Iranians and Their Ancestors

Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXIV, 1999

BEYOND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE: IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS

BY Charles BURNEY

David Stronach has never been one to look at Iran alone, tempting as that may be to any archaeologist long familiar with its past. After all, one may hear said, are there not now enough answers to problems in the archaeological record of Iran and relevant textual sources, whether Old Persian, Greek or Assyro-Babylonian? For myself two sites, Tepe Nush-i Jan and Hasanlu, pose questions of particular interest. The first is obviously of special concern still to David Stronach, who seems yet uncommitted to any one interpretation of the Central Temple and its carefully inserted filling of shale chips (Stronach 1984). For me the iconography of the Hasanlu Gold Bowl, whose emergence from the ruins of Burnt Building I in July 1958 I witnessed on first arrival on the site, and which I alone have been enabled to draw “from life”, remains an intriguing enigma. The tombs of Marlik more straight- forwardly demonstrate the interface between the ancient Near East and the northern steppes (Negahban 1983, 1996; Medveskaya 1982: 61; Burney and Lang 1971: 118-20). A search for ethnic contexts may be thought outmoded by some archaeologists, though hardly by historians, linguists or specialists in comparative religion. Linguists in particular seem absorbed, with some obsessed, by the search for Proto-Indo-European and other origins, a quest which can lead into some strange by-ways (Diebold 1992: note 10; Renfrew 1987: 75-98; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 859-60; Narain 1987). The last proposes the Gansu region of China as a homeland! At the same time a wealth of evidence of concern to the archaeologist is there for the asking, if often hidden in a welter of etymological reconstructions with supporting comparative examples. This writer is himself fascinated by aspects of ancient ethnicity, at the same time aware — to employ an artistic metaphor — that the distinct colours of the picture need blending by pulling the brush across the wet 2 CH. BURNEY Fig. 1. Proto-Indo-European, Hurrian and Indo-Iranian habitats. IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 3 paint, as can be done with oils. At the risk of tedium one passage seems worth repeating here, even if not all will agree:

“In the final analysis, ethnic identity is not in any meaningful sense shaped by genes but by cultural identity, where language plays a significant but not necessarily a dominant role. An Indo-Aryan-Hurrian symbiosis has been suggested (Mayrhofer 1966: 29). One linguist even claims (Justins 1992: 450) that “if the Hurrian language … were not so clearly non-Indo-European in its particulars, one would ask if the Hurrians were not more Indo-European than the Hittites. What more can be said?” (Burney 1997: 189).

