David Anthony, Michael Witzel, Asko Parpola & the Potapovka horse head burial HOAX

In 1995, a paper¹ was published by David Anthony, the well known kurganist, and Prof  Nikolai Vinogradov titled 'Birth of the Chariot'. The paper mainly sought to explain the findings at the Potapovka & Sintashta-Petrovka sites in Russian steppe and relate them to Vedic rituals. Before we get to the crux of this article, I first want to deal with 2 other claims made in the same 1995 paper. First one is:

Other offerings in the Sintashta-Petrovka graves also have a bearing on the hymns of the Rig Veda. One of the most sacred rituals described is the racehorse sacrifice. The animal is preceded by a goat, the symbol of Püsan, the god of paths and ways, who will lead the sacrificed horse to the heavens. 

Then they quote Wendy Doniger's translations of some Rks of the Rig Veda

The chariot follows you, Swift Runner; the young man follows , the cow follows, the love of young girls follows. The troops follow your friendship. The gods entrusted virile power to you. Your body flies, Swift Runner; your spirit rushes like the wind. Your mane, spread in many directions, flickers and jumps about in the forests [like sunlight]. The racehorse comes to the slaughter, pondering with his heart turned to the gods. The goat, his kin, is led in front; behind come the poets, the singers. . . Let this racehorse bring us good cattle and good horses, male children and all-nourishing wealth. Let Aditi [a goddess] make us free from sin. Let the horse with our offerings achieve sovereign power for us.

Keep the limbs undamaged and place them in the proper manner. Cut them apart, calling out piece by piece. As many of your limbs as I set out, according to the rules, so many balls [of meat] I offer into the fire

This is from RV 1.162, whose Griffith translation can be found here. It basically describes the Ashwamedha Yajna, more details of which are found in Mahabharata & Ramayana, and the details of the ritual can be read here.

One should note that the Ashwamedha is a 13+ month long ritual and is associated with expressing the King's sovereignty over his lands or is done to beget strong male offspring (eg. the horse sacrifice done by King Dasharatha in Ramayana to beget sons). It is IN NO WAY RELATED TO FUNERAL PRACTICES LIKE WHAT YOU SEE IN SINTASHTA PETROVKA GRAVES. The paper states:

Horses were often sacrificed in the mortuary rites of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. Many, like the pair at Krivoe Ozerò, appear to have been chariot teams and may possibly have been racehorses. Their heads and hides, with lower front legs intact, were deposited in the grave, while their lower back legs were cut off and laid out separately. The rest of the horse's body was probably eaten by the burial party.

There is not a single mention in any Vedic text of horse sacrifice as a mortuary/funeral ritual.

Now that this topic is done away with, we move on to the next one. Anthony & Doniger somehow identify a Kurgan in the RV Riks.

Describing an Aryan kurgan, the Rig Veda says: 

...Let them bury death in this hill I shore up the earth all around you; let me not injure you as I lay down this clod of earth. Let the fathers hold up this pillar for you; let Yama [the first mortal human, whose death was the first] build a house for you here. 

This is taken from RV 10.18.4 and 10.18.13. 

'Let them bury death in this hill/mountain' and 'I shore up earth all around you' are taken from 10.18.4 and 10.18.13 respectively, and made to sound like it is the process of building up a Sintashta kurgan, whereas it is not. It is disingenuous. The Griffith translation of the relevant sukta is here.

1. Go hence, O Death, pursue thy special pathway apart from that which Gods are wont to travel. To thee I say it who hast eyes and hearest: Touch not our offspring, injure not our heroes.

2 As ye have come effacing Mrtyu's footstep, to further times prolonging your existence,

May ye be rich in children and possessions. cleansed, purified, and meet for sacrificing.

3 Divided from the dead are these, the living: now be our calling on the Gods successful.

We have gone forth for dancing and for laughter, tofurther times prolonging our existence.

4 Here I erect this rampart for the living; let none of these, none other, reach this limit.

May they survive a hundred lengthened autumns, and may they bury Death beneath this mountain.

5 As the days follow days in close succession, as with the seasons duly come the seasons,

As each successor fails not his foregoer, so form the lives of these, O great Ordainer.

6 Live your full lives ap! find old age delightful, all of you striving one behind the other.

May Tvaṣṭar, maker of fair things, be gracious and lengthen out the days of your existence.

7 Let these unwidowed dames with noble husbands adorn themselves with fragrant balm and unguent.

Decked with fair jewels, tearless, free from sorrow, first let the dames go up to where he lieth.

8 Rise, come unto the world of life, O woman: come, he is lifeless by whose side thou liest.

Wifehood with this thy husband was thy portion, who took thy hand and wooed thee as a lover.

9 From his dead hand I take the bow be carried, that it may be our power and might and glory.

There art thou, there; and here with noble heroes may we o’ercome all hosts that fight against us.

10 Betake thee to the Iap of Earth the Mother, of Earth far-spreading, very kind and gracious.

Young Dame, wool-soft unto the guerdongiver, may she preserve thee from Destruction's bosom.

11 Heave thyself, Earth, nor press thee downward heavily: afford him easy access, gently tending him. Cover him, as a mother wraps her skirt about her child, O Earth.

12 Now let the heaving earth be free from motion: yea,—let a thousand clods remain above him. Be they to him a home distilling fatness, here let them ever be his place of refuge.

13 I stay the earth from thee, while over thee I place this piece of earth. May I be free from injury. Here let the Fathers keep this pillar firm for thee, and there let Yama make thee an abiding-place.

