An Outline of the Religious Literature of India c6.6

c6.6

§ 2. We cannot tell where the home of this ancient race was, nor at what times and places the great historical peoples hived off from it; but we can trace with certainty the invaders of India, in that stage of their life which immediately preceded the invasion.¹ A people, partly nomadic, partly agricultural, lived for a considerable time somewhere in Central Asia, perhaps just to the north of the Hindu Kush. Finally they separated into two groups, perhaps by a process of migration so slow as to leave them unconscious that they had fallen apart, the one moving through Afghanistan into India, the other spreading over the wide territory which bears their racial name, Iran. This word is simply a variant form of Aryan, the name used by their brothers, the invaders of India. We may therefore speak of the period before the separation as the time of Indo-Iranian unity.