Though not primarily concerned with the Hurrians, this essay will touch on them, while turning attention principally on those populations to a greater or lesser degree to be termed Iranian. Iranologists have understandably looked to later periods, Achaemenid to Sasanian, to illuminate the dark shadows over the later prehistory of Iran, within and beyond the modern frontiers. There alone may be found the texts they crave. In the quest for origins, however, it is surely safer to rely as far as possible on contemporary and earlier rather than later evidence. Of course later sources have their relevance; but they can also hide many a snare and pitfall, such as entrapped the ageing Rustam and Rakush his steed in their last hour. The Central Temple (alias Fire Temple) of Tepe Nush-i Jan still defies clarification (Roaf and Stronach 1973), whether through comparison with building rites in Mesopotamia (Stronach 1974) or in the setting of the early years of Xerxes (486-465 B.C.), who, alone in the succession of Achaemenid kings, seems to have tried to impose specifically Iranian religious practices (Ghirshman 1976a-b). The Neo-Babylonian date of two Mesopotamian examples of a building rite — with careful filling up of a temple with either soil or sand — precludes any influence on the Fire Temple at Tepe Nush-i Jan. For possible influences we must therefore look elsewhere, to other cultural contexts. One point remains absolutely certain, that the greatest respect was shown and care taken with mudbrick, clay and shale not to damage the altar, walls and decoration of the Fire Temple. Were there to be the slightest hint of a burial there, it might have been legitimate to point to the deliberate filling up of the tombs of the cemetery of Marlik. But that is hardly a parallel; nor were the tombs filled with comparable 4 CH. BURNEY care, damage being caused to bones and grave-goods alike. Much as I myself appreciate any arguable comparisons between Urartu and the civilization of the Medes and Persians (Stronach 1967), the use of false win- dows at Tepe Nush-i Jan and in basalt on Uçkale, the finest section of the more or less contemporary citadel of Çavu≥tepe south-west of Van Kale, built by Sarduri II (764-735 B.C.) (Erzen 1978: fig. 22), constitute a rather tenuous parallel in the contexts of attempts to explain the function and filling in of the Fire Temple. Two facts stand out, so obvious as scarcely to be worthy of repetition. First, this building was beyond serious doubt a temple or shrine; second, the altar equally clearly indicates a fire cult. Arguments for Mesopotamian rather than Iranian inspiration may be thought to be reinforced by the tradition of open-air worship so characteristic of the Iranian people, as recorded by Classical authors including Strabo (15. 3.13-14). Temples and statues were alien to them. Whence, then, this curious architectural phenomenon? Probably it should be seen in part as a product of a settled economy. Certainly the Fire Temple of Tepe Nush-i Jan should not be seen in isolation from the even more massive mudbrick structures on either side. The Medes would hardly have imported bricklayers from the Mesopotamian lowlands at a time when, in the eighth century B.C., they were barely beginning to achieve any political cohesion (Young 1988; Genito 1986). What then of the cult of fire? Here we are on surer, if heavily trodden, ground, if we seek an Iranian context for the Fire Temple at Tepe Nush-i Jan. Yet here I shall turn my back on the conventional wisdom, which looks to comparative evidence at Pasargadae and Naqsh-i Rustam, with further excursions into Parthian and Sasanian times, when the cult — established (we are told) by Zarathustra — became part of the apparatus of the impe- rial state religion. The literature on the topic is far too voluminous to be cited here (e.g. Boyce 1975; Duchesne-Guillemin 1983). The quest for an Iranian background for the fire cult will lead us into the fields of linguistics and comparative religion. First, however, let us note the suggestion of a fire altar in the centre of Burnt Building V, one of the principal structures on the citadel mound of Hasanlu in Period IVC. After a fire dated c. 1100 B.C. this building was used for humbler purposes in Hasanlu IVB (c. 1100-800 B.C.), probably ending its days as a stable. But in the twelfth century B.C. Burnt Building V had as its central feature a brick block with every appearance of an altar, capped by over one hundred layers of burnt IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 5 plaster. A reasonable estimate therefore would be that this altar was in use for over a century (Dyson 1989b: 114-5). Of course these burnt layers of plaster do not provide as irrefutable evidence as the fire bowl of Tepe Nush-i Jan that this was a fire altar rather than simply the location for repeated burnt offerings. The suggestion, however, remains attractive. Fur- ther aspects of the fire cult will be discussed below. Meanwhile Hasanlu demands wider attention for its comparability, in the use of columns, with later Median and Achaemenid architecture. With Hasanlu set in a purely Hurro-Mannaean context, such parallels are hard to explain. If, however, Hasanlu is put into a context at least in part Iranian, or Indo-Iranian to be more precise, then the architectural evidence begins to become a little more comprehensible. If a fire cult was practised at Hasanlu, at least in the later second millennium B.C., another piece can be added to the jigsaw. Are there any more pieces? Surely by now there is nothing more to be said on the burnt citadel of Hasanlu? Not so! If we look again at the Gold Bowl, there is yet room for fresh ideas. The most recent full discussion (Winter 1989) comes down with some hesitation in favour of the interpretation proposed a generation ago, of a Hurrian context for the complex iconography of this unique vessel, more of a beaker than a bowl (Porada 1959). I myself have long been an advocate of the place of the Hurrians in the cultural patterns of the ancient Near East: this has been acknowledged indirectly, the attribution of the Early Trans- Caucasian/Kura-Araxes culture to a Hurrian population being ascribed to “scholars” (Winter 1989: 100-1); but historians have been more cautious. Now, however, an alternative interpretation comes to mind. The leading figure in the procession of three clearly divine beings, riding a chariot drawn by a massive bull from whose mouth flows an abundance of water, has been identified with Teshub, not only from the association of this god with the bull but also from his leading place in this procession, Teshub being accepted as head of the Hurrian pantheon. Yet another god, an acknowledged warrior and leader of war bands to victory, was Indra, thus addressed in the Rig-Veda (10.153, line 2):

