Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.26

c14.26

Yet, tested against the background of archaeology and the movements of peoples in Western Asia in the middle of the second millennium B.C. as we can now begin to discern them, this date has much to recommend it. In the last chapter we have seen that there is good archaeological evidence for the arrival in North-West India of invaders from the west in the centuries following 2000 B.C.: these need not be Indo-Europeans, but their arrival is likely to be connected with the general movements from the west about this time in which the Indo-Europeans were involved. The establishment of the Kassite and the Mitannian kingdoms is a significant pointer to warrior bands pressing eastward at least to the Persian frontiers, and the appearance of new cultures, if not actual ethnic types, in such North Persian sites as Hissar III and Sialk, may again not be unconnected with folkmovements spread over the first half of the second millennium, while the pottery from Anau III in Turkestan and Nad-i-Ali in Afghan Sistan, as well as the Moghul-ghundai and Jiwanri cemeteries, shows that colonies of these same people were established farther east at a later date, around 1100-1000 B.C.