the composers of the Rig Veda to necessarily know anything about it to be able to mention it. Instead, you'd expect them to know even less about the migrations of their nation from the steppes than modern English-speakers know about Jarl Rikard. So the fact that the Rig Veda doesn't mention any long migrations is (almost) no evidence that the migrations didn't happen, nor that they were in any sense gradual. Especially since, unlike Homer, it barely mentions historical events at all—it's almost entirely supernatural bits.