“Thou, Indra, art born from power, strength and vitality. Thou, bull, art really a bull”. (Frye 1962: 25)

Before this suggestion is dismissed out of hand, let us remember the Indic gods recorded in Mitanni, and thus preceding the fashioning of the 6 CH. BURNEY

Hasanlu Gold Bowl by some three to five centuries, depending on the dating favoured. The Indo-Aryan presence in Mitanni has probably been over-emphasized, and the famous chariotry may not have been owned by individual maryannu, or knights, but rather issued to them from the royal arsenal as and when required (Jankowska 1981; Diakonov 1995). Never- theless, the penetration by Indo-Aryan groups, perhaps to be described as war bands, into upper Mesopotamia must have brought them through northern and western Iran, with implications for the development and spread of chariotry, quickly adopted by the Hurrian and Kassite population groups of western Iran in the second millennium B.C. (Burney 1997: 184-7). In Hasanlu one can surely see the agglomeration of different ethnic groups, whose cultural traditions were becoming inextricably mingled, as discerned by the excavator in his description of the syncretistic nature of the architecture and artifact assemblages (Dyson 1989a: 8-10), a parallel being drawn with early historic sites in Bactria (Sarianidi 1990). That an Indo-Iranian contribution is but one element in the cultural mix at Hasanlu is perhaps evident from the very presence of the burnt buildings, in part at least clearly serving as temples, a feature alien to unalloyed Indo-Iranian religion. If it is Indra who leads the procession on the Hasanlu Gold Bowl, the bull itself has a wider significance, alluded to below. Indra is followed by a sun god. Of the three Indian sun gods, described in the Rig-Veda as drawn in cars by numerous horses, Suriya is sometimes said to be dependent on Indra (Bettany 1890: 182-3). The most convincing evidence, however, from the Hasanlu bowl of an Indo-Iranian context is manifest in the focal theme of the whole design, the contest of the heroic figure, armed only (it seems) with knuckle-dusters, with the three-headed monster emerging from a rock. The hero may be identified as Trito (‘third’) (Vedic: trita). After losing his cattle to the monster, he gains the support of the Indo-European warrior-god (Indra?) in defeating the creature, here depicted as a dragon rather than a serpent, and duly recovers his cattle. The Indo-Iranian association of such monsters with indigenous, non-Indo- European populations indeed implies friction if not open conflict (Mallory 1989: 137). Vedic parallels may not always be readily accepted by those who point out the incredibility of the once widely held belief that the Rig-Veda — not written down around 1250 B.C. but relatively recently — comprises hymns handed down without alteration of one jot or tittle over three millennia IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 7

