Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.33

c14.33

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.