Chapter 4: Early Societies in South Asia

In the early days of Aryan migrations, Indra was their chief god.

• They sung hundreds of hymns and told dozens of stories about him.

The Aryans took Indra as a leader against earthly forces, as well as heavenly foes.

• Instead of mounting an attack into India, they migrated in sizable numbers into south Asia.

The Harappan society (so named after one of its two chiefs) developed in the Indus river valley.

• It is impossible to follow the developement of the Harappan society, as all the remains of their early development are underwater.
• The earliest remains accessable are from around 2500 BCE, during the high point of the Harappan society.
• The other main problem with studying the Harappan society is that they used a system of writing in which four hundred symbols represented sounds and words. It has yet to be deciphered, but scientists agree that it is most likely a Dravidian tongue.

The Indus river made an agricultural society possible for northern India.

• Cultivators grew wheat and barley, and supplemented their diet with cattle, sheep and goats. Additionally, they ate chicken, they kept the world's first chicken.

Indus river valley inhabitants had cultivated cotton by 5000 BCE.

• Dyed cloth was found dating back to 2000 BCE.

Harappans encouraged both foreign and domestic trade. Items produced in both Harappa and Mojenjo-daro found their wall all over the Indus river valley.

• From 2300 to 1750, they also traded with Mesopotamians.

After 1900 BCE, the Harappan society largely collapsed.

• Firstly, because of deforestation, which lead to decreased rainfall and erosion.
• Another cause would be natural disasters, such as a sudden flood or earthquake.

By 1500 BCE, a group of nomadic people who called themselves the Aryans ("noble people") filtered through the Indian subcontinent, and settled throughout the Indus valley.

• This migration took place over several centuries.
• Aryans originally were quite dependant on a pastoral econoomy. They kept sheep, goats, and horses.

Aryans did not use a system of writing, but trasmitted numerous poems and songs called the Vedas orally, in their sacret language Sanskrit.

• Everyday communication happened in Prakt, which later evolved into Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu.

During the early centuries of the Vedic age, Aryan groups settled in the Punjab, the upper Indus River valley that straddles the moder-day border between nothern India and Pakistan.

• After 1000 BCE, they settled between the Himalayan fotthills and the Granges River.
• By 750 BCE, populations increased enough that Aryans had established the first small cities in the Granges River valley.
• By 500 BCE, Aryan groups had migrated south as far as northern Deccan.

After 1000 BCE, the Aryans increasinly recognized for main varnas:

• Brahmins - priests
• Kshatriyas - warriars and aristocats
• Vaishyas - cultivators, artisans, and merchants
• Shundras - landlass peasants and surfs

Aryan India had a strongly patriarchal society, in which women had no public authority.

• Because they had no responsibilities, women rarely learned the Vedas, and formal edication in Sanskrit was almost exclusively a male privilege.

The practice of sati - in which a window voluntarily threw herself on her husband's funeral pyre to join him in death - demonstrated the dependance of some women on their husbands.

• This practice  never became a popular or widely practice, though it was recommended strongly by moralists, particularly for the wives of socially prominent men.

The chief deity of the Rig Veda was Indra.

• Aryans recognized a host of other deities, including a god of the sun, the sky, the moon, fire, health, disease, dawn, and underworld.

Aryan people performed ritual sacrifices of animals to win the favor of the gods.

• Proper honor for the gods required that each household have a brahmins perform no less than five sacrifices per day.

Around 800 BCE, many people became dissatisfied with the sacrificial cults of the Vedas, and many retreated and lived as hermits while they pondered the relationship between human beings, the world, and the gods.

• They often drew on the religious beliefs of the Dravidian people, who worshipped nature spirits who they associated with fertility and new life.
• Dravidians also believed that the human soul took on a physical form after death, and they returned to plants or animals, sometimes in the bodily shell of newborn babies.

The Upanishads taught that appearances are decieving, and that individual human beings are in fact not separate and autonomous creatures. Instead each human is part of a larger cosmic order and forms a small universal soul, known as Brahman.

• The Upanishads developed several specific doctrines that helped explain this line of thought:

  • One doctrine was the samsara, which held that upon death, invididual soulds go temporarily to the World of the Fathers, and reter to earth in a new incarnation.
  • Another was the doctrine of karma, which accounted for all the specific incarnations that souls experienced.

Even under the best circumstances, the cycle of rebirth was painful, as was human existance. The authors of the Upanishads sought to achieve moksha, a state characterized by a deep, dreamless sleep, where they were liberated from physical incarnation.

• To achieve moksha, they had to severe ties with the physical world which they could only do by aceticism and meditation.