Copper in Ancient India c7.s2.6

c7.s2.6

I would entirely agree with Mr. Vincent A. Smith in thinking that “in the greater part of Northern India a copper age intervened between the Neolithic period and the iron age.” Two evidences on this subject are conclusive. In the first place the wide area over which the finds of the copper implements have been distributed shows that the copper implements were used throughout the greater part of Northern India including certain parts of the Central Provinces, as the Gunjeria deposit by reason of its contents must be associated with Northern India. Secondly, this very large number of weapons including agricultural and domestic implements in the Gunjeria deposit is a conclusive proof of the fact that copper implements were largely used in Northern India at some period of her history. As Mr. Smith himself points out, the celts from Upper India found at Mathura, Bijnor, Mainpuri and Bithur are all, with one exception, of the kind known to archaeologists as ‘flat celts,’ extremely primitive in form “closely imitating common stone models and obviously referable to a period when metal was only beginning to supersede stone.” As the Aryans were undoubtedly well acquainted with at least two metals viz. gold and iron even at the time of the composition of the Rigveda, it would thus appear that the people who used these copper celts were not the Aryans but the *direct lineal descendents of the Neolithic people who inhabitated India before the Aryan conquest*. The copper age appears to have been spread over a tolerably wide interval of time, as much improvement in the technique of the construction of some of the implements as those found in the Gunjeria deposit and the spear heads would suggest.