East Europe as a proto-homeland of the Indo-Europeans - страница 4

And finally, many researchers, starting in the 19th century and up to now, it was considered possible to connect the common Indo-European ancestral homeland with Northern or Northeastern Europe on the basis of the continuous development of the anthropological type, the fact that a fair-haired and light-eyed population predominates here, because on the basis of the oldest Indo-European monument – the Rigveda, historical arias were light Hair and blue-eyed.

Nordic type

One of the oldest sources, based on which the researchers considered it possible to suggest the North-East European localization of the Indo-European ancestral home, is the Rig Veda – ritual texts, the design of which most scholars attribute to the second half or middle of 2 thousand BC T. Ya. Elizarenkova believes that many features of this monument indicate the presence of a long preceding period of poetic activity. An outstanding researcher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. B. Tilak correlated the time of creation of the most ancient hymns of the Rig Veda with the Arctic ancestral home of the Aryans and dated them to 6—4 thousand BC, pan-Indo-European period.

The monument to the ancient Iranians «Avesta» is very close to the Rigveda, which most experts date back to the 7th-6th centuries BC, although T. Barrow proposes to postpone the dating until the 11th century BC.

As T. Ya. Elizarenkova notes, the Rigveda and the Avesta are closest in language to each other «primarily in their most ancient parts (the „family“ mandalas of the Rigveda, the gates of the Avesta). The similarity is so great that sometimes both texts look like two variants of one archetext, differing only in different rules of sound correspondence.»

And finally, the basis for the northern localization of the ancestral homeland of the Aryans are the texts of the ancient Indian epos «Mahabharata», which were brought together as a number of researchers, in the 10—5th century BC, but retained a huge amount of very ancient realities. It is no accident that the Mahabharata is called the fifth Veda (in addition to the four main ones: the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharva Veda). In Mahabharata, as in the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda, there are a large number of northern or Arctic realities, the analysis and systematization of which allowed B. Tilak in his 1903 work «The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas» to conclude that the oldest ancestral home of the Aryans was not far from the Arctic Circle. In Russia in 1910, E. Jelachich’s book «The Far North as the Homeland of Humanity» was published, where B. Tilak’s ideas were supported and developed.