Were the Bactrians Indo-Aryans?
Other artefacts in Dashli have the same Iranian/Indo-Aryan ambiguity with a preference for the Iranian alternative. A vase in Dashli shows a scene with men wearing a kind of shirt leaving one shoulder uncovered. In this, Sergent recognizes the upanayana ceremony, in which a youngster is invested with the sacred shirt or thread.43 But this is both a Vedic and a Zoroastrian ritual, with the latter resembling the depicted scene more closely: in India, only a thread is given, but among Zoroastrians, it is an actual shirt. Some vases display horned snakes or dragons carrying one or more suns inside of them: according to Sergent, this refers to an Indo-Iranian dragon myth, attested in slightly greater detail in the Rg-Veda than in the Avesta (but what else would you expect, with Vedic literature being much larger, older and better preserved than the Avestan corpus?), about Indra liberating the sun by slaying the dragon Vrtra, or in the Avesta, Keresaspa killing the snake Azhi Srvara, the hom
