The upper deposits. These include carnelian, lapis lazuli, and TURQUOISE beads, many in an unfinished state, indicating local manufacture. There is also some evidence for a formal layout, for a street divides the site into two parts. The inhabitants cultivated wheat and barley, maintained domestic cattle, sheep, and goats, and also fished and hunted the local wild fauna.
The Rig-Veda asserts: “If we have deceived, like gamblers in a game of dice,” a passage that recalls the common discovery of gambling dice in sites of the Indus Valley civilization.
Ribadeneyra, F. Marcello de (16th century) F. de Ribadeneyra published Historia de las Islas del Archipelago y Reinos della gran China, Tartaria, Cochinchina, Malaca, Siam, Camboxa, y Japan. . . in 1601, the first account of Angkor in Cambodia in a European language.
He wrote:
We suppose that the founders of the kingdom of Siam came from the great city which is situated in the middle of a desert in the kingdom of Cambodia. There are the ruins of an ancient city which some say was built by Alexander the Great or the Romans, it is amazing that no one lives there now, it is inhabited by ferocious animals, and the local people say it was built by foreigners.
Rig-Veda Vedas are sacred ritual hymns that survived through oral tradition in India until first transcribed in the 14th century c. e. They have been intoned by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies for millennia, especially during ceremonies incorporating sacrifice and the soma ritual. The gods worshiped include the principal deities of Hinduism in their early manifestations: Foremost is Agni, the god of fire; Surya, the Sun god; Rudra, god of storms; and INDRA and Vishnu, the gods of war. The Rig-Veda is the principal and earliest such collection of hymns. These contributed to the later Yajur Veda and the Sama Veda. The vedas continue to be recited to this day
WHEELER’S VIEW EQUATING PEOPLE OF RIG-VEDA WITH END OF INDUS CIVILIZATION
SANSKRIT, the language of the Rig-Veda, belongs to the Indo-European family. Dating the hymns takes on profound significance, for it would indicate not only the presence of Indo-European languages in India, but also the nature of the societies at that time. There is no agreement on the chronological context or even the archaeological correlates of the activities and places described in the Rig-Veda. Indeed, there are at least two diametrically opposing schools of thought and groups that occupy the middle ground.
First, a widely repeated view is that the Indo-European peoples of the Rig-Veda swept into northwestern India and Pakistan in the early second millennium b. c.e.
And were responsible for destroying the cities of the INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION. This view has its clearest expression in the writings of sir Mortimer wheeler, who was the director-general of archaeology in India during the 1940s and adviser to the Pakistan government after partition in 1947. He excavated at mohenjo daro and HARAPPA, the two major Indus cities, and at the former, he found a number of skeletons and evidence for burning: “Men, women and children, some bearing ax or sword cuts, found lying on the topmost level in the sprawled or contorted positions in which they fell.” Wheeler then proceeded, in his own words, with a “guess.” He proposed that the Indus cities fell to the invading Aryans, whose sacred chants incorporated in the Rig-Veda constantly refer to an onslaught on walled cities. The barbarians responsible, he noted, were not accustomed to city life, but were nomadic people from the steppes. These, Wheeler noted, were nothing more than conjectures, but the linking of the Mohenjo Daro “massacre” with the Aryan invasion was a tempting path to follow.
FRAWLEY’S VIEW THAT RIG-VEDA PEOPLE WERE THE INDUS CIVILIZATION
However, his conjecture has drawn considerable criticism from many quarters, and David Frawley has countered it on every front in a lengthy essay. In the first case, were there nomadic warriors and the destroyers of cities? There is no doubt that the Vedics mention their gods as the conquerors of cities, but they themselves were also city dwellers. The cities destroyed were also evidently occupied by other Vedic people. One reason for war, it is said, was that one group destroyed the dam belonging to another. The alleged barbarian nomads also cultivated barley and maintained herds of cattle. They dug wells, used buckets to remove the water, and employed irrigation channels to sustain their crops in fields that were plowed for planting. Details of houses can be culled from a reading of the sacred hymns. It is possible to reconstruct aspects of urban life from the Rig-Veda. There was always a sacred fire burning in a room “where Agni, the fire god, rests at ease.” There was a room set aside for women; there were couches with pillows. The life described is one of opulence in spacious homes. The people held wealth and generosity in sacrificial rituals in high esteem. There was mention of traveling merchants, and the accumulation of riches; words for price, value, costly, and debt are found. There was a standard for exchange. Wealth was measured in gems, gold, silver, land, horses, and cattle. Ships with 100 oars were mentioned, and the sea with billowing waves was described. The city dwellers consumed beans, grain, and sesame cooked with milk. They were fond of gambling: The Rig-Veda asserts, “If we have deceived, like gamblers in a game of dice,” a passage that recalls the common discovery of gambling dice in sites of the Indus Valley civilization. There were numerous references to weavers, the art of weaving, and shuttles, and many spindle whorls and remnants of cloth were found at Mohenjo Daro. However, early vedas mention wool and silk rather than cotton.
Where were these cities located? The river most often described is the sacred Sarasvati, the gold-streamed course of which flowed to the sea past green fields. The rulers of these cities possessed horse-drawn chariots, and their prestige increased with their sacrifices of horses and cattle, particularly to the god of fire. Frawley, noting the vital importance of the sarasvati river to the Vedic people, asks how they could have known about it if it had dried up before the proposed second millennium b. c.e. date of their arrival. Again, the Vedas reveal familiarity with the entire course of the sarasvati and of much of northern india and Pakistan.
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