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Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14: Chapter VII: Conquerors from the West – The Aryans and the Rigveda

Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14

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Chapter VII: Conquerors from the West – The Aryans and the Rigveda

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The warrior's look is like a thunderous rain-cloud,
when armed with mail, he seeks the lap of battle:
Be thou victorious with unwounded body; so let the
thickness of thy mail protect thee ...
Whoso would kill us, whether he be a strange foe or
one of us,
May all the Gods discomfit him. My nearest, closest
mail is prayer.
*Rigveda*, VI, 75.*

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TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century two Europeans resident in India, a French missionary and an English administrator, made (apparently independently) an outstanding linguistic discovery. Cœurdoux in 1767 and Sir William Jones in 1786 published the conclusions they had been led to by a study of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian liturgical language (represented for instance in the *Rigveda*), which they both perceived to have the most remarkable affinities with the Latin and Greek tongues in vocabulary and grammar. It seemed to them that such striking similarities could be accounted for only by supposing that these languages had a common origin in some extinct tongue and that there had been a dispersal of peoples to east and west. This supposition was put on a sound footing by the later work of such grammarians as Bopp, and by 1813 someone had suggested the word ‘Indo-European’ as a convenient term for the group of allied languages and their presumed original. The name has been retained in modern studies, which have thrown much new light on the problems involved, and vindicated the ideas of Cœurdoux and Jones.

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∗ The translations from the *Rigveda* are those of Griffiths (1896), but in a few instances, in consultation with Professor Dillon, I have ventured to substitute alternative words for his sometimes rather banal phraseology. While my interpretation of the *Rigveda* has been based on translations only, I feel that some attempt must be made by archaeologists who are not Sanskrit scholars to obtain at least the broad outlines of its significance.

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Today we can recognize the Indo-European group of languages as a relatively junior member of the Old World linguistic family, evolving at a time when such languages as Sumerian and those in the Hamitic and Semitic groups were of respectable antiquity. The original ancestral language from which its known variants developed and spread seems to have been mixed from the start and to have incorporated two main elements, one Uralic and the other probably related to the Caucasian group, and this mixture, with the emergence of a distinctive language group, is likely to have taken place somewhere on the outer boundaries of the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad, between South Russia and Turkestan. If there ever was an original Indo-European unity, in language at least, internal division into dialects and variants must soon have taken place. Early divisions in the main linguistic group can be traced, probably partly a result of an actual spread of populations west and east from the area of origin.

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One such subdivision can be distinguished by the variant forms of the ‘k’ palatal, conveniently typified by the word for ‘one hundred’, in the one group represented by the Latin *centum*, in the other by the Sanskrit *satem*. The *centum* languages have on the whole a western distribution, and include the Celtic, Italic, Germanic, and Greek dialects among living tongues, Illyrian and perhaps Ligurian among those now extinct. The exception is also a dead language, Tocharian, known from manuscripts of the first few centuries A.D. found by Stein in Sinkiang, and the only *centum* language in the Orient. The *satem* group includes the Baltic and Slavic languages, Armenian, Iranian, and Sanskrit and its later Indian derivatives. Related to the *centum* group is the Nashili dialect of Hittite in the second millennium B.C., which many linguistic scholars would bring into close relationship with the Italo-Celtic group. Less importance is attached to this *centum-satem* division by contemporary philologists than by those of the past, and another grouping based on the passive and deponent in *-r* has been distinguished, which includes Hittite, Tocharian, Phrygian, Italic and Celtic.

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But cutting across these divisions such close linguistic parallels can be traced within the whole known Indo-European group that it has been possible to reconstruct, with some conviction, the essentials of the original parent language and its cultural background. Verbal equations can be made through six or eight languages, representing ideas or objects which are fundamental to a society and not dictated by changes of environment; for instance, relationship within the family represented by the words for ‘father’ – Sanskrit *pitár-*, Greek *πατήρ*, Latin *pater*, Irish *athir*, Germanic *fadar*, Tocharian *pātār*, Armenian *hair* – or a characteristic domesticated animal such as ‘horse’ – Sanskrit *áśva*, Greek *ἵππος*, Latin *equus*, Celtic *ech*, Anglo-Saxon *ehu*, Lithuanian *aszwà*, Tocharian *yakwe*. Based on such equations as these, a hypothetical Indo-European community has been reconstructed, of agriculturalists who had also domesticated the horse, patrilineal in social structure, users of copper and bronze but not of iron, and worshippers of a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods with a certain ritual. The method has its dangers – the great Sanskrit scholar A. B. Keith once remarked that by taking the linguistic evidence too literally one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet, but not rain and hands! But nevertheless the broad outlines are certain enough, and the structure of the society as worked out from the linguistic evidence is convincing enough when it is tested against our knowledge of second-millennium archaeology in Western Asia and Eastern Europe.

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There is one other point of some importance. There has been a growing appreciation among linguists of the concept of the geographical distribution of languages and language-groups in their relationship one to another, with a realization of a distinction between central language areas, where innovation is common and rapid, and peripheral regions, where ancient linguistic traditions survive more or less unchanged. In this context, equations may with some confidence be made between areas geographically remote, if these are within the peripheral zone, as they may contain the same survivals, lost in the central area of rapid development. Grammatical peculiarities in Tocharian, for instance, recur in the Italo-Celtic group, and Hittite and Old Irish both preserve archaic survivals lost elsewhere.

