Is the Aryan Invasion a Myth?

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Lars Martin Fosse <lmfosse at ONLINE.NO> wrote:
> Nath wrote:
>
> On the other hand, philologists have been known to claim that
> Egyptians were inferior to Steppe people in making spoked wheels
> because the former used only 4 and occationaly 6 spokes, while the
> latter had 18 or more spokes. Somehow, such nonsense seems to
> escape ridicule.
>
> Nath, who ever said a stupid thing like that?

[The gist of what I wrote is true, but refering to the sources,
I see that 18 should be replaced by other numbers, 10 for the
particular one I am going to quote.

I was going to reply off-list, but the repeated assertions that
only linguistics matters here changed my mind. When you start
saying things like ``Andronovo culture was (proto)-Aryan''
or ``Invasions from BMAC brought I-Ir languages into India'',
archaeology matters. When realia of chariots enters the debate
Engineering, or at least carpentary, matters. When you say things
like ``chariots were the tanks of {Bronze Age etc}''
or ``horse-drawn chariots would have struck fear into the
hearts of inhabitants of ancient Near East/Northwest India''
the state of art of wheeled vehicles and comparisons of
ancient horses and hemiones matter.]

Here is a quote from Paropola, ``Deciphering the Indus Script'',
p151., col 2 para 3: ``The horse chariot ... Sintasha cemetry had
two wheels with ten spokes each (fig 8.20) In the ancient Near East
most chariots continued to have only four spokes until aboput 1400 BC.
Thus the chariotry of the early Andronovo of the northern steppes
was more advanced.'' Note the ``thus''.

> The reason why we don't =
> believe in them is that the ancients had no knowledge of the necessary =
> principles, nor the technology to make them.

So, physics and engineering do matter, at times at least.
And we need to point to evidence of metal-working in Andronovo
sites to satisfy Mark Hubey. Not knowing Russian, I have little
ability to read original reports. But isn't there some survey in
English/French/German of Andronovo culture, written >without<
any reference to the ``Aryan problem''?