Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.15

c14.15

In the fourteenth and fifteenth century B.C. Indo-European names are frequent among the Mitannian rulers, and appear in the diplomatic correspondence from El Amarna in Egypt and Boghaz Keui, the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, in documents written in modified cuneiform script on clay tablets. But the most exciting document is a treaty between the Hittite king Subiluliuma and the Mitannian Mattiuaza, son of Dusratta, in about 1380, in which the latter invokes his gods as witness, in the formula *ilani Mi-it-tra-as-si-il ilani U-ru-w-na-as-si-il ilu In-da-ra ilani Na-sa-at-ti-ia-an-na*. These can only be the gods Mitra, Varuna, and Indra of the ancient Indian pantheon as recorded in the earliest Sanskrit religious texts (such as the *Rigveda*) described later, and the last deity is likely to be the Nāsatyas, an alternative name for the heavenly twins, the Asvins, in the same literature. This Hittite treaty does not, of course, mean that there were Indians in the Mitannian kingdom at this time, but it does point to just that common stock of mythology among the Indo-European peoples that the linguistic equations would suggest – the gods of the Mitanni were also the gods of the eastern branch of the great Indo-European family.