Indo-Iranians

Indo-Iranian peoples, also known as Indo-Iranic peoples by scholars, and sometimes as Arya or s from their self-designation, were an who brought the, a major branch of the , to major parts of.

Nomenclature
The term  has been used historically to denote the Indo-Iranians, because Arya is the self designation of the ancient speakers of the, specifically the and the , collectively known as the Indo-Iranians. Some scholars now use the term Indo-Iranian to refer to this group, while the term "Aryan" is used to mean "Indo-Iranian" by other scholars such as, , and Jaakko Häkkinen. , in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes, also uses the term Aryan to describe the Indo-Iranians.

Origin
The early Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the descendants of the known as the  and the subsequent  within the broader Andronovo horizon, and their homeland with an area of the  that borders the  on the west, the  on the east (where the Indo-Iranians took over the area occupied by the earlier ), and  and the  on the south.

Based on its use by Indo-Aryans in Mitanni and Vedic India, its prior absence in the Near East and Harappan India, and its 19th–20th century BCE attestation at the Andronovo site of, Kuzmina (1994) argues that the chariot corroborates the identification of Andronovo as Indo-Iranian. dated a at  to about 2000 BCE, and a  burial that also contains a foal has recently been found, indicating further links with the steppes.

Historical linguists broadly estimate that a continuum of Indo-Iranian languages probably began to diverge by 2000 BC, if not earlier, preceding both the and  cultures. The earliest recorded forms of these languages, and , are remarkably similar, descended from the common. The origin and earliest relationship between the and that of the Iranian and  groups is not completely clear.

Expansion
Two-wave models of Indo-Iranian expansion have been proposed by Burrow (1973) and. The Indo-Iranians and their expansion are strongly associated with the invention of the. It is assumed that this expansion spread from the north of the  south to the, , the Iranian plateau, and. They also expanded into and  and introduced the horse and chariot culture to this part of the world. texts from EDIIIb (2500–2350 BC) already mention the 'chariot' (gigir) and  texts (2150–2000 BC) mention the horse (anshe-zi-zi).

The Mitanni of Anatolia
The Mitanni, a people known in eastern from about 1500 BC, were of mixed origins: a -speaking majority was dominated by a non-Anatolian,   elite. There is linguistic evidence for such a, in the form of: In particular, Kikkuli's text includes words such as aika "one" (i.e. a cognate of the Indo-Aryan eka), tera "three" (tri), panza "five" (pancha), satta "seven", (sapta), na "nine" (nava), and vartana "turn around", in the context of a horse race (Indo-Aryan vartana). In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the deities, , , and  are invoked. These tend to connect the Mitanni superstrate to Indo-Aryan rather than  – i.e. the early Iranian word for "one" was aiva.
 * a manual written by a Mitanni man named, which was used by the , an ;
 * the names of Mitanni rulers and;
 * the names of gods invoked by these rulers in treaties.

Indian subcontinent – Vedic culture
The standard model for the entry of the Indo-European languages into the Indian subcontinent is that this first wave went over the Hindu Kush, either into the headwaters of the and later the. The earliest stratum of, preserved only in the , is assigned to roughly 1500 BC. From the Indus, the spread from c. 1500 BC to c. 500 BC, over the northern and central parts of the subcontinent, sparing the extreme south. The in these areas established several powerful kingdoms and principalities in the region, from south eastern  to the doorstep of. The most powerful of these kingdoms were the post-Rigvedic Kuru (in Kurukshetra and the Delhi area) and their allies the Pañcālas further east, as well as and later on, about the time of the, the kingdom of  and the quickly expanding realm of. The latter lasted until the 4th century BC, when it was conquered by and formed the center of the.

In eastern and southwestern, whatever  were spoken there were eventually pushed out by the. Most Indo-Aryan languages, however, were and still are prominent in the rest of the. Today, Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in, , , , , Fiji, and the.

Second wave – Iranians
The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave. The first Iranians to reach the may have been the  in the 8th century BC, although their linguistic affiliation is uncertain. They were followed by the, who are considered a western branch of the Central Asian s. tribes, of whom the best known are the  (Rhoxolani),  (Jazyges) and the  (Alans), followed the Scythians westwards into Europe in the late centuries BC and the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (The ). The populous Sarmatian tribe of the, dwelling near the Caspian Sea, were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Period. At their greatest reported extent, around 1st century AD, the Sarmatian tribes ranged from the to the mouth of the  and eastward to the, bordering the shores of the  and  seas as well as the  to the south. In the east, the Saka occupied several areas in Xinjiang, from Khotan to Tumshuq.

The, and ns begin to appear on the  from c. 800 BC, and the s replaced  rule from 559 BC. Around the first millennium AD, Iranian groups began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau, on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western , displacing the earlier  from the area.