(Sjoberg 1992: 513). Modifications there must have been, even to these sacred texts; but there seems no doubting their essential validity. Indra is addressed in almost one quarter of the hymns (Zaehner 1966: vi). Here one can glimpse an Aryan society before the invaders became enmeshed in the traditions of the indigenous Dravidian majority, the people of the Indus Valley civilization. Not till the mid-first millennium B.C. are profound linguistic modifications evident in India. By then there had been a parting of the ways from the rest of the Indo-Aryans, many of whom as Indo-Iranians spread over Iran, others doing so over much of central Asia, Siberia and European Russia. Indra was not the head of an Indian pantheon, for no such hierarchy as beloved by the peoples of the Near East was recognized in India or indeed in the old Aryan homeland to the north. Here must be a reflection of the profound socio-economic differences between the wide, open homeland of the Indo-Iranian tribes and the settled, long-established urban and agricultural communities of the Near East beyond Iran. It is significant that the Proto-Indo-European *peku, the word for ‘move- able wealth’, later came to be given the meaning ‘livestock’, apparently not vice versa (Benveniste 1969: I, 47-61; Diebold 1992: 347). This is but one of many linguistic illustrations of the realities of life for the cattle- herders of the region now named Kazakhstan and of surrounding lands. Their wealth lay in the rich pastures so abundant in the spring but increasingly over-exploited in the dry summer season. Wealth was measured in cattle, which themselves were associated with human fecundity, notably on the Indian evidence (Tull 1996: 229; Boyce 1987; Lincoln 1981). As the demand for pastures grew, so came the inexorable urge to find new grazing grounds. There is now wide agreement that the archaeological record most relevant to this process of expansion from an earlier, more restricted homeland is discernible in the Andronovo culture, for seventy years investigated by three generations of Russian archaeologists (Kuzmina 1993, 1994; Diakonov 1995). A formidable mass of data has been gathered from some 250 cemeteries and 150 settlements, as well as from mines, sanctuaries and rock drawings. Moreover, the vast zone in due course covered by this material culture in itself must command attention even if the term Andronovo covers a variety of differing sub-cultures, developed in accordance with local environments and resources. Variety was inevitable, given the expansion of the Andronovo population during the early to middle second millennium B.C. from its central pastures southward 8 CH. BURNEY into semi-arid, partially exhausted lands, north-west into the mineral-rich Urals and beyond into the northern forests, with expansion in time also far to the east. Not only did the Ural mines provide immense wealth in met- als, effectively exploited by the Andronovo craftsmen, but the very variety of environmental challenges must have made the Indo-Iranians that much better fitted to adapt to the vast new territories which they were to overrun in the second millennium B.C. Linguistic evidence, which this writer has perforce to take on trust, has been stated to indicate the separation of Iranians from Indo-Iranians no later than c. 2000 B.C. (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 827-8); but it could be hard to reconcile this theory with the archaeological evidence from the Andronovo zone. To do so would be to postulate an earlier, pre-Andronovo stage, by no means to be ruled out. Not all the so-called “ethnic indicators” for the Andronovo culture are entirely convincing (Kuzmina 1993, 1994; Diakonov 1995). Neither time nor space allow discussion of an elaborate and rather controversial reconstruction of Indo- Iranian movements in central Asia, tracing back to the mid-fifth millennium B.C. and based on the linguistic data (Harmatta 1992; Frye 1996: 60-1). We are on firmer ground with the analysis of ethnic movements in the Andronovo zone, starting in about the seventeenth to sixteenth centuries B.C. from north of the Caspian Sea, and then during the fifteenth to ninth centuries B.C., in the subsequent Karasuk period, swinging to a westerly and southerly direction for outward migrations (Kuzmina 1994: maps VII-IX). While the bulk of the evidence points to the major role played by horsemen and chariotry, there are certain caveats to be noted. The light two-wheeled vehicles, so much more manoevreable than the cumbersome four-wheeled wagons, are, with many other items, widely depicted in rock drawings found for the most part in remote mountain valleys over a vast expanse from Mongolia and the Altai to Kirghizia and the Pamirs. Rock drawings of wheeled vehicles, not all chariots, occur also in the Syunk district of Armenia in the Caucasus, where oxen not horses were the draught animals (Piggott 1983: 78-82). The argument that the quartered circle depicted on the chariot-box indicates a solar cult, and that the majority of these rock drawings can be associated with sanctuaries and ritual is of course a not uncommon example of archaeologists' over-emphasis of cult and ritual. Several of the scenes with two-wheelers appear to relate them to the rounding up of cattle. The construction of the two-wheelers was normally IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 9

