Although Sapta Sindhava, the core geographical area which would relate to the Rigveda, corresponds to Punjab and Haryana, the land of seven rivers, the Rigveda geographical reached contained the Gomal plains, southern Afghanistan, and southern Jammu and Kashmir.
Traditional historians believed that the early Vedic society was composed of Indo-Aryan migrants who came from West Asia to India in stages or waves, that they belonged to a linguistic group speaking Indo-European languages, composed the Vedas and were different from the non-Aryan Harappans of the preceding period.
In the nineteenth century, ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Indo-Aryan’ were incorrectly used as racial labels, not merely as language labels. However, language is a cultural label not to be confused with race-and its association with a biological descent.
In any case, civilisation on the Indian subcontinent goes back beyond the Indus Valley or the Vedic society. Neither the artefacts of the Indus Valley Civilisation nor the Vedic corpus gives us information about the earlier times.
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Observing the similarities in the language of the Rigveda to that of the Avesta, the oldest Iranian text, older than the Vedas, scholars have suggested that there existed a kind of relationship between the people represented in both these books due to common linguistic links and that they migrated to the Indian subcontinent from West Asia and Iran.
Known as Aryans, these people had a common original home from where different groups migrated to Europe and the East.
As there is no common racial identity for the Aryans, the concept of a common home has been questioned. However, the belief in the linguistic commonality remains and so does the belief in migration.
Observing the linguistic similarity between the Avesta and the Rigveda, repeated attempts were made to connect the PGW (circa 900-500 BC) with Aryan craftsmanship.
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Archaeologists following the inferences based on literary texts tried to find similarities in pottery, paintings on ceramics, copper objects etc., between post-Harappan and the West Asian Iranian chalcolithic assemblages.
Admittedly, Unguis tic similarities exist, but they do not support large- scale migration of people into the Indian subcontinent.
Furthermore, whatever similarities have been found between Indian and West Asian archaeological finds, they are only occasional and do not indicate.