Free Republic

What if instead of invading Greece the Persians would have invaded and conquered Arabia? At the time Arabia was real weak so it would have been an easy victory. Freeper CarrotandStick poised this question in another thread. Lets hear your predictions history buffs. No Islam? A Zoroastrian Middle East? How would it have played out? The Persian Empire. Notice how accessible Arabia was. Until the sixth century BC, they were a people shrouded in mystery. Living in the area east of the Mesopotamian region, the Persians were a disparate group of Indo-European tribes, some nomadic, some settled, that were developing...

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages—but it absorbed few genes—from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida. The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years. That theory is bolstered by the presence of Indo-European languages in India, the archaeological record, and historic sources such...

JERUSALEM: Some forty scholars from all over the world recently took part in a summer programme on second millennium Sanskrit literature at Hebrew University here. Eminent Indologist, Prof David Shulman, who was instrumental in organising the programme, pointed out that so far the Sanskrit works in the first millennium (those of Kalidasa et al) have been explored to a great extent by the modern-day Sanskrit scholars, but the later period literature hasn't got much attention. "The second millennium A.D. Also witnessed intense creativity in Sanskrit throughout South Asia. Every major region produced its own distinctive corpus of Sanskrit literary works...

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language....

Scientists trace evolution of Indo-European languages to Hittites Tim Radford, science editor Thursday November 27, 2003 The Guardian At last the answer in black and white, or beltz and zuri if you happen to be Basque, or noir and blanc, if you are French. You owe the words to Hittite-speaking farmers from Anatolia, who invented agriculture and spread their words as they sowed their seed, 9,500 years ago. Languages, like people, are related. Russell Gray of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, reports in Nature today that he and a colleague decided to treat language as if it was DNA...