Fig. 2. Andronovo cultural zone and its expansion (after Kuzmina 1994). flimsy, to a degree that they would not have had a long life (Sorokin 1990). Certainly for all or most of the time most of these vehicles were used for peaceful, everyday purposes, such as transporting family belongings from one tented encampment to the next, with a move to fresh pastures. Horse- breeding and wheeled vehicles are anyhow the only attributes, according to the most level-headed of recent general discussions, definitely attribut- able to the Indo-Europeans, and some query the latter, though to my mind unjustifiably (Mallory 1989: 270). There is incontrovertible evidence of the warlike character of Indo-Iran- ian society at least from the early second millennium B.C., exemplified by five burials with impressions of wooden chariots with spoked wheels and 10 CH. BURNEY datable to the sixteenth century B.C., found in excavations in 1972 on the Sintashta River in the southern Urals (Piggott 1983: 91-2; Burney 1997: 186). Before following those Russian authorities claiming priority for such chariots, however, we should remember their appearance in Egypt at much the same time, the dawn of the New Kingdom. In the Andronovo mining centres of the Urals weapons were cast of bronze with a higher percentage of tin than for other artifacts. Every indicator points to a society of chief- doms rather than a centrally administered kingdom. For that a sedentary population controlled from established towns and cities would have been requisite, very much not in accord with all we know of early Indo-European (more specifically Indo-Iranian) society. Economic pressure, especially shortage of grazing, was the spur leading to mass movements south-east into India and south-west into Iran, the latter perhaps in smaller numbers, migrations for whose success the energy and skills of the warrior were prerequisites. Where the Andronovo demographic zone bordered not on older civilizations but on the fringes of dense northern forests, however, the penetration by Iranian-speaking people appears to have taken more the form of a quiet infiltration of farmers and craftsmen into the Finno-Ugric zone with its essentially neolithic economy. The evidence, as so often, is linguistic, as is that for the willingness of Iranian incomers to hire themselves out as labourers or servants (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 827). Such morsels are available to the archaeologist, unqualified to judge the minutiae of linguistic palaeontology but often gaining a fair idea of the sense or lack of it behind wider conclusions. If religion and burial rites are to be closely associated, given the long- standing human concern with the fate of the individual after death, then the Andronovo culture fails to provide that homogeneity so beloved of the traditional archaeologist. There is no hint of a pantheon, though a solar cult does seem to be implied by the rock drawings over many scattered sites in Kazakhstan and central Asia, including representations of an anthropo- morphic being with solar head: a round eye on the face or multiple eyes and rays are also depicted. Burial customs were far from uniform, depending on one or other of two major traditions within the Andronovo zone, associated with the sites of Federovo and Alakul, and characterized by cre- mations and inhumations respectively. Hints of a fire cult have stimulated particular interest among iranologists. It has also been suggested that the diversity in ways of laying the corpse in the cemetery of Sintashta points to: IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 11

“… much religious speculation and controversy, such as helped, it seems, to prepare the way for Zoroaster's new teachings, promulgated possibly about one hundred years later — an approximate date of c. 1400 B.C. having been assigned to the prophet on both linguistic and other grounds” (Boyce 1987: 510-11).

To this merely archaeological mind this seems rather over-imaginative, find- ing what is being sought. One does not, however, need to go to the opposite extreme by questioning the very historicity of Zoroaster (Skjaervo 1997). That does seem rather wickedly iconoclastic! For the Andronovo people the purifying effect of the flames seems to have been significant most notably in association with the richer burials, when a fire was lit on the embankment of the kurgan, with sacrifice of bulls, sheep and horses, the last being de rigeur (Kuzmina 1993: 88). This profligacy in slaughtering animals is perhaps reflected in a context far removed in space and time, in eighth-century B.C. Urartu (Melikishvili 1960: 273-89 – inscription 155 A-G). Clearer reflections of a cult of fire and the domestic hearth are to be seen in the Bishkent culture of south Tadzhikistan, where in the cemetery of Tulkar men were buried with small rectangular hearths comparable with the rectangular fire-altar of early Indic priests, the Ahavaniya, while women were accompanied by round hearths, reminiscent of the Garhapatya, the hearth-fire of the Indo-Aryan house associated with the female (Mallory 1989: 53). It seems that the Indo-Iranian devotion to fire, whatever was true of the Andronovo culture in its earlier phases, centred round the family. The flame was lit when the man first set up house, transported in a pot during nomadic journeys or transhumance and reestablished in each new home. It was extinguished only on the death of the head of the family (Boyce 1975: 455). Whether or not the veneration of the fire as symbolizing the continuing life of the family was in fact distinctive of the Indo-Iranian tribes seems far from certain. It was perhaps a natural concept for people lacking the spiritual security of fixed landmarks in the shape of temples. The family hearth naturally had its obvious function through the cold, windswept winters of the open plains. In the equally cold, if more sheltered, winters of the Early Trans-Caucasian cultural zone (late fourth and third millennia B.C.) the hearth had a comparable significance. I have indeed suggested a possible non-Indo-European origin for the cult associated with the domestic fire (Burney 1996: 11). One must, however, acknowledge the sanctity of fire 12 CH. BURNEY in northern India, in the form of the Vedic god Agni, god of fire, who figures in the Rig-Veda almost as prominently as Indra, and who acts as messenger between gods and mankind (Bettany 1890: 183). One hymn declares:

