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Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples [Proceedings of the British Academy No Indo-Iran J (2007) 50: 173–182 DOI 10.1007/s10783-008-9053-6 BOOK REVIEW Sims-Williams, Nicholas (Ed.): Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples [Proceedings of the British Academy No. 116] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, viii + 296 pp., 8 plates, numerous figures. ISBN 0-19-726285-6. £29.50 Almut Hintze © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 One of the greatest iranists of the twentieth century, Professor Sir Harold Walter Bai- ley, who died on 19th January 1996, would have completed the centenary of his birth on 16th December 1999. Nicholas Sims-Williams marked the date with a symposium held in Cambridge, England, at the Ancient India and Iran Trust which Sir Harold had established in 1979 jointly with two academic couples, and where he had lived and worked during the last fifteen years of his life. Sims-Williams brought together a group of leading linguists and archaeologists in the field of Sir Harold’s academic passion: Indo-Iranian languages and peoples. The thirteen articles collected in this volume are based on presentations given at the symposium and not only cover a wide range of Indo-Iranian topics but also pay tribute to Sir Harold’s life and work. The conference was sponsored by the British Academy, of which Bailey was a fellow for over fifty years, and its proceedings appeared in 2002, the year of the Academy’s own centenary. On the day that would have been Sir Harold’s one hundredth birthday, his dis- tinguished pupil, the late Ronald E. Emmerick, delivered the first Sir Harold Bailey Memorial Lecture, which Bailey himself had endowed at the Oriental Faculty in the University of Cambridge. The lecture, entitled “Hunting the hapax: Sir Harold W. Bailey (1899–1996)”, was in memory of the great scholar and constitutes the first contribution (pp.1–17) to this volume. Emmerick, who also published a detailed ac- count of his teacher’s life (p.1), discusses some of Bailey’s findings that have re- mained unchallenged. They include his connection of Khotanese s´sanda´ a¯- with Av. spn. ta- and of Khot. s´sandr´ amat¯ a-¯ with Av. spn. ta-¯ armaiti-¯ (pp.6–9). He also con- siders views held by Bailey that are unlikely to stand the test of time, in particular the A. Hintze () School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Thornaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK e-mail: [email protected] 174 A. Hintze equation of the Khotanese hapax legomena ttaira and haraysä with Av. taera-¯ ‘peak’ and hara-¯ brz- respectively (pp.12–15). Emmerick emphasizes the enormous and pioneering contribution to Iranian studies made by Bailey’s transcriptions and inter- pretations of Khotanese texts and fragments. In his article “Archaeological models and Asian Indo-Europeans” (pp.19–42) James P. Mallory distinguishes five different ways of accounting for prehistoric lin- guistic dispersals: the continuity, discontinuity, geographical, cultural and contact models (pp.19–21). He points out that Indo-Iranian dispersals have to rely on “se- quencing a series of independent ... cultures into a common linguistic trajectory” (p.21). On the basis of archaeological records he distinguishes four broad geograph- ical zones of IIr. core areas and reviews the evidence for IIr. languages within them (pp.23–32). He proposes a unified model according to which the four zones consti- tuted a geographical and chronological sequence of IIr. dispersals. Zone 1 is the area of the IIr. proto-language, which during the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE transgressed eastwards into the steppelands of zone 2, passed through the Bactria-Margiana Ar- chaeological Complex (BMAC) of Central Asian oasis farmers in zone 3 and then dispersed southward into zone 4 of Iran and India (p.32f.). Mallory explains the movement of IIr. culture through the BMAC by means of the Kulturkugel black-box model: When passing through that area, although the IIr. steppe tribes adopted its material culture, they not only retained both their own (IIr.) language and social organisation, but also effected a social and linguistic assimilation of the oasis khanates (p.34). Mallory adduces the case of the Ugandan Acholi as a parallel for ethnic and language maintenance. In the light of this Ugandan example, he examines the four-tiered system of social organization which has been postulated for both the Indo-Iranians and the BMAC, and suggests that the former adopted not only “a portion of their most significant religious vocabulary from the BMAC” but also the concept of “their superordinate fourth social tier”, the *dasyu-. The latter provided “a system of co-ordination” between the *dasa¯ -speaking BMAC oasis dwellers and the Central Asian steppe nomads (p.38f.). Asko Parpola’s article entitled “From the dialects of Old Indo-Aryan to Proto- Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian” (pp.43–102) offers a useful survey of the complex linguistic and archaeological data involved in the debate on Indo-Aryan and Iranian origins and dispersals. In three main sections, he discusses “Historical layers of early Old Indo-Aryan” (pp.44–66), “Aryan languages and archaeology” (pp.66–92) and “Non-Aryan linguistic substrata in Vedic” (pp.92–95).1 While some arguments for Mesopotamian influence on Achaemenid culture are compelling (e.g. Parpola suggests that the Zoroastrian winged disc, first attested in Achaemenid glyptics, is an adaptation of the Assyrian winged solar disc, which repre- sented the national god Aššur, p.88f.), it is difficult to accept his view that the worship of “abstract deities”, such as Mitra and Varun.a, Aryaman, Bhaga, Am. sa´ and Daks.a, was adopted “into the ‘Proto-Indo-Aryan’ pantheon of the BMAC from the Assyri- ans” (p.89f.). Since deities representing abstract social and ethical qualities are found in both Indo-Aryan and Iranian, it is likely that they developed independently during 1Only selected aspects of Parpola’s long contribution are discussed here. For a more detailed survey of its contents, see the review by P.O. Skjærvø in Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 2006, p.195f..
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