Notes: Theories of an eastern homeland for Aryans and Indo-Europeans

Some Earliest Traces of the Aryan:
Evidence from the 4th and 3rd Millennium B.C. By: Jahanshah Derakhshani

The Earliest Trace of the Aryan
The early presence of the Aryans in their ancient homeland is verified by loanwords in other languages. In the West, a lot of loanwords have penetrated into the Finno- Ugric, which are dated to the 5th millennium B.C. and are derived from the Indo- Iranian and not from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The linguistic analysis of the early phases of the Indo-Iranian has also demonstrated that the separation of the speakers of this language from the Balts and Slavs took place during the long period of the originating agriculture, and therefore it should be placed in the early 5th millennium B.C. or even earlier. In the East, loanwords from the Proto-Iranian – again not from Indo-European – are attested in Chinese and Korean, which are to be explained by an early penetration of Proto-Iranian people to China and Korea or even by a prehistoric settlement of the Aryans in Korea. The Indo-Aryan – Dravidian relations in the 4th millennium B.C. have also been investigated and considered as possible (see Aryans 3.1). The Aryan (or the so-called “Indo-European”) loanwords in Sumerian are the topic of this article and in the Main Work (NE.Aryans); their presence upon a large scale in Akkadian and other Semitic languages has already been studied.[2] Moreover, most of the geographical names in Syria and Palestine are not Semitic and can be often explained by the Aryan (see Aryans 6.2.1.2; 5.4.2.3). Many geographical names around the Black Sea are Iranian too (see Aryans 6.2.5.5).
As the traces of the Aryan language (and again not Indo-European) was so broadly expanded from Eastern Asia to Eastern Europe already in the 5th millennium B.C., the existence of an older Indo-European proto-language, from which other IE languages, among them the Aryan, had descended much later, namely in early to mid 3rd millennium B.C.,[3] becomes a serious problem. This severe chronological problem, among other things, as well as the fact that no people called themselves “Indo- European”, but the fact that on the contrary the trace of the designation “Aryan” is still extant in almost all languages of this family (see bellow 4.1), has urged the author to discard the unhistorical former term in favour of the latter historical one (see Aryans 3.1). Therefore, all the Indo-European roots listed in the present paper, which are accompanied with an apteryx (non attested), are to be imagined with a question mark.
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Centumization (s > k). The linguists generally proceed from a centum mother language of the “Indo-Europeans”, from which the sat‹m dialects have descended. Some indications speak, however, in favour of the reciprocal phonetic changes, i.e. a sat‹m original form, centumized later. The extension of the centum languages from Europe over Western Iran up to the Tokharians (see Aryans 6.2.3.5) and the east to west spread of the Indo-European languages[4] bear witness to various types of early migration of languages from an eastern homeland in different directions. The fact that the group of eastern languages, conventionally qualified as Aryan, in general does not show signs of a centum group, only means that the Eastern Aryan languages belong to the satem group and not necessarily means that the non-attested Western Aryan languages and dialects did not show once signs of centum features. Those linguistic features, generally unknown to the Eastern Aryan, could have been penetrated into the Western Aryan under an external influence, namely through migrations of foreign peoples, like the case of the Arabization of the New Persian (see Aryans 3.3). Quite the same could have been happened to a part of the Western Aryan, which has become, so to say, “centumized” already in early periods through overlaying of other languages. The trace of a rare centumization in the Iranian linguistic area may be traced still today (see bellow 3.2.1.1). The assumption of an early centumization is corroborated by the fact that the “Indo-European” vocabulary in the Near-Eastern languages very often descends from a sat?m-form, as the following examples show:…
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4.7. Names of peoples and countries
4.7.1. Aratta. In the country Aratta, situated in Eastern Iran[129] and possessing legendary wealth, gold, silver, carneol and lapis lazuli, one could come upon a series of other Iranian elements. The designation of the land itself is Aryan: in the cuneiform texts the OIA rátha-‘wheel, war-chariot’ is rendered as *arata-, like in the Akk.
eratti(ja)nnu ‘part of a weapon?’, probably the wheel of the chariot and the Hittite aratianni ‘chariot equipment, a part of a chariot’, as well as aratiyanni in the texts from Alalakh, which all descend from the Aryan rátha-(see Aryans 5.4.1.24). Besides, it is necessary to take into consideration that initial ‘r’ is usually preceded by an euphonic element ‘a’ in the cuneiform script[130] (cf. the euphonic vocal ‘i’ by (I)nanna, (I)dig(i)na, see above 3.1). Hence after removing this ‘a’, we obtain the original ratta < rátha-. Thus there might be no objections against the cuneiform rendering of rátha-by aratta. The Aryan analogy of Aratta could be seen in. Xvaniratha, the designation of the part of the earth (kaÓvar-) in the middle of the earth, which enclosed the homeland of the Aryans.[131] The possible roots for Xvaniratha can be restored by connecting rátha-‘wheel’ with xvarenah-(= Med. farnah-< IE *sëel ‘sun’), thus ‘wheel of kingly brilliance’, as well as with the Av. hvar-, hence ‘wheel of the sun’. Rátha-and the symbolic description of all parts of the world, in the middle of which Xvaniratha is situated, as the homeland of the Aryans,[132] found its continuation in the Avesta and in the Indian sources.[133] In the list of the countries in the Avesta among the 16 Ahurian countries also ?Chxra is mentioned. Later it became the NP charx ‘wheel’. NP Charx was also the name of a town Khor~s~n, north of Neish~bur,[134] also Òarq not far from Bukh~r~[135], and another place near Ghazn§n.[136] All those names should be understood as the survivals of the term rátha-(Aratta) in Eastern Iran; in spite of the linguistic transformation they have been preserved semantically until the Islamic times. According to HERODOTUS and HELLANICUS the Persians were called also Artaioi (Artaians).[137] Later, the inhabitants of the country Barygaza were mentioned by the Greeks as Arattii, Arachosi and GandarÉi, subdued by the bellicose Bactrians.[138]