Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.32

c8.32

What do the hoards themselves tell us? The flat axes with more or less expanded blades are the only possible link with the Indus Civilization, and the type is too generalized and widespread to support the view that the hoards represent 'the colonization of the Ganges basin by refugees and displaced persons from the Punjab and the Indus valley during the time of the break-up of the Harappā empire and the coming of raiders from the west'. The only important parallelism between the copper hoards and the Indus bronzes is the absence from both of the hafting-socket, which had been familiar in Mesopotamia and farther north since the 4th millennium. But the really distinctive elements of the hoards—the barbed harpoons, the spearheads with basal projection, the 'bar-celts', the so-called anthropomorphs, the shouldered axes—are not Indus types; and *per contra* the distinctively Indus blade with curved end is absent from the copper hoards. Analogies to the swords with antennae have been recognized in the Koban culture of the Caucasus and may be significant,44 but intermediate links are at present missing. In all the circumstances, the alternative theory that the hoards may be 'in fact traces of the Indo-Aryan migration' is equally difficult to sustain. Indeed, archaeologically our Ganges evidence is not ready for equation with any major historical event or speculation of the kind, and the Aryans in particular should, I suggest, be given a holiday for the time being. It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material culture has yet been identified in India.