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And it seems likely that this can be taken a step further, to include the ritual and mythology with which so much of the early languages were concerned, so that it is not by chance that elements of the curious and complicated ritual of the ancient Indian horse-sacrifice are found again among the Altai Turks of modern times, and survived until the twelfth century A.D. in Ireland. We shall see, indeed, that the whole structure of ancient Indian society, and the manner of its warfare, as reflected in the earliest Sanskrit texts, is often strikingly reminiscent of the Irish heroic tales of the Celtic Iron Age, although so widely separated from them in time and space.

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The location of a possible Indo-European homeland, and the identification of the culture implied by the linguistic evidence with a comparable archaeological phenomenon, has been a matter of debate since the idea was first formulated in the last century. Nationalistic feeling has sometimes vitiated the quest in Europe, as when the German school headed by Kossina placed the original home of the Indo-Europeans in the North European plain, peopled with blond Nordics, while in India a love of the miraculous has led to such fantasies as a derivation of the Aryans from the North Pole six thousand years B.C. But responsible linguists and archaeologists have agreed in regarding the possible region of origin as relatively limited, and lying somewhere between the Danube and the Oxus. Giles, on linguistic grounds, looked to the Hungarian plains as a possible area for the evolution of the earliest Indo-European speech, while others have suggested Central Asia. Much play has been made of the significance of certain words (such as that for a beech-tree) in limiting down the possible area by reason of its natural features, but the careless use of names of plants and animals among various peoples even today (the ‘robin’ in England and America are, after all, two totally different birds!) warns us of the danger of attaching too great an importance to such arguments.

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The most reasonable hypothesis, and one which seems best to satisfy the demands of philology and archaeology, is that originally put forward by Professor J. L. Myres and the late Harold Peake, and developed by Professor Childe, which sees the Indo-European languages evolving among the earliest agriculturalists of the South Russian steppes and the lands eastwards to the Caspian Sea. On linguistic evidence this area had been favoured by such scholars as Schrader in the last century, and the archaeology as we now know it seems to provide the most satisfactory background of material culture in accordance with the hints given by the language itself. In this South Russian area the basic culture in the late third and early second millennium B.C. was that of agriculturalists, perhaps partly nomadic but sufficiently sedentary for small cemeteries to be formed, presumably close to relatively stable settlements. They domesticated sheep and cattle, and the horse was certainly tamed in the latter phases of the culture, if not at the beginning; burials in separate graves, sometimes under a mound or barrow and often accompanied by a stone (exceptionally a copper) battle-axe, emphasize the presence of a stratum of warriors and chieftains in the social structure.

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There are certain great tombs, such as that of Maikop in South Russia and others, of more than petty chieftains, and in these much of the metal-work can be seen to be of types derived from Early Dynastic or Akkadian tools, weapons and wrought silver or gold. Such metal-work can be traced farther eastwards, to such sites as Tepe Hissar and Turang Tepe at the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea, and again into Anatolia in the richly furnished tombs of Alaca Hüyük and, rather later, in those of Trialeti in the Caucasus. It is significant that the Indo-European words for an axe (Sanskrit *paraśu*, Greek *πέλεκυς*, presupposing an original *peleku*) and that for copper (*roudhos*) appear to be of Mesopotamian derivation (Assyrian *pilakku*, Sumerian *urud*) and there may be similar connexions with the words for an ox and a star. The adoption of the metal shaft-hole axe of Sumerian type by the barbarians on the northern fringes of the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad has been commented on in Chapter V - indeed, the Shahi-tump axe has its best parallels in the Maikop tomb.

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It seems likely, therefore, that by about 2000 B.C. there was at least a loose confederacy of tribes, stretching from South Russia to Turkestan, who shared certain elements of culture, including a dependence on the higher centres of civilization for their metal-working techniques, and who spoke closely related dialects within the Indo-European framework. The evidence of historical documents from the literate urban cultures of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia supports this view, for the Nashili dialect of Hittite, a member of the Indo-European family, is recognizable soon after the beginning of the second millennium B.C. in the extant inscriptions and documents of the Hittite empire.

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About the beginning of the sixteenth century B.C. Mesopotamia suffered once again from the inroads of the mountaineers from the north on the break-up of the First Dynasty of Babylon, which had been brought to its climax by the great Hammurabi, and a new dynasty was set up under the Kassites, whose monarchs bear Indo-European names. They must have come from the north or north-east, and indicate the beginning of the great dispersal of Indo-European speakers eastwards. Little is known of the dynasty, which, however, endured for over five hundred years; but during this time we have the first intimations of another Indo-European group on the north-west frontier of the Kassite kingdom, the Mitanni, who occupied the district round the headwaters of the Khabur River, and exercised authority over a considerable portion of Northern Syria.