14 Even as an arrow's feathers, they have set me on a fitting day.

The fit word have I caught and held as ’twere a courser with the rein.

The only instruction for building anything is to erect a stone circle rampart to separate the dead from the living (boundary between burial and village). It does not instruct anyone to build a hill on the grave of the dead.

Translation of 10.18.4 by HH Wilson (1866)

“I erect this circle (of stones) for (the protection of) the living, that none other of them may approach thislimit; may they live a hundred years, occupied by many holy works, and keep death hidden by this mound.”

Commentary by Sāyaṇa: Ṛgveda-bhāṣya (14th Century CE)

I erect this circle of stones: after the burning of the body, the Adhvaryu is to raise a bank or lump or earth between the village where the deceased lived and the cemetery, as a rampart against death (Mahīdhara, Yajus. 35.15);

With these behind, we can now move on to the main theme of this article.

THE POTAPOVKA HORSE HEAD BURIAL HOAX

In the 1995 paper, Anthony and Vinogradov write

There are other parallels between Sintashta-Petrovka burials and the sacred text. In an important Rig Veda myth, the Divine Twins, called the Ashvins, seek the secret of a magical drink of mead from the god Tvastr, who created it. A human fire-priest, Dadhyañc Atharvana, knows the secret but cannot reveal it. The Ashvins cut off his head and replace it with a magical horse head, through which the fire -priest can speak to them and disclose the secret of the mead. This strange tale may be evident at the site of Potapovka, near Samara on the Volga River. Igor Vasiliev, deputy director of the Urals Region Institute of Archaeology, excavated kurgan graves at Potapovka that belong to a variant of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. They have horse sacrifices, studded bridle cheekpieces, and other characteristic grave offerings. A human sacrifice, very rarely encountered in Sintashta-Petrovka cemeteries, was discovered under one kurgan. The body of the decapitated victim had been placed on top of the central grave pit after it was filled with earth. The head had been replaced with that of a horse, as in the myth of the fire-priest Dadhyañc Atharvana

Since then, this horse head human sacrifice burial has been cited often by other Indologists, even till current times. 

Michael Witzel, the Harvard indologist, writes in his 2019 paper²

Importantly, even some aspects of typical IA social culture have turned up in the archaeology of the Ural area, such as theVrātya young men association (Männerbund) that celebrated a‘dog killing’(śvagn-in) ritual in winter. Remnants of it have recently been discovered at Krasno-Samarskoye, just west of the Urals. In the same area, some 40 years ago, a grave has been found with a headless body; instead a horse head had been substituted, just as in the Ṛgvedic Dadhyañc myth.

The noted Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola wrote in his 2015 book pg 122³,

The Dadhyañc legend also speaks of providing a human sage with a horse’s head. Such an operation may have been an integral part of the secret rite of reviving a dead hero. It is tempting to see this Aśvin-related revival rite revealed in a human skeleton with the skull of a horse, which was excavated in a unique grave near Samara in the Mid-Volga region of Russia; it belongs to the Potapovka culture, dated to c. 2100–1700 bce, and was very probably the skeleton of a Proto-Indo-Aryan speaker.

Although, unlike Witzel, he is careful to note that there could be a problem with this narrative.

It must be noted, however, that the evidence of the Potapovka grave has been questioned, because of a suspected mixing of the archaeological layers.

The funny thing is that none of this is true. The horse head and the human are actually dated 1000 years apart and both the horse and the human are female. There was no horse head replacement and human sacrifice. This admission is made slyly in the notes section in David Anthony's book⁴ from 2007.

17. In Table 1, sample AA 47803, dated ca. 2900–2600 BCE, was from a human skeleton of the Poltavka period that was later cut through and decapitated by a much deeper Potapovka grave pit. A horse sacrifice above the Potapovka grave is dated by sample AA 47802 to about 1900–1800 BCE. Although they were almost a thousand years apart, they looked, on excavation, like they were deposited together, with the Potapovka horse skull lying above the shoulders of the decapitated Poltavka human. Before dates were obtained on both the horse and the skeleton this deposit was interpreted as a “centaur”—a decapitated human with his head replaced by the head of a horse, an important combination in Indo-Iranian mythology. But Nerissa Russell and Eileen Murphy found that both the horse and the human were female, and the dates show that they were buried a thousand years apart. Similarly sample AA-12569 was from an older Poltavka-period dog sacrifice found on the ancient ground surface at the edge of Potapovka grave 6 under kurgan 5 at the same cemetery. Older Poltavka sacrifices and graves were discovered under both kurgans 3 and 5 at Potapovka cemetery I. The Poltavka funeral deposits were so disturbed by the Potapovka grave diggers that they remained unrecognized until the radiocarbon dates made us take a second look. The “centaur” possibility was mentioned in Anthony and Vinogradov 1995, five or six years before the two pieces were dated. Of course, it now must be abandoned.

There you have it, this is how a claim made in 1995 and debunked in 2000/2001 is still cited by Indologists in 2015 and 2019. It will remain a part of 'IE Studies' folklore.

REFERENCES

1 Anthony, D. W., & Vinogradov, N. B. (1995). BIRTH OF THE CHARIOT. Archaeology, 48(2), 36–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41771098

2 Witzel, Michael. (2019). Early ‘Aryans’ and their neighbors outside and inside India. Journal of Biosciences. 44. 10.1007/s12038-019-9881-7. 

3 Parpola A. The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and The Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press; 2015. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190226909.001.0001/acprof-9780190226909. Accessed December 14, 2021.

4 ANTHONY, D. W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7sjpn

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