Indo-Aryan migration

Early Indo-Aryans

The earliest written evidence for an Indo-Aryan language dates to about 1500 BCE and is found in northern Syria in Hittite records regarding one of their neighbors, the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni. In a treaty with the Hittites, the king of Mitanni, after swearing by a series of Hurrian gods, swears by the gods Indara, Mitraśil, Naśatianna and Uruvanaśśil, who correspond to the Vedic gods Indra, Mitra, Nāsatya and Varuṇa. Contemporary equestrian terminology, as recorded in a horse-training manual whose author is identified as "Kikkuli the Mitannian" contains Indo-Aryan loanwords. The personal names and gods of the Mitanni aristocracy also bear traces of Indo-Aryan. In 1960, Paul Thieme demonstrated to the satisfaction of most scholars that this vocabulary was specifically Indo-Aryan, as opposed to Iranian or Indo-Iranian. Because of this association of Indo-Aryan with horsemanship and the Mitanni aristocracy, it is generally presumed that, after superimposing themselves as rulers on a native Hurrian-speaking population about the 15th-16th centuries BCE, Indo-Aryan charioteers were absorbed into the local population and adopted the Hurrian language.

Brentjes argues that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian, eastern European, or Caucasian origin in the Mitannian area and associates with an Indo-Aryan presence the peacock motif found in the Middle East from before 1600 BCE and possible as long ago as 2100 BCE.

However, received opinion rejects the possibility that the Indo-Aryans of Mitanni came from the Indian subcontinent as well as the possibility that the Indo-Aryans of the Indian subcontinent came from the territory of Mitanni, leaving migration from the north the only likely scenario.

There were also tribes (the Maiotes and Sindoi/Indoi) that spoke Indo-Aryan languages in the Ukraine. Kretschmer (1944) saw this as proof for the Pontic homeland hypothesis.