Talk:Pirak

Surplus

Unquotable, contextless, confusing. Undue promotion of a fringe theory Ficaia (talk) 02:31, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

• Indeed, from the Indus eastwards, we lose track of this Bactrian invasion. Sergent himself admits as much:
  “For the sequel, archaeology offers little help. The diggings in India for the 2nd millennium BC reveal a large number of regional cultures, generally rather poor, and to decree what within them represents the Indo-Aryan or the indigenous contribution would be arbitrary. If Pirak (…) represents the start of Indian culture, there is in the present state of Indian archaeology no ‘post-Pirak’ except at Pirak itself, which lasted till the 7th century BC: the site remained, along with a few very nearby ones, isolated.” So, the Bactrian invaders who arrived through the Bolan pass and established themselves in and around the border town of Pirak, never crossed the Indus.
  • Bernard Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.246-247., as quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• As the excavator of Pirak, the only well-preserved second millennium B.C.E. site from the area (which he dates from 1700 to 700 B.C.E.), Jarrige (1985) finds a "town" of some size with "elaborate architec- ture" and evidence of a more intense level of irrigation and cultivation than occurred in the third millennium B.C.E.: "Just the opposite of that which has been presumed on the basis of negative evidence" (46). In view of the fact that Pirak is widely accepted as her- alding the Indo-Aryans due to the discovery of the horse there, my previous remarks about Indo-Aryans and urban centers are reinforced. Those wishing to consider Pirak as evidence of nomad Indo-Aryan pastoralists must address the fact that it was "a town of some size with elaborate architecture" that increased the agricultural productivity of the area.
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• Jarrige's study of continuity and change concludes that the people living in the Kachi plain during the second millennium B.C.E. undoubtedly experienced the major economic transformations of the time yet maintained significant elements of cultural continuity and conservatism from the early third millennium B.C.E. and earlier. He underscores the continuity aspect of the area by comparing the ancient ruins of residential buildings from the excavations at Pirak with the very recent ruins of a house deserted by Hindus at partition in the same district. The resemblance is striking, while the samples of cooking pots between the two periods seem almost identical. Regarding the transformations, he doubts whether every newly attested item in the Kachi archaeological record of the second millennium B.C.E. could be attributed to an influx of new peoples, "since the processes . . . are too complex to be attributed to the arrival of invaders who at the same time would have had to have introduced rice from the Ganges, sorghum from the Arabian Gulf, and camels and horses from Central Asia" (Jarrige 1983, 56).
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• Suffice it to quote Elst who has surveyed all the literature and says of B. Sergent's 1997 Genèse de l’ Inde, "the Indo-Aryan invasion doesn’t get farther than Pirak in Baluchistan” (1999:320).
  • quoted from Kazanas, N. (2002). Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 30(3-4), 275-334.

• To take a single example here, some scholars decided that the Pirak culture, which emerged around 1800 BCE in the plains of Baluchistan, is the best representative of the Aryan intrusion. However, Jarrige, who directed excavations in the region, found that none of the transformations happening there in the early second millennium BCE, including the introduction of summer crops such as rice and millets (especially sorghum or jowar, in addition to the traditional winter crops of wheat and barley), ‘can be explained in the context of invasions of semi-nomadic peoples coming from the [Central Asian] steppes. … How could this series of transformations be seriously attributed to Indo-Aryan invaders? … Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research … enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups’ (Jarrige 1995, pp. 24, 21). Regrettably, such well-informed views have been brushed aside in the desperate but vain search for material traces of those ‘Aryan groups’.
  • Jarrige J-F 1995 Du néolithique à la civilisation de l’Inde ancienne. Arts Asiatiques L 5–29
  • in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.

• In the case of Pirak, however, it must be admitted that the cultural innovations do not appear to be clearly Indo-European. Perhaps there was only indirect contact via other ethnic groups in Seistan.
  • Hock, H. H. (2002). Wem gehört die Vergangenheit?: Früh-und Vorgeschichte und indische Selbstwahrnehmung. (244)