Indo-Aryan migration

History and political background

In the earliest phase of Indo-European studies, Sanskrit was assumed to be very close to (if not identical with) the Proto-Indo-European language. Its geographical location also fitted the then-dominant Biblical model of human migration, according to which Europeans were descended from the tribe of Japhet, which was supposed to have expanded from Mount Ararat after the Flood. Iran and northern India seemed to be likely early areas of settlement for the Japhetites.

In the course of the 19th century, as the field of historical linguistics progressed, and Bible-based models of history were abandoned, it became clear that Sanskrit could no longer be given priority. In line with late 19th century ideas, an Aryan 'invasion' was made the vehicle of the language transfer. Max Muller estimated the date to be around 1500–1200 BC, which is also supported by more recent scholars.

The Indus Valley civilization, discovered in the 1920s, was unknown to 19th century scholars. The discovery of the Harappa and Mohenjo-daro sites changed the theory from an invasion of implicitly advanced Aryan people on an aboriginal population to an invasion of nomadic barbarians on an advanced urban civilization, an argument associated with the mid-20th century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. The decline roughly contemporaneous to the proposed migration movement was seen initially as an independent confirmation of these early suggestions (compare the causal relations between the decline of the Roman Empire and the Germanic Migration Period).

Among the archaeological signs claimed by Wheeler to support the theory of an invasion are the many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-daro. They were interpreted by Wheeler as victims of a conquest of the city, but Wheeler's interpretation is no longer accepted by many scholars (e.g. Bryant 2001). Wheeler himself expressed no certainty, but wrote, in a famous phrase, that "Indra stands accused".

In the later 20th century, ideas were refined, and so now migration and acculturation are seen as the methods whereby Indo-Aryan spread into northwest India around 1700 BCE. These changes are exactly in line with changes in thinking about language transfer in general, such as the migration of the Greeks into Greece (between 2100 and 1600 BCE), or the Indo-Europeanization of Western Europe (between 2200 and 1300 BCE).