Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.53

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.