By the middle of the second millennium BCE, a people calling themselves Arya, or "noble ones," were living in northwest India. Historians call these people Aryans. The Aryans’ closest relatives were the ancient Iranians, as their similar name suggests. Aryans and Iranians were probably the same people at one time, living as nomads and moving with herds of cattle across the dry plains of central Asia. At some point they separated, and the Aryans moved south into India.
Research has not uncovered evidence showing when the Aryans reached their new homeland, though there are many different theories. Some scholars believe that they arrived toward the end of the Indus valley civilization, around 2000 BCE, and may have conquered some of the Indus cities. Others argue that they came later, only after those cities had fallen into ruin.
The Aryans first settled in the Punjab, the plain where five rivers flow into the Indus. They lived in small villages, still raising cattle but now also growing crops, such as barley, using a plow pulled by an ox. They later spread east, reaching the valley of India’s other great river, the Ganges, in the first millennium BCE.
Vedas
The source of almost all current knowledge about the mysterious Aryans is their collection of religious poems, the Vedas. These are thought to date from between 1700 and 900 BCE and are the oldest Indian texts that can be understood.
For many hundreds of years, the Vedas were memorized and passed on by word of mouth. It was not until a new writing system was invented, sometime after 500 BCE, that they were written down. The Vedas are so important that the whole of Indian history between around 1700 and 500 BCE is known as the Vedic period.
Society
According to the Vedas the first Aryans lived in janas, or clans – tribes whose members all believed they were descended from a single ancestor. Each clan was ruled by a chief called a raja, a word that later came to mean "king."
Over time, four different classes developed. At the top were the Brahmans, or priests. Next were the Kshatriya – the nobles and warriors. Below them were the Vaisya – craftspeople and merchants. At the bottom were the Sudra, or servants and laborers. These designations are thought by many scholars to be the beginning of the caste system, the division of Indian society into classes, whose members would only marry others from their own caste.
Warfare
The Aryans were a warlike people who rode into battle on horse-drawn chariots, shooting arrows at their enemies. In early times fighting took the form of cattle raids. The Aryan word for war, gavisti, means "searching for cattle." Later, the aim of warfare was to conquer territory.
Religion
The Aryans worshiped many gods, who were thought to provide all the good things in life – victory in war, wealth, cattle, and "heroic sons." The most powerful god was Indra, the sky and war god. People pictured him riding a chariot across the sky armed with a thunderbolt, smashing the clouds open and releasing the rain.
Other important gods were Agni, the fire god, Mitra, the sun god, and his brother Varuna, who was god of the moon and lord of the dead. Varuna also had a special role as a god who watched over oaths.
In order to win the gods’ favor, the Brahmans performed ceremonies in which they praised the gods by reciting the Vedas and offered them sacrifices. Cattle, horses, and sometimes even people were killed as offerings to the gods. The sacrificial offering was burned on a movable brick altar. Agni, the fire god, was thought to eat the meat, turning it into smoke, which then rose to feed the other gods.
|
SANSKRIT |
|
|
|
The best evidence that the Aryans were not originally from India is that their language, Sanskrit, is closely related to most of the languages of Europe and western Asia. The word ignite, for example, comes from the Latin word for "fire," ignis, which is very similar to agni, the Aryans’ word for "fire" and the name of their fire god. Vocabulary provides other evidence that the Aryans did not come from India. Aryans had to invent a name for the elephant, calling it "the beast with a hand." As elephants were common Indian animals, the lack of an Aryan name suggests that their language developed in a land without elephants.
| |
|
|
|
|
|
