Indo-European Aryans

During the Vedic Age in India, a group of people called the Aryans became a dominant culture if north India. These people spoke an early form of Sanskrit, “an Indo-European language closely related to Persian and more distantly related to Latin, Greek, Celtic, and their modern [linguistic] decendants” (McKay, 68). The Indo-European Aryans created a complex society with it’s own distinctive social structure, religious beliefs, and technologies. The primary source of information about the Aryans and their culture comes from an oral collection of hymns, philosophical treatises, and ritual texts called the Rig Veda that was composed around 1500 B.C.E. to 500 B.C.E. in Sanskrit. In the Rig Veda, one will discover that the Aryans were a people composed
of a number of warrior tribes who loved to hunt, race, drink, and dance. Wealth in the Aryan culture was counted in cattle, and the honored heroism and warrior skills.
Each Aryan Tribe was lead by an elected chief chosen for his military skills known as a raja, who led his people in both peacetime and during militaristic campaigns. Socially, the priests followed the raja in importance. The priests were responsible for knowing and performing the different complex rituals and sacrificial magic required of them. After the priests came the warrior nobility and warrior class, then the common tribesmen who would tend the herds and work the land. Non-Aryans were at the bottom of the social structure and oftentimes assigned the most menial tasks. The epics of the Aryans speak of their chiefs “as godlike heroes and their opponents as irreligious savages who did not perform the proper sacrifices” (McKay, 68).
They followed a core of memorized sacred texts known as the Vedas. Some of the hymns of the Vedas are even believed to have “provided the catalytic germ for what was to become Hinduism – a synthesis of the Aryan and pre- or non-Aryan elements” (Blackwell, 15). The Aryans enjoyed a number of technological advantages over that of their opponents such as horses, two-wheeled chariots with spoked wheels, bronze weaponry such as swords, axes, and spears, and longbows with a significant range unlike anything seen in the region before their arrival. After they would conquer a people, they would then adopt many of the best practices of those people such as local agricultural techniques and even adjust their diets to accommodate what would grow best in their new territories. As time progressed the region’s environment changed and was no longer so accommodating to the Aryans; “some say that the Saraswati River was drying up, others that the region suffered catastrophic floods” (Violatti). Either way, agriculture would have greatly suffered as a result, causing the Aryan civilization to decline. During their approximate 1000-year reign, they evolved to become a distinctive culture that permanently influenced India’s subsequent social structures, religious beliefs, and
technologies.