“O Agni … the brilliant smoke goes towards the sky, for as messenger thou art sent to the gods”.

This nevertheless does not exclude an origin for the hearth cult in the Hur- rian lands. An independent origin in lands far removed is at least equally possible. The horse was increasingly important — initially for meat, then as a draught animal but only later on a wide scale for riding — to the Indo-Ira- nians and equally so to other peoples in the highland zone, including the Hurrians. In fact, however, some evidence exists for earlier horse-riding, around 2750 B.C., in Mesopotamia: this shows skeletal remains with traces of bow legs from riding (Molleson 1991). Its utility made the horse a natural companion in death for the more prominent members of the clan. In Sintashta I and II and other cemeteries of the sixteenth century B.C. were buried two horses yoked to each chariot. It seems that the Andronovo communities were the first to raise three breeds of horse, determined by the zoologist V.I. Tsalkin (Kuzmina 1993): there were heavy draught horses to pull four-wheeled wagons; a standard horse of 128-136 cm. to the withers; and a larger breed of race horse, fast and small-headed, 152-160 cm. to the withers. It was of course this third breed which was attached to the light, two-wheeled chariot. It should come as no surprise that the horse was widely regarded as a worthy offering in the form of sacrifice, apart from horse burials, attested in the time of the main Iranian migrations into western Iran (Burney and Lang 1971: 291 (note 108): Goff 1969: 123-6). Of course the richest and best known examples of multiple horse burials to accompany a chieftain's funeral date to the Scythian period in the mid-first millennium B.C. (Rolle 1989: 64-91). Ultimately these represent descendants of the Andronovo kurgans. Horses were still being sacrificed late in the last century, in czarist Russia, by the Vogul people, who drank the animal's blood at the ceremony conducted at a sanctuary high in the Urals (Bettany 1890: 101). Shamanist practices and totemism were then still widespread in the northern latitudes of central Asia. Horse sacrifices were not, however, peculiar IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 13 to isolated and relatively primitive ethnic groups. After the Vedic period in India emphasis shifted from the gods to the sacrifice, with its increasingly meticulous ritual, the thinking behind this being demonstrated in literary form in the Upanishads. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad we read:

“The dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse; the sun its eye, the wind its breath, universal fire its mouth. The year is the self of the sacrificial horse, the sky its back, the atmosphere its belly”. (Zaehner 1966: vii-viii).