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In the fourteenth and fifteenth century B.C. Indo-European names are frequent among the Mitannian rulers, and appear in the diplomatic correspondence from El Amarna in Egypt and Boghaz Keui, the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, in documents written in modified cuneiform script on clay tablets. But the most exciting document is a treaty between the Hittite king Subiluliuma and the Mitannian Mattiuaza, son of Dusratta, in about 1380, in which the latter invokes his gods as witness, in the formula *ilani Mi-it-tra-as-si-il ilani U-ru-w-na-as-si-il ilu In-da-ra ilani Na-sa-at-ti-ia-an-na*. These can only be the gods Mitra, Varuna, and Indra of the ancient Indian pantheon as recorded in the earliest Sanskrit religious texts (such as the *Rigveda*) described later, and the last deity is likely to be the Nāsatyas, an alternative name for the heavenly twins, the Asvins, in the same literature. This Hittite treaty does not, of course, mean that there were Indians in the Mitannian kingdom at this time, but it does point to just that common stock of mythology among the Indo-European peoples that the linguistic equations would suggest – the gods of the Mitanni were also the gods of the eastern branch of the great Indo-European family.

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And there is additional evidence which, though not conclusive, points in the same direction to a common cultural heritage. Among the Boghaz Keui documents of about the same date there is a fragmentary handbook on chariot-racing, written by a Mitannian named Kikkuli, and among the technical terms used for so many ‘turnings’ round the course he employs forms which are very near to Sanskrit – *aikavartanna*, *teravartanna*, *panzavartanna*, *shattavartanna* – for one, three, five or seven laps of the race (Sanskrit *vartanam*, a turning). A class of military nobility, the *mariannu*, is mentioned in the same text, and might be equated with the Sanskrit *marya*, a young hero. Here again one must be dealing with common interests and sports – chariot-racing, as we shall see, was eagerly indulged in by the earliest Indo-European speakers in India – and a terminology which shows that Sanskrit and Mitannian could hardly have diverged much in vocabulary by the early fourteenth century B.C.

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Archaeologically and linguistically, this is the nearest one can bring Indo-European speakers towards India in the second millennium B.C. When we turn from the Mitannian kingdom to Persia and beyond, we leave literate societies and enter a world in which direct archaeological evidence is lacking and where an oral tradition has handed down the early Indo-European literature in such a way that the date of its composition can be arrived at only by more or less approximate computation, in the complete absence of epigraphic or palaeographical evidence to provide a check. In Persia the *Avesta* and in India the *Rigveda* constitute two Indo-European religious texts which linguistically should belong to the period under discussion, but we are entirely dependent on internal evidence for this attribution. Our concern here is with the *Rigveda*, and with the evidence which can be extracted from it to contribute to our knowledge of the material culture of its composers, which in its turn can be assessed against the archaeological evidence. To anticipate, there is no reasonable doubt that it does represent a text going back in its essentials to the middle of the second millennium B.C., and, in the light of our knowledge of the archaeology of contemporary Western Asia, it takes its place naturally as a characteristic Indo-European document of that time.

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After the extinction of the Harappā civilization, there are no inscriptions or manuscripts known in India until the middle of the third century B.C. To this date belong the famous inscriptions cut at the command of Aśoka on surfaces of natural rocks or on pillars to propagate Buddhism, in the Brāhmī script, which itself appears to be of Semitic origin, and thereafter one has a more or less regular series of epigraphic monuments. The climate of India is most unfavourable to the preservation of documents written on such perishable materials as parchment, bark or leaves, and probably the earliest Indian manuscript is the fragmentary Buddhist religious text written on birch-bark in the late fifth century A.D. and found in the Jaulian monastery at Taxila. The Bakhshali manuscript, of the same material, seems the next claimant for high antiquity, though this is only of the twelfth century. Direct information on the earliest manuscripts in India is, incidentally, extraordinarily difficult to come by. Paper was introduced by the Moslems into India in the thirteenth century, but most of the early manuscripts on this or similar substances have long ago decayed or been devoured by white ants.

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Although certain Hindu religious texts were written down in the Indian Middle Ages and later, the whole tradition of the Brahmans vehemently opposed this desecration of the holy word by committing it to the written form. Essentially the tradition was, and very largely still is, that of oral transmission from teacher to pupil, both of whom may be formally illiterate but have their powers of memorizing preternaturally sharpened by their very lack of contact with the techniques of reading and writing. Not long ago in Benares an illiterate Hindu priest appeared who dictated a very long religious work in verse, until then unknown and unrecorded, which on internal evidence of style and language belonged at least to the Middle Ages, since when it had been passed on orally through a certain line of priests.

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The writing down of the early Hindu religious literature was in fact achieved only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century at the instance of such British scholars as Sir William Jones, with what was regarded as the highly treasonable collaboration of certain Brahman priests. It is therefore clear that we cannot use the principles of textual criticism or of palaeography in studying this literature, since we have only a single standard text handed down in a single unvarying recension. Max Müller, after examining all the available texts of the Rigveda in the last century, concluded that ‘no use can be derived from them as manuscripts, because all of them are but transcripts, more or less carefully executed, of one and the same text’. But despite this extraordinary gap in time between the composition and the eventual writing down of these works, we can place great reliance on the purity of text. The exact preservation of every syllable and accent was thought to be of vital importance – the very sounds had a magical significance that could be varied only at the peril of the individual reciter. There is a story in a late religious work that stresses this danger, relating how the demon Tvaṣṭṛ recited a fatal magic spell against the god Indra, but, making a single slip in an accent, was himself killed by the spell recoiling against him.

