Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.4

c6.4

The simplest means of determining an archaeological date is naturally by the direct or indirect application of historical criteria. In India, it may be claimed that the earliest literature, the hymnal of the *Rigveda*, has something of the quality of history, since it portrays incidentally the earlier struggles and rivalries of the Aryan-speaking invaders of the north-western territories of the subcontinent, and gives a vivid picture of their social condition at the time. What precisely that time was, is less explicit. An Indian writer, enlarging a remark of Megasthenes by means of supposititious king-lists, would ascribe the Aryan Invasion to 6777 B.C., a fantasy which may be consigned to limbo with Archbishop Ussher's date for the Creation. More rational inference assigns the episode to the centuries following 1500 B.C., when, if not earlier, Aryan gods and men were on the move in western Asia. Of this movement it is reasonable to regard the invasions reflected in the *Rigveda* as an eastward extension; and their possible bearing upon the date and character of the latter end of the great Indus Civilization will be considered later.