Men and beasts have related to one another in quite different manners according to the cultural context of the particular time and place. It is a truism to state that without the economic imperative of human subsistence there would be no livestock, a fact sometimes overlooked in our own day. There is concrete evidence from the field to document the long-asserted supremacy of cattle-breeding in the early Indo-European if not in the Proto-Indo-European economy, the latter probably being more agricultural (Diebold 1992). Cattle-herding reigned in the absence both of urban life and of horse-riding nomadism, a later phenomenon. The animal bones studied from Andronovo sites are revealing in the proportions of livestock: cattle, 60%-70%; horse, 20%-30%; sheep, 10%. The small percentage of sheep is remarkable; but this was to change with expansion into drier regions and perhaps also as an effect of climatic change towards greater aridity in the settled lands south of the Andronovo heartland, in the period c. 1700-1400 B.C. Salinization of the soil after millennia of irrigation could have been another factor, along with disruption caused by Indo-European migrations (Frye 1996: 60). A side effect may have been the movement of the Kassites into Mesopotamia in the seventeenth century B.C. During approximately this suggested period of climatic deterioration, there was at Altyn-Depe a decline in the percentage of cattle and a sharp increase in sheep (Masson 1992: 356). A millennium later and far to the west, the Scythian tribes dominating the Pontic-Caspian region were still dependent on livestock, but the proportion of one species to another had changed greatly between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (later second to earlier first millennium B.C.). In the earlier of these periods the Cim- merians and neighbouring tribes bred cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses. With the first millennium B.C. domesticated animals began to become smaller, a trend destined to persist into medieval times and reversed only 14 CH. BURNEY since the eighteenth century. Sheep became predominant over cattle, reversing the percentages in the Bronze Age. The horse became ever more important, providing meat, milk, butter, cheese and koumiss; and it was of course now used much more widely for riding. It could even be trained to bite and kick in battle. It remained also a beast of burden. Pictorial evidence suggest that the Scyths preferred to ride stallions, small compared with modern crossbreeds (Rolle 1989: 100-1). Why were cattle becoming smaller and less prominent in the economy of the steppe peoples from the later second millennium B.C. onwards? Over-grazing is one obvious if not the only explanation. No doubt subtle climatic changes played their part too. Consequently pressure increased for energetic young men to seek their livelihood further afield. Cattle-raiding seemingly became a far-flung activity by c. 1000 B.C., with war parties only of men ranging sometimes for years over vast tracts, the spearhead of the Cimmerians and Scyths, not always warmly welcomed when they eventually returned home. Popular stories depicting the Centaurs (“bull- killers”) may give the first record of the ridden horse on marauding raids (Sorokin 1990: 145-6). Such activities were, however, economically non- productive beyond the collection of booty, largely on the hoof. Moreover, they have given the northerners a bad name in history! Their earliest histori- cally attested relations with the Mediterranean world developed through Scythian dealings with the Greek colonists on the Black Sea coasts, one of the topics of a recent thought-provoking if non-academic book (Ascherson 1996: 11-24, 49-88). One opinion, incidentally, places the Proto-Indo- European homeland nearby, in western Ukraine and Poland (Goodenough 1970; Renfrew 1987: 97). The slow decrease in the wealth derived by the Indo-Iranians from cattle may well have led to their becoming more highly prized. The owner of a large herd would have been held in that much higher regard. This may have been all the more true of the Aryan invaders of northern India, where their cattle may not have flourished in the heat of the sub-continental plains. Indeed in the Vedic texts the man of wealth is often called gopati, “Lord of Cows” (Tull 1996: 229). In the Rig-Veda praise for cattle is a constant refrain. The Aryan warriors secured their cattle during the raiding and transhuming season; but in the peaceful agricultural season they zeal- ously performed the sacrificial rites, with much carnage. The first hint of vegetarianism, however, occurs in a Vedic reference to a ban on eating meat, especially beef, for all involved with the Vedic initiation ceremony IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 15

(diksa), where for the initiate eating beef is proclaimed to be as evil as the killing of an embryo (Tull 1996: 227). Of the importance of cattle — prominent among fees given to priests for services at the Vedic ritual — it has well been said that:

“The animals supplied milk and meat, the main elements of the food supply; hides for clothing, blankets, bags and shields; bones for tools; dung for food; and urine for disinfectant”. (Lincoln 1976: 62-3).

Much of ancient Indian religion, a mingling to an uncertain degree of rec- ognizably Aryan with non-Aryan (Dravidian) elements, remains obscure. The Rig-Veda presupposes a sound knowledge of the relevant mythology. In the post-Vedic periods, when the act of sacrifice became all-important, what are we to make of texts giving precise instructions how the func- tionaries, now normally described as priests, can manipulate the ritual so as to defraud their patron and rob him of his cattle, generally injuring his interests? (Heesterman 1994, reviewing Minkowski 1991). Clearly there was a special bond between men and cattle. As the power of the priests grew in post-Vedic India, so they manipulated the ancient veneration of cattle to their own advantage. In Iran it is indeed impossible to discern any development in religious thinking or practice comparable with the Hindu reverence for the cow. Perhaps the purity of the open-air fire altar with its sacred flames provided the requisite echo of the ancestral sacrifices once offered in the old Indo- Iranian homeland with its abundant livestock? We cannot know for sure. The attitude to animal sacrifice in the Indian subcontinent in course of time became ambivalent, with the concept of “the killing that is not killing”. In the Rig-Veda the already dismembered sacrificial horse is told:

“You do not really die here, nor are you hurt”. (Tull 1996: 227).

