Theseus

The Indo Europeans conquered the major part of Europe, Persia, Central Asia and Northern parts of South Asia and were able to change the native languages to an Indo European language during the ancient period. But why did the Indo European languages not spread to Arabia, South India and North Africa despite of the close proximity

Theseus

The difficult terrain could be a reason why IE language did not spread to Arabia but North Africa and South India were literally neighbours of IE speaking regions so there must be other reasons like culture or military

MAGolding

I don't know. Possibly There are three different reasons for the three different areas.

And I would suggest that possibly those three regions might have resisted the invasions by Indo European speaking hordes that you imagine because those invasions didn't happen in those regions. People need reasons of some sort to decide to invade some place. On the other hand nobody needs a reason to not make the decision to invade some place. If the spread of Indo European languages was caused by invasions by Indo European speakers then that was a massive series of invasions. And maybe those who believe in those hypothetical prehistoric invasions should be more impressed by the scale of them than wonder why they weren't even more widespread.

Visigoth Panzer

India was probably just too big, they concentrated their dominance in the north. The middle east at the time was dominated by the Mesopotamian states and Egypt, which prevented the Indo-Europeans from expanding (their are several tribes which may have been IE that invaded the middle east in the ancient period) into Arabia and North Africa. Persia was conquered because much of it was undeveloped, except Elam, which was mostly in the south.

Theseus

Egypt was probably too powerful for the IE people but India was certainly not too big considering the fact that the IE people reached Sri Lanka which lies further south than South India. And the region of modern Saudi Arabia was not more developed than Persia during ancient period.

peccavi

If you examine such migrations (and that is a probably teh more appropriate word than invasion) they are nearly all across the same latitude.

The reason is simple. The animals, crops and technology of the immigrant is appropriate to that latitude and less so further north or south.

Theseus

No this does not make much sense as Sri Lanka has a very different latitude than Western European countries yet both are mostly IE speaking regions. On the other hand North Africa has a similar latitude to Iran yet North Africa is not IE but Iran is IE

Fantasus

What if the main way those IE languages spread was not by massive invasion, or at least not by great conquests?
What should convince us those "conquests" was the reason and not other events and processes?
Spread of skills and trade or barter and religious practises and technologies are othef possibillities.
That does not neccesarily imply absence of violence but only it may have been ( I guess so) had other elements.

Theseus

Unfortunately languages spread through invasions many times in the past. And a small elite was able to change the native language of the conquered regions.
North Africa was fully arabized after the Arab expansion. The Roman conquest of Western Europe led to the spread of the Roman script and Latin languages to the extent that some Western European languages have almost 50% Latin words. A small group of Central Asian warlords were able to transform Anatolia from Christian Greek to Muslim Turkish. Today China is a homogenous country because a small group of Han people were able to conquer whole China and impose their language upon the native people

Naima

Some did .
Hicksos conquered Egypt if not wrong .