DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

4.1J DEMOLITION OF BARRIERS 85
difference of quality; many people previously separated were involved
by force in new types of social organization. The basis was a new
availability to all of skills, tools, production techniques that had
remained local secrets till then. This meant flexibility in adoption,
versatility of improvisation. It meant new barter, hence new
commodity production. The result was the opening up of new regions
to cultivation by methods which the more or less ingrown local
populations had not dreamt of using. All this may be read from a widespread
archaeological record. The violent methods whereby these
innovations were introduced effected more and greater improvements
than did previous trade, warfare, or ritual killing. From the age of Sargon
to that of the last Assyrian kings, we see wars in the Near East fought
on a growing scale, with increasing cruelty, without compensatory
improvements. Such conquests may be compared with the drought,
which indeed withered up Mesopotamia by ruining irrigation; the
Aryans resembled the destructive flood, which fertilises the soil to
promote new growth. The only social function of the overdeveloped
ritual and cults of the dead could have been to preserve the status
quo. This discouraged innovation, atrophied the mind. The Aryan raids
swept away the older classes with their rituals.
The barriers so torn down could never be effectively re-erected
because the Aryans left a priceless means of intercourse, a simpler
language distributed over a vast region. They had no alphabet of their
own, but simplified, adopted, and spread whatever was available from
the cuneiform and Phoenician scripts. The difference was that literacy
was no longer the monopoly of the priests, a small tiass of professional
scribes, or narrow, dosed merchant guilds. On the other hand, older
records — if any — vanished while archaeological data in fixed stratification
decreased. The Aryan settlements shifted constantly and left far less
durable remains than those of the static Indus culture. None of the
vedic records yield a chronology, not even the relative chronology of
a stratified pottery sequence. The difficulty of
discovering whether a specific component of Indian society is Aryan
or not is augmented by the fact that words change their meaning over