Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.16

c14.16

And there is additional evidence which, though not conclusive, points in the same direction to a common cultural heritage. Among the Boghaz Keui documents of about the same date there is a fragmentary handbook on chariot-racing, written by a Mitannian named Kikkuli, and among the technical terms used for so many ‘turnings’ round the course he employs forms which are very near to Sanskrit – *aikavartanna*, *teravartanna*, *panzavartanna*, *shattavartanna* – for one, three, five or seven laps of the race (Sanskrit *vartanam*, a turning). A class of military nobility, the *mariannu*, is mentioned in the same text, and might be equated with the Sanskrit *marya*, a young hero. Here again one must be dealing with common interests and sports – chariot-racing, as we shall see, was eagerly indulged in by the earliest Indo-European speakers in India – and a terminology which shows that Sanskrit and Mitannian could hardly have diverged much in vocabulary by the early fourteenth century B.C.