Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta, the holiest text of Zorastrianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the original Iranian form) himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named,

In the Rig Veda the clouds were compared to dappled cows full of milk; milk and butter were the symbols of prosperity; milk, butter, cattle, and horses were the proper offerings to the gods; Indra was compared to a mighty bull; and wealth was counted in fat cattle and swift horses. Agricultural products were never offered to the gods. The people of

3350 BCE.3 Because wool itself is rarely preserved, the evidence comes from animal bones. When sheep are raised for their wool, the butchering pattern should show three features: (1) sheep or goats (which differ only in a few bones) or both should make up the majority of the herded animals; (2) sheep, the wool producers, should greatly outnumber

Seima-Turbino metal-working techniques were adopted by emerging elites across the southern Siberian forest-steppe zone, perhaps in reaction to and competing with the Sintashta and Petrovka elites in the northern steppes. A series of original and distinctive new metal types quickly diffused through the forest-steppe zone from the east to the west,

Steppe miners and craftsmen mined their own abundant ores and made their own metal tools and weapons; in fact, the enormous copper mines of Russia and Kazakhstan and the tin mines of the Zeravshan show that the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East depended on them.

Regardless of how “pushes” are defined, no migration can be adequately explained by “pushes” alone. Every migration is affected as well by “pull” factors (the alleged attractions of the destination, regardless of whether they are true), by communication networks that bring information to potential migrants, and by transport costs. Changes in any of

Large, sustained migrations, particularly those that moved a long distance from one cultural setting into a very different one, or folk migrations, can be identified archaeologically. Emile Haury knew most of what to look for already in his excavations in Arizona in the 1950s: (1) the sudden appearance of a new material culture that has no local

By 4200 BCE people had become more mobile, their single graves emphasized individual status and personal glory unlike the older communal funerals, high-status graves contained stone maces shaped like horse heads and other weapons, and raiding parties migrated hundreds of kilometers to enrich themselves with Balkan copper, which they traded or

Access to the scouts’ information defines the pool of potential migrants. Studies have found that the first 10% of new migrants into a region is an accurate predictor of the social makeup of the population that will follow them. This restriction on information at the source produces two common behaviors: leapfrogging and chain migration. In