The Historians' History of the World 02

There is no trustworthy historical information of antiquity to throw light on the development and gradual evolution of the culture of the Aryans, and so until the chronicles and legends of the Buddhists in the sixth and fifth and the records of the Greeks in the fourth and third centuries, it can only be gathered from a few traces and analogies. The Brahmans had not the slightest interest in records; on the other hand they endeavoured to blot out all recollection of earlier times and other conditions, so that the conditions and views which developed later might appear to the people as the original ones. So the chronological order of the accounts, derived from the national poems and religious writings, is necessarily so very deficient and intermittent that the more ancient periods can only be surmised.

From the years of their immigration into the district of the Indus, which must have occurred in the third millennium before our era, until the fifteenth century, the Aryans lived in the Land of the Five Rivers as far as the sacred Saraswati. Divided into many tribes, they led a settled pastoral and agricultural life under the leadership of elders, chiefs, and kings, worshipping the sun-god Indra and the other powers of nature with songs and sacrifices, and hardening themselves by battle and tribal feuds. In the oldest portions of the Vedas are still preserved some of the songs and invocations sung at the festivals of the gods or at the sacrificial feasts of the dead.

In their gradual expansion towards the south, they may have reached the mouth of the Indus by the fourteenth or thirteenth century, and on the southern seacoast they may have made commercial alliances with the Babylonians and Phœnicians. Diodorus’ account, taken from the Greek historian Ctesias, of the journey of Queen Semiramis to the Indus, and her battle with the “Lord of the Earth” (Stabrobates-Sthavarapatis) seems, in spite of its fabulous exaggeration, to rest upon historical tradition, which, combined with the report that Semiramis founded the city of Kophen on the river Kabul tends to prove, that at this time the country on the right bank of the Upper Indus was subject and paid tribute to the Assyrians.[21]

A second stage of evolution is connected with the conquest of the land of the Ganges, beginning about the fourteenth century before our era, when an heroic period commenced full of warlike deeds, the traces of which are retained in the oldest legends of the national epic, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and in the names of some tribal princes and ruling families. We should have more accurate information about this period of heroic activity had not the heroic poems later undergone complete transformation under the hands of the Brahmans, but even in their present form they still retain a core of historical truth although more concealed and veiled than among other peoples. The farther the Aryans went to the east, the more the forsaken home on the Indus and its tributaries was regarded as the sacred mother country where the Aryan race was unmixed with foreign elements and where the sacred Sanskrit language maintained its original purity. But the patriarchal institutions and the old nature-religion were in the course of time so eliminated from the memory of the race that the remaining tribes, which had not kept pace with the evolution of the people of the Ganges, or had clung to the old forms, were excluded from the religious communion and the legal system of the worshippers of Brahma as impure and of low degree. Some of these tribes on the Upper Indus were under Persian dominion and marched as far as the plains of Eleusis in the army of Xerxes.

The national strength of the Indians seems to have been shattered by these centuries of long-continued struggles, first against the aboriginal population, and then after their subjugation or expulsion, among the Aryan races themselves, the first settlers seeking to defend the territory they had gained against later immigrants. Therefore it was not difficult for the priests, when arms were at last laid down, to repress the warlike portion of the population, which had been supreme in the heroic period, but had lost its best forces and its most capable leaders in the bloody battles, especially as the enervating climate and the fertility of their new abode on the Ganges and Jumna were more conducive to religious contemplation and peaceful courses than to martial excitement and military life.