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This oral tradition in literature is, of course, by no means uncommon among illiterate peoples, and within the Indo- European group one can aptly cite the Celtic practice as recorded by Caesar in Gaul of the first century B.C. ‘It is against the principles of the Druids,’ he writes, ‘to commit their doctrines to writing ... During their novitiate it is said that they learn by heart innumerable verses.’ In the two illiterate peripheries of the Indo-European dispersal, in west and east, one sees the same technique of the oral transmission of sacred lore: a technique unnecessary, and so lost, in regions where writing had been acquired at an early stage.

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With these preliminaries we can turn to the ancient religious books of Hinduism and their chronology. They are written in the Indo-European language Sanskrit and, as a whole, they fall into four or five main divisions, among which the poetical corpus known as the *Rigveda* stands alone in that all the other works presuppose its existence and in large part consist of commentaries based upon it. It must therefore be placed first in any attempted sequence, and nearly related to it must be a group of three other Vedic books, the *Sāmaveda* (instructions for the tunes to which the *Rigveda* hymns should be chanted), the *Yajurveda* (prose prayers and spells based on the *Rigveda* and sometimes merely paraphrasing it), and the *Atharvaveda* (verse incantations with occasional prose passages). Then there come the *Brāhmaṇas*, which, as their name implies, are works of priestly liturgical exegesis based on the Vedic books, and the *Upanishads*,* ‘secret teachings’ of metaphysics. In addition, there are the *Sūtras*, which are much condensed manuals of rites accompanying the Vedic prayers.

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The position of the *Rigveda* as the archetype within this series has already been pointed out, and internal evidence makes it clear that the *Sūtras* are later than the *Brāhmaṇas* and the *Upanishads*, so that a rough relationship of the various works seems established. But when we come to find a chronological framework against which this sequence can be set, we have very little to go on. The one certain fact seems to be that the doctrine preached by Buddha is essentially based on and develops out of the philosophical concepts contained in the Upanishads, and there is a reasonable consensus of evidence to place the date of Buddha’s death as within a decade or so of 500 B.C. The Upanishads, therefore, must have been in existence in the sixth century B.C.

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∗ This word is so well established in this form in English that to use the ‘s’ modified by a diacritical would be pedantic.

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Beyond that date we have to depend on a sort of philosophical dead-reckoning, invented by Max Müller and still generally accepted, by which the Brāhmanas are assigned to the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., the later Vedas to the ninth and tenth, and the older elements of the Rigveda to the eleventh or twelfth centuries. These dates Müller later insisted were minimum dates only, and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement (influenced no doubt by the discovery of the Mitannian document of about 1380 with the names of Rigveda gods) to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 B.C., but without any absolutely conclusive evidence.

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Yet, tested against the background of archaeology and the movements of peoples in Western Asia in the middle of the second millennium B.C. as we can now begin to discern them, this date has much to recommend it. In the last chapter we have seen that there is good archaeological evidence for the arrival in North-West India of invaders from the west in the centuries following 2000 B.C.: these need not be Indo-Europeans, but their arrival is likely to be connected with the general movements from the west about this time in which the Indo-Europeans were involved. The establishment of the Kassite and the Mitannian kingdoms is a significant pointer to warrior bands pressing eastward at least to the Persian frontiers, and the appearance of new cultures, if not actual ethnic types, in such North Persian sites as Hissar III and Sialk, may again not be unconnected with folkmovements spread over the first half of the second millennium, while the pottery from Anau III in Turkestan and Nad-i-Ali in Afghan Sistan, as well as the Moghul-ghundai and Jiwanri cemeteries, shows that colonies of these same people were established farther east at a later date, around 1100-1000 B.C.

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We shall see that an examination of the material culture of the composers of the *Rigveda*, as extracted from the allusions in the text, is entirely compatible with what we know of conditions at this time from archaeological evidence from other regions of early Indo-European colonization around the edges of the old city civilizations in Asia and the Aegean. I think we are justified in accepting the *Rigveda*, on archaeological grounds, as a genuine document of the period, preserved intact by the constant fear of the consequences if the magic word were altered by a hairsbreadth. An epic can be altered, brought up to date, recast and adapted to suit the changing tastes in heroic literature - the Indian epics, the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa*, are notable examples of this, their extant forms going back no further than the first few centuries A.D. In a religious text there is no need to delete an anachronism or explain an act whose significance is forgotten. Meaning is of less account than the precise sequence of words and phrases. We do not ourselves worry unduly about the meaning of archaic phrases in the Book of Psalms or even in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

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The *Rigveda* is a curious document. In length, it is approximately equal to the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* together, and consists of over a thousand poems, or ‘hymns’. These vary from more or less epic chants, hymns of praise, and prayers to the gods, to magic spells and fragments of popular songs, all of very varying standard - ‘sometimes true, genuine, and even sublime, but frequently childish, vulgar and obscure’, as Max Müller remarked. The language is elaborate and self-consciously literary, and the metrical composition, based on syllabic verse-forms, is often extremely complicated. In a word, however barbarous and archaic may be the life and thought reflected in the *Rigveda*, it is a laborious and sophisticated anthology, put together with conscious artifice by professional hymnologists at a relatively late stage of the culture of those people who in it are called the Aryans (*Ārya*) and who figure as conquerors in a newly-won land.

