Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.48

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’.