Research Items

Abstract

Prehistory of indo-Iranian Borderlands. A report of the Huxley Memorial Lecture of the Royal Anthropo logical Institute, delivered by Sir Aurel Stein during the session of the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences on July 31, appears in Man for September. The subject matter of the lecture was gathered on five journeys between 1927 and 1934 in British Baluchistan, Makran and Fars, the ancient Persis. The plentiful remains of the chalcolithic and later periods, in an area inade quately explored archseologically, provide links with the earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia and Elam on one hand and with the Indus valley on the other. Great ethnic movements have passed across these areas and penetrated India; and their effects are felt down to the present day. Prehistoric settle ments are to be traced west of the Indus at a great ‘line of mounds stretching along the barren foot of the south-western Waziristan hills. Their size suggests climatic conditions more favourable to settlement than those of the present day. In considering the probable line of migration of the Aryan tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit, who con quered the Punjab about the second millennium B.C., attention is directed to the tribes worshipping Vedic divinities and apparently speaking a Sanskrit language, who are mentioned in Hittite inscriptions of the seven teenth century B.C. as leading a pastoral life in the Mitanni country roughly located in Kurdistan. Both archaeology and history fail to throw any light on the great movement of Aryan conquest, which may be supposed to have started from this area; but geographical considerations suggest that it is likely to have passed south of the great belt of central Persian deserts to the northern portion of Persian Baluchistan and the Helman basin.