this part of India, a prehistoric civilization almost as old as that of Sumeria. The frontiers of Indian prehistoric have been pushed back more than two thousand years. Before we describe the two principal cities have been excavated, and the vast area they controlled, it is worth while to consider the most ancient sacred literature of India, the Vedic Hymns. There are about one thousand of them, and they are addressed to the greatest gods of the Hindu pantheon, extolling their deeds and entreating them to accept the sacrifice of their worshipper. The hymns are in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, branch of the Indo-European family of languages from which our own is descended. Parts of the Rig Veda may refer to the time before the Aryan invaders entered" India, though, this cannot be proved, but may appear to belong to a time of strife and conflict, when the invaders from the north were moving into the land to which they have given their name, a time when they called upon their greatest god, Indra, to help them in battle. Indra was "the ruler of the bright firmament". Like Zeus in Greek mythology he stands at the head of heaven as king of gods, and in Vedic poetry he is represented as performing wonderful deeds for the benefit of good men, while possessing at the same time the attributes of a war-god. In some of the hymns Indra is puramdara: "fort-destroyer". To assist his protégé, Divadasa, he destroys "ninety forts". These are evidently walled cities of some sort; the word pur occurs, meaning "rampart" or "stronghold"; some are of stone (asmamayi), others probably of mud-brick (ama-"raw", "unbaked"). He also destroys one hundred "ancient castles" and "rend forts as age consumes a garment".2 Until recently it was assumed that these citadels were mythical, or, as Macdonnell and Keith suggested, "were merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with pallisades and a ditch". But, just as in the case of the Homeric stories of ancient Greece, which used to be regarded as mere myths, the events described in the Rig Veda appear to have an historical basis. In fact it can now be proved that when the Aryans entered India they had to encounter not mere untutored barbarians but a highly civilized people who had occupied the Indus Valley for at least a thousand years before the invasion. The evidence for this has been obtained mainly from the excavation of two "lost cities". One is Harappa, already mentioned, a small ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2 For these allusions to the Rig Veda I am indebted to Sir Mortimer Wheeler's book, The Vedic Age. |