HISTORY OF SANSKRIT THE HE career of Sanskrit, or Indo-Aryan to be precise, started from the time of its separation from its immediate parent stock, Indo-Iranian or Aryan, which was a closely knit group of dialects spoken in Iran and in parts of Mesopotamia sometime before 1400 B.C. This may also be taken as the date of separation of Indo-Aryan from Indo-Iranian although there was not yet any question of the migration of Indo-Aryan into India. We do not know when the migration started. But there is no ground to assume that the Indo-Aryan speakers migrated from Iran in appreciable numbers before 1300 B.C. The date may be put still later, and it must be borne in mind that the migration was in waves and in successive times. The clans that migrated did not all belong to the same group nor was their language completely identical. 1400 B.C. as the date of the separation of Indo-Aryan is an assumption which is warranted on two grounds : (i) the existence of indisputable evidence of the proto-Indo-Aryan dialectal vocables occurring in some Hittite docu- ments, and (ii) comparative estimate of the language of the Ķgveda and of the Avestan Gāthās. The language of the Ķgveda takes us to circa 1000 B.C. and that of the Avestan Gáthas to circa 700 B.C. A common source would take us back to circa 1400 B.C., at a moderate estimate.