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As a source-book it is full of limitations and difficulties. The archaic Sanskrit in which it is written soon lost its precise significance, and by the Indian Middle Ages elaborate commentaries had to be devised to ‘explain’ the ancient text—which often meant forcing elaborately metaphorical interpretations on the misunderstood original. For the student of Aryan religion it gives only a partial picture, since it is concerned almost wholly with a limited group of ceremonies and gods, and many aspects of belief and ritual must be wholly unrepresented. In its interpretation the later works based on it can hardly be disregarded, as, however late their composition, they may often contain ancient elements dating back to the earliest phase, and in any discussion of Aryan religion the *Rigveda* cannot be isolated from its related books such as the *Atharvaveda* and the others.

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This method of interpretation, however, is one which grew up at a time when the Harappā civilization was still undiscovered and when it was assumed that the Aryan invaders of India encountered only a rabble of aboriginal savages who could have contributed little save a few primitive animistic beliefs to Vedic thought, nothing to the structure of later Indo-Aryan society. With such an assumption it was safe to regard the whole Vedic corpus as representing in the main an Aryan evolution owing practically nothing to the older vanquished people of the Punjab. But as the preceding chapters of this book have shown, the Aryan advent in India was, in fact, the arrival of barbarians into a region already highly organized into an empire based on a longestablished tradition of literate urban culture. The situation is, in fact, almost reversed, for the conquerors are seen to be less civilized than the conquered. In the *Rigveda* we see (or rather accidentally glimpse) this conquest from the Aryan point of view alone: they are the heroes, and scant tribute is paid to their contemptible opponents, more skilled in the arts of peace than in those of warfare. But, as we shall see, the Harappā tradition is very unlikely to have been suddenly and totally wiped out.

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With this knowledge, it is clear that it would be dangerous, in trying to work out the material culture of the first Aryan communities in North-West India, to use evidence from works compiled at a time when Harappā elements may have permeated Aryan society. In the ensuing sections of this chapter, therefore, I have used only the *Rigveda*, which does seem likely to represent faithfully the entrance phase of Aryan conquest, before the Indo-European tradition had become mixed with Harappā elements, while occasionally making reference to the later texts.

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Even with these limitations, however, we still encounter considerable difficulties in using the text of the *Rigveda* as a source for information on material culture. In the hymns the transition from the more or less literal to the wholly metaphorical is often sudden, and frequently almost imperceptible. The physical war-chariot of an Aryan chieftain turns, with bewildering rapidity, into the noon-day sun; the roistering young cattle-raiders are suddenly the four winds of heaven. And the accident of survival of words descriptive of aspects of material culture is really dependent on their adaptability to religious metaphor and their appropriateness to the warrior aristocracy for whom the hymns were composed; chariots are described in such detail that a modern coach-builder could probably turn out a passable replica of Indra’s vehicle, but we hardly know what the Aryan house looked like.

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But there is much that we can recover and interpret in the light of archaeological knowledge. We are building up a picture of Aryan communities presumably settled in some area of North-West India, or westwards in Afghanistan, at a time when their conquests had not extended farther east than the Ambala region of the Punjab: some scholars are inclined to think that the *Rigveda* was composed in this particular district. Such description of landscape as is contained in the hymns implies a knowledge of snow-capped mountains, fairly certainly the Himalayas, and a land of great rivers; while the rainfall seems to have been plentiful enough to suggest that the westward extension of the monsoon region, which we have seen is likely to have influenced the climate during the hey-day of the Harappā Culture, still affected the Punjab. In modern India Lucknow is usually taken as representing the approximate boundary between the wheat-growing areas to the west and the rice lands to the east, and the *Rigveda* knows nothing of rice, nor of the tropical animals such as the tiger, both of which are mentioned in the *Atharvaveda*, which implies that by the time of its composition Aryan territory had been extended eastwards down the Ganges, though as we have seen the tiger is depicted on the Harappā seals.

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The *Rigveda* hymns reflect the aspirations and life of members of the upper classes of a society which, in common with other Indo-European communities, was formally divided into a threefold grading of warriors, priests, and artisans – *Kṣatriyas*, *Brahmans*, and *Vaiśyas*, comparable with the *milites*, *flamines*, and *quirites* of Roman society or the *equites*, *druides*, and *plebes* of the Celts of Gaul as recorded by Caesar in the first century B.C. But it is important to realize that the concept of caste, as known in later literature, is quite unknown in the *Rigveda*. The tripartite arrangement is perhaps an obvious enough division of responsibilities within a community, but its formal recognition is characteristically Indo-European. The hymns are composed by the priests on their own behalf and on that of the warriors, their patrons, and are addressed mainly to a group of anthropomorphic deities, or to the deified sacrificial liquid, soma, round the cult of which the whole group of hymns is really centred.

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In several of the gods we can see the Aryans themselves magnified to heroic proportions. The greatest god of the Rigveda is Indra, to whom about one-quarter of the hymns are addressed, and he is the apotheosis of the Aryan battle-leader; strong-armed, colossal, tawny-bearded, and pot-bellied from drinking, he wields the thunderbolt in his more god-like moments, but fights like a hero with bow-and-arrows from his chariot. ‘He is strong, young, immortal, and ancient’, as Keith puts it; his appetite is enormous and he devours prodigious quantities of beef, porridge, and cakes, swilling them down with the intoxicating soma or with mead, and both his drunkenness and its after-effects are described with convincing fidelity. He is a cattle-raider, and above all he is the destroyer of the strongholds of the enemy, the victorious leader of the Aryans in their conquest of the hated ancient empire in the Punjab. With him fight the young warrior-band, the Maruts, who seem to be commanded by Rudra, rival to Indra and yet in some ways his counterpart, ‘unassailable, rapid, young, unaging, ruler of the world’ and with the malevolent characteristics which develop in later Hinduism in the person of Śiva.

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The portraits carry conviction in their artless barbarism, so curiously transmitted in the sophisticated Sanskrit verse. The atmosphere is that of the Irish tales that reflect the conditions of the Celtic Iron Age of the first century B.C. in Ulster and North Britain; Indra is often reminiscent of the grotesque Dagda with his insatiable appetite, Rudra and the Maruts make one think of Finn and the fianna, the young band of heroes, and the cattle-raiding is as familiar. But the Aryan reivings are carried out on the plains of the Punjab, and Indra and his followers fight against foes who, if not feared as opponents on the battle-field, are regarded with the superstitious dread of the simple soldier for the subtle townsman.

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These opponents of the Aryan onslaught, the despicable enemy who dares deny Indra’s supremacy in heaven and on earth, are referred to as the dasyus or dāsas. They have black complexions, no noses to speak of (anāsa), they are ‘of unintelligible speech’ and above all they are infidels. They have no ‘rites’, they are ‘indifferent to the gods’, they ‘follow strange ordinances’, they do not perform the Aryan sacrifices, and they probably worship the phallus. But they are wealthy, with great stores of gold, they are formed into groups or states, and they live in fortified strongholds. Their names may refer to their eventual fate in Aryan eyes, and be related to the root of das, to lay waste: the dwellers in the waste land after conquest.

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Our knowledge that the Harappā civilization was flourishing in Northern and Western India at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., centred on cities with strongly fortified citadels and containing among its population a large proportion of proto-Australoids with dark skin and flat noses, and that these cities came to a sudden and violent end, makes the identification of the dasyus and dāsas with the inhabitants of Harappā and Mohenjo-daro something near to a certainty. Indra’s exploits as a destroyer of forts, recently discussed by Wheeler in connexion with the defences of the Harappā citadel, go to confirm this view.

c14.39

With all-outstripping chariot-wheel, O Indra, thou
far-famed, hast overthrown the twice ten kings of men
With sixty thousand nine and ninety followers ...
Thou goest on from fight to fight intrepidly,
destroying castle after castle here with strength.

c14.40

Thus a hymn in the first book of the Rigveda (I, 53). The forts destroyed by Indra are said to be of stone, or with the epithet *āmā*, which may refer to unbaked (‘raw’) brick walls; some are ‘autumnal’, which may mean that they were protected from the river floods after the rains. Indra is *puramdara*, the fort destroyer: ‘Thou smitest foemen down, and many a citadel’, ‘thou breakest down the seven citadels’ say the bards in his praise. He ‘rends forts as age consumes a garment’.

c14.41

The attack seems to have included setting fire to the buildings:

c14.42

... in kindled fire he burnt up all their weapons,
And made him rich with kine and carts and horses (ii, 15)

c14.43

says another hymn of one of those favoured by the war-god. And it is possible that one can trace references to the destruction of the ‘bunds’ built to protect the Harappā cities from flood, so that the waters turned against them; it is difficult to be sure of this, because of the possibility of a sudden transition to the metaphorical usage of words describing Indra in his celestial character of Jupiter Pluvius releasing the rain and swelling the rivers, but the association of flood and conquest is significantly brought together in the same hymn from which the last quotation is taken:

c14.44

The mighty roaring flood he stayed from flowing, and carried those who swam not safely over,
They having crossed the stream attained to riches ...
He slaughtered Vala, and burst apart the defences of the mountain ...
He tore away their deftly-built defences ...
There the staff-bearer found the golden treasure ... (ii, 15).

c14.45

And again, ‘he sets free the rivers’ paths’, and ‘all banks of rivers yielded to his manly might’ (ii. 13).

c14.46

In the past, these ‘forts’ of the *dasyas* and the *dāsus* were considered to be either mythological or at best the primitive earthworks and palisades of the supposed aborigines of Northern India at the time of the Aryan conquest. But now, as Wheeler has said, ‘the recent excavation of Harappā may be thought to have changed the picture. Here we have a highly-evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type, now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river-system of north-western India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan invasions of that region ... On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused.’

c14.47

The archaeological evidence given in detail in Chapter V fits so well with the tale of conquest in the *Rigveda* that it is difficult to come to any other conclusion. The forts of the dasyus are the citadels of the Harappā civilization, wrecked and plundered by the war-bands who invoked Indra, Lord of Hosts, as they slaughtered those who would not accept his supremacy.

