Who Were the People Who Produced the Rigveda?

Part 5. The Indo-Iranians: Movement and Migration

In our previous post, as part of our continuing exploration of the origin of the Rigvedic Aryans, we took a look at the Avesta, the collection of Zoroastrian scripture from ancient Iran and the remarkable similarity it bears to the Rigveda. The closeness between the language of the Rigveda and of the Avesta indicates that the two share a common ancestral language; this common ancestral language is called Proto-Indo-Iranian or Indo-Iranian; its speakers were the common ancestors of the peoples who composed the Rigveda and the Avesta.

Further, we noted that Indo-Iranian belongs to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language family, and its speakers were a Proto-Indo European people. We also learnt that the common homeland of the Proto-Indo European speakers was the steppe region north of the Caspian and the Black Seas. Around 3000 BCE, after the advent of wheeled vehicles, the Proto-Indo-European speakers began to move out of the Eurasian steppes. They left their common homeland in stages, each leaving group growing ever more distant from the others in time and space and ultimately forming its own distinct cultural and linguistic identity; over the course of several centuries, they spread out across Europe and Asia.

Let us now look specifically at the journey undertaken by the Indo-Iranian speakers— from the Eurasian steppes to the highlands of present-day Iran and thence into the Indian subcontinent across modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan to the plains of the Indus.