Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.60

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.