The Ostiaks of southern Siberia are a far cry from India yet on the northern fringes of the old pre-Indo-European (Dravidian) ethnic substratum once extending from the subcontinent throughout central Asia (Sjoberg 1992: 512, 525-6 (note 3)). In the last century the Ostiaks still venerated bears, asking a bear's pardon after killing him (Bettany 1890: 83-101). Common to virtually all regions of Asia was veneration of the ancestors, who alone could secure the good fortune required for preservation of 16 CH. BURNEY the blood line. Ancestor worship might be associated with veneration of sacred trees, today as in times past. In contemporary Mongolia, once in part the easternmost territories penetrated by Indo-European groups, vari- ous folk rituals survive, some linked to the memory of Jenghis Khan and others to the fire cult, ancestor worship and prayers to mountains, stone cairns and totems (Ujiyedin and Stuart 1997: 291). Possibly the habit of tying rags to trees and bushes, persisting today in remote parts of Turkey, may reflect not simply the wish for a cure from sickness or good luck in child- birth but also respect for the ancestors. As was asserted a century ago of the shamanist beliefs of the Kalmucks of the Altai:

“The spirits of their ancestors are said to be represented by ribbons of varied colours hung on the branches of trees, and from them the living man believes that he hears the whisperings of his dead father giving him counsels which he scrupulously obeys”. (Bettany 1890: 100).

The reference to the whispering of the trees recalls the Armenian tradition of listening to the rustling of the plane trees at Armavir to obtain oracles (Burney and Lang 1971: 215). Mountains and water have ever been venerated, not least in the Hurrian homeland. Water was the other great natural element revered by the Irani- ans, along with fire. It is hardly surprising that those hardy non-Iranian highlanders the Tibetans worshipped their ancestors in association with the overpowering peaks and ranges of their land (Smith 1996; Kirkland 1982). At the end we are left with horsemen and probably also chariots as the distinctively Indo-Iranian legacy, developed from the earlier domestication of the horse in the north Pontic region, perhaps specifically in Ukraine (Anthony 1986). Darius I saw horsemanship on a level with truthfulness as the attributes of a king, a leader among the Aryans. On their open plains and steppes the Indo-Iranians, following customs dating back to Andronovo times, tended their undying family fires, and welcomed new arrivals as guests for the prescribed period. Not for nothing was the name of Arya- man, the god of the Aryans, synonymous with ‘hospitality’, just as Mitra was synonymous with ‘contract’ (Frye 1962: 24-6). The worship of Arya- man was clearly linked or overlapping with that of Ahura Mazda (Gnoli 1989). Zoroaster, on the other hand, may well have obliterated ancient cultic traditions which till his time the Iranians had held in common with IRANIANS AND THEIR ANCESTORS 17 their cousins, who in successive waves invaded and settled in northern India. Thenceforward came a parting of the ways within the eastern half of the wider Indo-European world, that half sometimes rather vaguely termed Aryan. This has been a mixed story. The early Indo-Iranians, in their Andro- novo homeland, achieved far more in material culture than it has been practicable even to mention, let alone discuss, here. We surely have to see them, however, as major contributors, in and beyond central Asia, to a world in which ethnic frontiers, perhaps in the dim past more of a reality, were becoming ever less sharply distinguishable. If I have been able to plant a few ideas, defensible or otherwise, this essay will have achieved its modest goal. I would end with my very warmest good wishes from the family fire for a long, productive and happy future ahead for you, David. Lang may your lum reek!

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Abbreviations:

BAR British Archaeological Reports BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London IIJ Indo-Iranian Journal JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies