Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.17

c14.17

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.