Book Description

El-Ahwat excavations in Israel identify the location as Harosheth hagoyim. The original word is pronounced khar-o-sheth. The place is mentioned in Judges 4.2 of the Bible, Old Testament. Bronze-age contacts extended from El-Ahwat on Kishon river to Rakhigarhi on Sarasvati River. Seafaring merchants traded across the Persian Gulf and from Mt. Mustagh Ata of Tocharian speakers of Turkmenistan who traded in ancu 'iron' (cognate amsu 'soma') to Caspian Sea across many regions of Ancient Near East including Haifa. This Harosheth hagoyim, 'smithy of nations' also evolved early writing systems like Indus script, cuneiform, Aramaic and kharosti. This is a multi-disciplinary account of cultural contacts - discovered in archaeological, metallurgical and language studies -- with inventions in smelting, alloying, chariot-making and writing systems, in an extensive region of 2nd millennium BCE with links between Harosheth hagoyim and Proto-Indian speakers/artisans/traders of the smithy of nations. The raison d'etre for this account is to call for more studies to unravel the nature and chronological evolution of the smithy of nations spurred by contacts among traders, artisans and technology innovators of ancient civilizations surrounding the Ancient Near East. During the 3rd millennium BCE, a veritable revolution in the history of civilizations was unleashed with the invention of the smithy supported by the crucible and the forge. The ability to identify metallic minerals, to smelt them, to alloy them to create new metals provided for the next stages of casting ingots and forging metal tools and weapons including ploughshares for the plows, axes, harrows, sickles, swords, knives, linchpins to hold the hubs of axles of spoked-wheels of carts and chariots. These resultant technological developments led to the establishment of state power using improved mobility of troops engaged in warfare, issues of coins from mints and development of markets involving improved seafaring and rapid land-transport of surplus products in bulk for trade activities by caravans of manufactory artisan guilds, merchants' guilds. Social institutions got transformed beyond recognition as cultures evolved from the chalcolithic era into the bronze-age. The invention of smithy was thus developed further as a trans-state institution of smithy of nations, a development recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible, calling this Harosheth hagoyim. The smithy guilds operating in a variety of new corporate forms, extended their reach beyond state boundaries to become the smithy of nations to meet the demand for metals, metallic tools and weapons produced in the smithy and merchandising them across an expansive interaction area of Eurasia. This development, together with the associated invention of writing systems for bills of lading and other trade transctions, transformed the lebensraum (living space) of bronze-age civilizations of the Ancient Near East. A profound cultural consequence was the formation/evolution of linguistic areas (language unions or sprachbunds such as the Indian sprachbund) with free exchanges of semantic clusters and other language features. The reconstruction of glosses and other language features of Proto-Indian will help evaluate, conclusively, the claims of decipherment of Indus writing. This monograph has not attempted to resolve the polemics of dating and relative chronology of Rigveda and Avestan and directions of migrations of Proto-Indian people. Further studies in the identification of isoglosses, demarcating several linguistic features relatable Indian sprachbund will complement the contributions by studies in Proto-Indo-European and help delineate the cultural framework of the formation and evolution of languages in Indian sprachbund. The apparent semantic links between Tocharian and Indian sprachbund call for a rethink of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) dispersal theories.