c14.48

Like the Amurru in Mesopotamia, the Aryans were ‘people who had never known a city’. Their way of life is clearly presented in the *Rigveda*, and is far from being that of the complicated urban organization traditional to the ancient centres of oriental civilization since the beginning of the third millennium. It belongs to the simple pattern of agricultural communities known throughout the prehistoric world of Europe and Asia up till and after the Roman Empire - more barbarous than the Homeric world and nearer to that of Beowulf. Its background is an agricultural economy which includes the growing of a grain crop, but in which herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats are of prime importance; wealth is reckoned in cattle, following the Indo-European tradition which gives the equation *pecus* = *pecunia* in Latin, a war-band is described as ‘the horde seeking cows’, and the root of the verb ‘to protect’ simply implies ‘to guard cows’.

c14.49

As in all simple pastoral societies, the Aryan vocabulary is rich in names for every aspect of the herd, with special words for ‘a cow with a strange calf’, ‘a cow barren after calving’, ‘a three-year-old ox’, and so on – one may compare the infinity of Arab words for camels. Red, black, dappled, and light-coloured cows are mentioned, and herds were differentiated by distinctive nicks cut in the ears, following a well-known custom which survived in Wales, for instance, to the last century. Milk evidently formed an important item of diet, either fresh or as curds or butter, but there is no direct evidence of cheese-making, nor of the use of fermented mare’s milk (*koumiss*) in the ancient steppe tradition. The cows were milked three times a day, and castration was practised, oxen being used for the normal purposes of farm transport, and beef was freely eaten as the main meat dish. ‘Slaying cows for guests’ was an attribute of highest praise to an Aryan squire, and Indra was a champion beef-eater: the present-day Hindu doctrine of *ahimsa*, and the ritual prohibition of flesh food, is connected with the later (*post-Brāhmaṇa*) ideas of transmigration, which are entirely foreign to the earlier Aryan beliefs.

c14.50

The Aryan feasts recall those of the Celts: there is the bronze cauldron (Sanskrit *caru*, Irish *coire*) slung over the fire by pot-hooks, with the guests waiting for the Champion’s Portion –

c14.51

The trial-fork of the flesh-cooking cauldron, the vessels out of which the broth is poured,
The warming-pots, the covers of the dishes, hooks, carving-boards ... (I, 162)

c14.52

as one hymn lovingly enumerates. Meat was also roasted on spits, and mutton and goat-flesh were eaten, in addition to beef. Leather was used for many purposes, such as slings, bow-strings, chariot-traces, reins, and whips, and some sort of a tanning process and the wetting of the hide preparatory to stretching it are implied by references in the *Rigveda*.

c14.53

The grain grown seems likely to have been barley, known, as we have seen, from Tell Halaf times in Northern Mesopotamia and with its wild ancestors growing in Asia Minor, Turkestan, Transcaucasia, and Northern Persia. Fields were tilled by an ox-drawn plough, which was presumably fairly large and heavy, since ox-teams of some size were in use at least in immediately post-Rigveda times, but a yoke does not seem to have been used, as it is nowhere mentioned in the Rigveda in this connexion. This is significant in view of the representations of ox-drawn ploughs in Early Dynastic Sumer and early (Third Dynasty) Egypt, in which no yoke is used, but the plough-traces are shown tied to the beasts' horns. A similar representation of Kassite origin in Mesopotamia shows the same technique, and the oxen employed seem to have the characteristic hump of the Indian breed known from the earliest pottery-paintings at Rana-ghuṇḍai and throughout the duration of the Harappā Culture. Whatever the significance of this feature, it is interesting to see the Kassites, presumably members of the Indo-European linguistic group in the fifteenth century B.C., using the same method of plough traction as can be inferred for the Aryans in India.

c14.54

The ripe ears of barley were cut with a knife or sickle, bound into sheaves or bundles, strewn on a threshing-floor, and eventually winnowed or sifted to separate the grain from the chaff. Some form of container or measure was used, for which the word ūrdara is used – Indra is filled with drink as one fills an ūrdara with grain – and one may recall the circular structure interpreted by Vats as a grain-bin in the final (post-Harappā) occupation on the deserted citadel of the type-site in this connexion. Some artificial water-supply is implied by a reference to ‘waters produced by digging’ in one hymn, suggesting wells rather than any more ambitious scheme of irrigation.

c14.55

Dogs were used for guarding houses and for boar-hunting, and they got driven away from the sacrifices, but there is no direct evidence of their use in herding, which seems to have been carried out by a herdsman armed with an ox-goad. The flocks included both sheep and goats, kept for their wool as much as their flesh. The Sanskrit word for a sheep is used by transference for wool, and no doubt sheep’s wool was mainly used, but there is evidence that goat’s wool was also used, presumably from such long-haired animals as those of Kashmir, already mentioned in Chapter V. The wool when spun was woven, probably by women, on a loom of which the names of warp, woof, and shuttle are preserved.

