The Vedic Aryans refered to themselves as Aryans, but the Vedas do not state that the Aryans 'conquered' the native peoples of India and destroyed their forts. According to David Frawley, author of "Gods, Kings, and Sages", who supports the "out of India" hypothesis, the Vedic Aryans are autochthoutonous to India, that is, they were not part of an invasion of people who came from outside India. Frawley thinks that the Vedic Aryans were fighting among themselves, just like the Battle of Kurukshetra.

According to Michael Witzel it is a mistake to equate the Vedic 'Aryans' with any particular people. The term Aryan refers to speakers of Indo-European and Indo-Iranina languages, and does not signify a race of people. The Vedic Aryans tribes were composed of varied ethnic people.

The term Aryan may mean 'noble' but it can also mean 'plough' or a 'digging stick', as in agriculture. The Vedic Aryans were not the only people to use the term aryan. The historical Buddha, a non-Vedic teacher, described his desciples as Aryans and his teaching as the Arya Dharma. In fact, any teaching which is noble, as opposed to ignoble, is termed aryan. But, whether there was a fight between invaders and indigents or not, one thing is for sure, some people don't take very kindly to others calling themselves 'the noble ones'! Aryan - This tells us nothing; Iran is Aryan, in Persian, and Aryan is Aryan, in Sanskrit.

There is no such thing as the 'Hindu Vedas'. 'Hinduism' is a synthesis of three heterodox and six ortohodx systems and didn't come into existence until the Gupta Age in 300 AD. The Vedic Age, 1500-300 BC, was followed by the Sramana Age of Buddhism and Jainism, then came Brahmanism.

We don't exactly know what the beliefs were of the Iranians who composed the Avesta. Apparently, they believed in the comsumption of a decoction refered to as 'Hoama', which was imbibed much like the Vedic Soma and that they believed in the powers of the supernal dieties of nature such as the sun, storm, dawn, etc.

The Avesta and the Avestan religion was reformed by Zoroaster and the beliefs of that system may have drasticaly altered the original Avestan beliefs. The system of Zoroaster has some striking parallels with the Indian system of Sankhya dualism. It may be that the Indian Sankhya system influenced Zoroaster to alter his system to fit the Indian model.

In the view of Sir Colin Renfrew, the Indo-Aryan alnguage dispersion occured as a result of trade and agriculture, and not by an migration of masses people out of India or into India. According to Michael Witzel "Socio-linguistic theories include the development of Prot-Indo-European as a sort of camp language (another Urdu so to speak), a new Pidgin based on diverse original languages that evetually spread beyond its own rather limited boundaries, for example with the introduction of horsebased pastoralism" (Witzel 30).

Once again, there were no 'ancient Hindus'; that is a misnomer - the term Hindu is a modern one. It has now been established that the Vedic Aryans came from Iran. They may have originaly come from around the Caucasus area, or they may have come from the Ural Mountains.

According to Sir Colin Renfrew, the Indo-European languages spread by a process of difussion along with the spread of agriculture. There was no large scale movement of people from one area to another. It's obvious that the people who composed the Rig Veda forgot where they originally came from. If this seems surprising, consider the fact that the Vedic Aryans apparently forgot what were the ingrediants of Soma, which was their main ritual and belief!

Go figure.

According to the Rig Veda the Vedic Aryans came from the Land of the Seven Rivers, that is, India. Broadly speaking, the Indo-European and Indo-Iranian language group includes Celtic, (Gaulish, Irish, Welsh, Breton, etc.) since the La Tene Iron Age, 500-1 B.C.; Italic (Latin and the Romance languages, etc.); the Germanic languages (Scandanavian, English, Dutch, German, etc.); the Baltic languages (Old Prussian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.); the Slavic languages (Polish, Chezh, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukranian, Albanian, etc.); Greek (from the Bronze Age circa 1300 B.C.); Armenian (1900 B.C.); Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Old Persian, Avestan) and Tocharian of Chinese Turestan (Fagan 563).

Work cited:

"The Oxford Companion to Archaelogy"
Edited by Brian M. Fagan
Oxford University Press, 1996

"Autochthonous Indians?"
Out of India and Aryan Invasion Theories
By Michael Witzel
Harvard University

Other titles of interest:

"Gods, Kings, and Sages"
Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization
By David Frawley
Passage Press, 1991

A rebuttal from Michael Wetzel:

Frawley: "The [Rigveda] refers to how the Maruts, the wind-gods, bring the waters of the rain from the ocean (RV V.55.5)."

Wetzel: This is more difficult to understand, unless one makes the Rigvedic Sarasvati flow right into the Arabian Sea, which is not the case (R. Mughal, Ancient Cholistan 1997). The southwest monsoon brings rain from the Bay of Bengal but in Gujarat (and the peninsula also) from the Arabian Sea. Did the Rigvedic people, who do not mention Gujarat, the Deccan or Bengal, hear of the ocean from their neighbours? — However, the Maruts have been explained as mar-vat "blowing from the sea" (mar/maru, Latin mare `sea', Engl. mere). They appear in Near Eastern sources of c. 1500 BCE as the Marut(t)as (K. Balkan, Kassitenstudien, 1954), along with other pre-Rigvedic words (Witzel 1999). This may reflect the earlier habitat at the Caspian/Aral seas, from where they would have brought rain (Avesta: Yasht 8. 32-34). — While clouds may seem to rise from any large body of water, the concept of the ocean as origin of the rain clouds is found only in post-Rigvedic texts. The Maruts could also bring rain from the world-rimming ocean or from beyond the sky (Lueders 1951-9). Frawley's translation is ahistorical (rain concept, sea-going Sarasvati) and thus not compelling.

Read more::

'Gods, Kings, and Sages'
By David Frawley
Morson, 1991
http://tinyurl.com/2wo5cg

Philology vanished: Frawley's Rigveda — II:
http://tinyurl.com/2wyxfx