In, the Iranians were eventually decisively assimilated (e.g. ) and absorbed by the population of the region, while in Central Asia, the  marginalized the  as a result of the  of the early centuries AD. Extant major Iranian languages are , , , and  besides numerous smaller ones. , primarily spoken in and, is a direct descendant of , and by that the only surviving Sarmatian language of the once wide-ranging East Iranian dialect continuum that stretched from Eastern Europe to the eastern parts of Central Asia.

Archaeology
s associated with Indo-Iranian expansion include: suggests the following identifications:
 * Europe
 * (2700–2100 BC)
 * Central Asia
 * horizon (2200–1000 BC)
 * Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim (2200–1600 BC)
 * Alakul (2100–1400 BC)
 * Fedorovo (1400–1200 BC)
 * Alekseyevka (1200–1000 BC)
 * (2200–1700 BC)
 * (2000–1100 BC)
 * (1700–1500 BC)
 * (1500–1100 BC)
 * India (middle Ganges plains)
 * (1100–350 BC)
 * Iran
 * Early West Iranian Grey Ware (1500–1000 BC)
 * (900–700 BC)
 * Indian subcontinent
 * (1600–500 BC)
 * (1900–1300 BC)

Language
The spoken by the Indo-Iranians in the late 3rd millennium BC was a  still not removed very far from the, and in turn only removed by a few centuries from  of the. The main phonological change separating Proto–Indo-Iranian from Proto–Indo-European is the collapse of the vowels *e, *o, *a into a single vowel, Proto–Indo-Iranian *a (but see ). and were also complete in Proto–Indo-Iranian, as well as the loss of the labiovelars (kw, etc.) to k, and the Eastern Indo-European (Satem) shift from palatized k' to ć, as in Proto–Indo-European *k'ṃto- > Indo-Iran. *ćata- > Sanskrit śata-, Old Iran. sata "100".

Among the sound changes from Proto–Indo-Iranian to is the loss of the voiced sibilant *z, among those to  is the de-aspiration of the PIE voiced aspirates.

Religion
Despite the introduction of later and  scriptures, Indo-Iranians shared a common inheritance of concepts including the universal force *Hṛta- ( ',  '), the sacred plant and drink *sawHma- (Sanskrit ', Avestan ') and gods of social order such as *mitra- (Sanskrit ', Avestan and Old Persian ', Miϑra) and *bʰaga- (Sanskrit , Avestan and Old Persian Baga). Proto-Indo-Iranian religion is an archaic offshoot of. From the various and dispersed Indo-Iranian cultures, a set of common ideas may be reconstructed from which a common, unattested proto-Indo-Iranian source may be deduced.

Development
Beliefs developed in different ways as cultures separated and evolved. For example, the cosmo-mythology of the peoples that remained on the Central Asian and the Iranian plateau is to a great degree unlike that of the Indians, focused more on groups of deities (*daiva and *asura) and less on the divinities individually. Indians were less conservative than Iranians in their treatment of their divinities, so that some deities were conflated with others or, conversely, aspects of a single divinity developed into divinities in their own right. By the time of, Iranian culture had also been subject to the upheavals of the (late Iranian Bronze Age, 1800–800 BCE), an influence that the Indians were not subject to.

Sometimes certain myths developed in altogether different ways. The  is linguistically and functionally cognate with Avestan. In the Rig-Veda (6,61,5–7) she battles a serpent called Vritra, who has hoarded all of the Earth's water. In contrast, in early portions of the Avesta, Iranian *Harahvati is the world-river that flows down from the mythical central Mount Hara. But *Harahvati does no battle &mdash; she is blocked by an obstacle (Avestan for obstacle: vərəϑra) placed there by.

Cognate terms
The following is a list of terms that may be gleaned from comparative linguistic analysis of the  and. Both collections are from the period after the proposed date of separation (ca. 2nd millennium BCE) of the Proto-Indo-Iranians into their respective Indic and Iranian branches.

Genetics
(R-M17 or R-M198) is the sub-clade most commonly associated with Indo-European speakers. Most discussions purportedly of origins are actually about the origins of the dominant R1a1a (R-M17 or R-M198) sub-clade. Data so far collected indicates that there are two widely separated areas of high frequency, one in the, around , and the other in , around and. The historical and prehistoric possible reasons for this are the subject of on-going discussion and attention amongst population geneticists and genetic genealogists, and are considered to be of potential interest to linguists and archaeologists also.

Out of 10 human male remains assigned to the Andronovo horizon from the Krasnoyarsk region, 9 possessed the Y-chromosome  and one  haplogroup (xC3). mtDNA haplogroups of nine individuals assigned to the same Andronovo horizon and region were as follows: U4 (2 individuals), U2e, U5a1, Z, T1, T4, H, and K2b.

A 2004 study also established that during the Bronze Age/Iron Age period, the majority of the population of (part of the Andronovo culture during Bronze Age), was of west Eurasian origin (with mtDNA haplogroups such as U, H, HV, T, I and W), and that prior to the 13th–7th century BC, all Kazakh samples belonged to European lineages.