DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

86 STUDY OF THE RGVEDA [4.2
the centuries; observances tend to change too, with the means of
production. It is sometimes doubtful whether a feature common to Iranians
and Indie Aryans could not have been adopted by both from earlier
societies, since these earlier societies had great points of similarity :
say, the Indus and Sumerian urban cultures. Finally, the normal
sequence of development from matriarchy to patriarchy is disturbed by
the later, comparatively peaceful, assimilation of non-Aryan Indians to
the Aryan way of life and of speech ; matriarchal features such as stridhan
(a small amount of personal property handed down in the female
line) re-appear rather late in the Indian tradition, and cannot be
explained in any other way except by such relatively peaceful assimilation
of the old to the new manner of life. A little caution enables such
difficulties to be overcome, provided our definition of history is kept in
mind.
4.2. The main source for the period of Aryan invasion,
destruction, conquest is the oldest of the four vedas (discussed in Chap.
V) the Rgveda, 2 with very little support from archaeology. The need
for such support may be seen from the complete reorientation which is
called for in vedic studies by Indus valley excavations ; the Hariyupiya
of RV. 6.27.5 was once identified not with the city of Harappa but
with the Haliab or Ariob river, a tributary of the Kurum, the whole
battle being laid in Afghanistan. The Indus decline, on Albright’s
chronology, comes at abotit 1750 B. c. Rgvedic actions are put at about
1500 3 B. c. (on internal evidence, not clear to me). The period of regular
settlement represented by the Yajurveda must have begun about 800 B. c.
The Rgveda has therefore to be divided into strata on the basis of language
alone, much pf which has now become obscure ; some of it was
misinterpreted by later commentators to whom the Veda was the height of
mystical philosophy. In one respect alone is the critic reasonably happy
: the text of the Rgveda is fixed with far greater certainty than anything
in classical Sanskrit. Rgvedic hymns (sukta) were regarded as immutable,
i n
existence from eternity not composed but only ‘ seen’ by the various seers.
The vedas (particularly the RV) were preserved intact, without change, by
a most rigid discipline which we know from the practice of the later priestclass,
the brahmins.