Copper in Ancient India c7.s2.7

c7.s2.7

The question of the copper age naturally therefore resolves into the determination of the time when the Aryans conquered Northern India from its aboriginal inhabitants. That date would form the lower limit of the copper age, as the Aryans evidently taught the original inhabitants of Northern India the use of iron in the place of copper. Now in the time of the Rigveda the Aryans were in their first settlement in the Punjab on the banks of the Indus and its tributaries. "The Yajurveda introduces us not only to a geographical area different from that of the Rigveda but also a new epoch of religious and social life in India. We no more hear of the Indus and its tributaries, for the geographical data of all the rescensions of the Yajurveda point to the territory in the middle of Northern India occupied by the neighbouring people of the Kurus and Pāñchālas. It lay in the plain between the Sutlej and the Jamuna. But the conquest of Northern India appears to have been complete during the Brāhman age. In the Sathapatha Brāhman we find that "the Brāhminical system had by this time spread to the countries to the east of Madhaydesh, to Koshala with its capital Ajodhya (Oudh) and Videha (Tirhut or Northern Behar) with its capital Mithila."² Buddha who preached a religion antagonistic to Brāhminism in many respects was born in 507 B.C. and when Alexander came to invade India, the Indian troops as we learn from Herodotus had arrows tipped with iron.³ It would thus appear that by 1000 B.C. the greater part of Northern India was conquered and Aryanised and by the seventh century B.C. the Aryans begen to penetrate into Southern India. I would therefore agree with Mr. Smith, though for entirely different reasons, that all the copper implements must be dated previous to 1000 B.C. and that the most primitive forms may be as old as 1500-2000 B.C.