Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.3

c8.3

The archaeology of the Ganges valley is in its infancy, and correlation between its material cultures on the one hand and linguistic or literary factors on the other may wisely be deferred. The composite individuality which, from an early date, distinguished this region from the Punjab on the west and Bengal on the east requires much further evidence and analysis for its proper understanding. No part of India has been changed more drastically by the encroachment of tillage on jungle, and the first act of the historical imagination must be to replant 'the dark and pathless forest', the mahāvana, in which Rāma and the Pāṇḍavas had their being. In this close and tangled country the intruding Aryans at the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. may have found little previous occupation of a settled kind; such at least is the implication of the few sites which have hitherto been probed to the subsoil. The invaders themselves, it may be suspected, here quickly dropped their dominantly pastoral economy in favour of one based on agriculture in fertile riverside clearings. Here the territorial magnate began at no great interval to supersede the traditional tribal chieftain and to build the nations and kingdoms of the Indian epics, of which this is the homeland. Here, in the Middle Country or *Madhyadesha*, developed the 'Inner' category of Indo-Aryan speech, as distinct from the 'Outer' category in the Punjab, Bengal and Assam. Here emerged the essential India, with its imperial dynasties and its great religious teachers. At present, all this achievement is strangely lacking in palpable roots.