c14.56

But, apart from cattle, the really characteristic domesticated animal of the Aryans was the horse. From the descriptions of the colouring of horses in the *Rigveda*, Ridgeway concluded that they had chestnut heads and backs, shading off into dun on the lower parts of the body, in the manner of the wild horse of the steppes known as Przewalski’s horse, and that they were of Mongolian or Upper Asiatic stock. They seem to have been kept in stalls on occasion at least, and were hobbled when put out to graze. Stallions were sometimes gelded, but mares were especially used as draught animals in war-chariots, and riding seems to have been very exceptional and never formed a technique of warfare. This may well have been partly due to the fact that the invention of stirrups seems to come unaccountably late in the development of horse-harness, and that a secure seat for a fighting man could hardly be attained without them. Military cavalry was known to the Assyrians and the Achaemenids, and the invention of stirrups must be an ancient oriental contribution to horsemanship. In India stirrup-loops appear on carvings of the second century B.C. at Sanchi in the Deccan and on an engraved copper vessel of rather later date from North India, but in any case their adoption must have been long after the early Aryan phase.

c14.57

The Aryan horses seem to have been used essentially as chariot-animals, whether in warfare, as described later on, or for chariot-racing, which was a favourite sport. It seems to have been indulged in purely for amusement and for prizes (except on a few formal religious occasions, such as the royal consecration), and the race took place along a course to a mark round which the chariots turned and came back again - the aikavartana and so forth of the Mitannian Guide to the Turf mentioned above. Such a race-course is presumably the ancestor of the Roman *circus* and the Greek στάδιον such as that at Olympia, where a race with ridden horses was first introduced as a novelty in the middle of the seventh century B.C., though chariot-racing still remained popular. One is reminded too of the ancient Celtic horse-races at the Fair of Carman and the other assemblies in Dark-Age Ireland.

c14.58

The horse appears to have been domesticated in South Russia by Middle Kuban times (between 2000 and 1500 B.C.), and representations of Przewalski's horse appear on a silver bowl from the rather earlier Maikop tomb. But the evidence from Anau and Sialk shows that an apparently domesticated horse was known in Persia and Turkestan in very early times, and it again appears in Baluchistan in Rana-ghuṇḍai I and, though rarely, in the Harappā Culture. One cannot, therefore, hold that the Aryans were the first people to domesticate the horse in India or on its western border-lands, but they were certainly among the first to introduce the idea of rapid transport made possible by its use. For their farm work, ox-drawn four-wheeled carts seem to have been used, and horses bred solely for use with the light two-wheeled chariot for sport or warfare.

c14.59

Practically nothing can be gleaned of the appearance or lay-out of an Aryan settlement, or of the houses, but we are clearly dealing with nothing larger than farmsteads and villages. Such mundane affairs did not lend themselves to metaphor in hymns to the war-gods, though the goddess of Dawn does make a homely, rustic appearance in her ox-drawn cart, reminding us of Demeter and of the Teutonic goddess Nertha described by Tacitus, whose image was similarly transported, and of the actual ritual carts carrying a deity’s throne known in Europe from Italy, Alsace, and Denmark, and dating from the fifth century B.C. onwards. All the Aryan buildings, however, appear to have been of wood, and the house seems to have been rectangular, with a thatched roof, divided into more than one room or compartment; possibly some phrases may be construed to imply that the cattle and sheep, as well as the household, were under a single roof. If the linguistic equation of the Sanskrit word for a doorway, *ātā* (always used metaphorically for the doors of the sky) with the Latin *antae* is to be taken literally, it should have the meaning of a porch formed between the projecting end-walls of the building. This architectural device is characteristic of the *megaron* house, known in the Troad and Eastern Europe at least as early as the beginning of the third millennium B.C., and certainly associated with the early speakers of Indo-European languages in Greece, but it is dangerous to force the analogy.

c14.60

As in the *megaron*, so in the Aryan house, the central hearth has a position of peculiar importance, and is the focus of the household religious rites. The use of roasting-spits and bronze cauldrons, with flesh-forks to impale the savoury gobbets of boiled beef, has already been mentioned, and presumably among the household gear must be reckoned saddle-querns for grinding, or pestles and mortars for pounding the corn into flour: the former are probably, the latter certainly, referred to in the *Rigveda*. Pottery vessels are again mentioned, and the drink available at feasts included mead, the name of which runs convincingly through the Indo-European vocabularies to suggest that it was an early invention common to all branches (Sanskrit *mádhu*, Greek *μέθυ*, Celtic *mid*, Old High German *metu*, Old Slavonic, *medu*). Another intoxicating drink was *sura*, which was probably a kind of beer brewed from grain. The mystic liquid soma, extracted from the stems of some now unknown plant, seems likely to have been used almost entirely for religious ritual; its preparation and drinking is fully described in the various hymns dedicated to this aspect of Aryan religious practice.

c14.61

Little, again, can be gathered of clothing, except that it was mainly of woollen cloth. Clothes that were either embroidered or woven in ornamental patterns were worn by women, and a cloak or mantle was worn, probably by both sexes. We are reminded of the garment dyed red and purple and the cloak of brown wool found in one of the tombs contemporary with that of Maikop, at Tsarskaya in South Russia. It is interesting that the use of a turban (surely derived from the Harappā Culture) is mentioned only in texts from the Brāhmaṇas onwards. Men wear ear-ornaments in the Rigveda, and there is mention of an ornamental headdress for women, which the etymology suggests stood up like a ‘horn’, while gold was used for anklets and rings, neck-ornaments and others worn on the breast. Shaving is mentioned, and there are references to moustaches and beards - Indra is famous for his tawny beard.

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