THE ROOTS OF INDIAN CULTURE

A PROUD-VISAGED FIGURINE, found in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro, is one of the few stone sculptures left from this once-thriving city. Archeologists think the figure, perhaps representing a priest, was used at a family altar.

In Western history, a thousand years is a long time. The rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire all took place within that span of time; ancient Greece rose and fell in less than half of it. But it took a full millennium—the years between about 1500 and about 500 B. C.—merely to lay the foundations of Hinduism. During those centuries, nomadic tribes from Central Asia overran the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Borrowing from older cultures already on the land, they developed and enriched their own social and religious ideas. Though modified by reforms and evolutionary changes, these social and religious ideas still prevail in India: for modern Hindus, all the fundamental principles of society and religion were laid down in that first thousand years.

For nearly 2,000 years afterward, the period from 1500 to 500 B. C. was generally taken as the beginning of Indian history, for only in recent decades have men been able to peer further back into the Indian past. In some respects, recent discoveries leave the general picture unchanged; the birth of Hinduism is still the crucial starting point of historic India. But some of these discoveries are important and exciting for their own sake. They have extended our knowledge of Indian history by thousands of years, and they have turned up at least one great pre-Hindu civilization.

Archeologists and anthropologists now know that the beginnings of civilization in India are nearly as old as civilization itself. About 4000 B. C., soon after the appearance of farming communities in Mesopotamia, men in the northwest corner of India made the great transition from nomadic hunting and food-gathering to agriculture. West of the Indus River, on the hills of Baluchistan and the rim of the Iranian plateau, such men began to settle on the land. By 3000 B. C. they had developed a primitive village culture—a culture of farmers who lived in mud-and-wattle huts, and practiced the animistic worship of natural objects and forces.

Then, in a great and still-unexplained advance, these people developed one of the earliest of the world's great civilizations. Because the centers of this civilization were first found along the Indus River, some archeologists call it the Indus Valley civilization; others call it the Harappan Culture,

PRE-HINOU CIVILIZATION first developed in northwestern India, where agricultural villages grew up in the Indus Valley region about 4000 B. C. These villages preceded the more advanced Ha-rappan Culture, which flourished from about 2500 to 1500 B. C.

After one of its two capital cities. Whatever its name, it flourished mightily for a thousand years, from about 2500 to about 1500 B. C., and then mysteriously disappeared.

The discovery of the Harappan, or Indus Valley, civilization is one of the triumphs of modern archeology. Not until 1922, when an archeologist excavating in what is now Pakistan turned up a handful of bricks and stone seals, did anyone even guess at the civilization's existence. Since then hardly a year has passed without a significant find and an increase of knowledge, and the hunt for Harappan sites and artifacts is still underway. The story is still fragmentary, and important gaps remain to be filled. But the explorers have proved conclusively that the civilization was a great one, ranking with the other great river civilizations of its time—that of Egypt on the Nile, and of Sumer on the Tigris and Euphrates.

It was great, to begin with, in the sheer size of the territory it dominated—an extent of land far greater than that of Egypt or Sumer. The Harappan world covered a gigantic triangle with sides a thousand miles long. The apex of the triangle lay far up the Indus River system, or perhaps as far as the Ganges; its base extended along the coast from the head of the Arabian Sea, at the modern Iran-Pakistan border, to the Gulf of Cambay, near modern Bombay. Within this vast area archeologists have already found over 50 communities, ranging from farming towns and villages through large seaports to the two great capitals of the civilization—Mohenjo Daro, located on the central Indus River, and Harappa, on a tributary of the Indus about 400 miles to the northeast.

The diversity of these communities reflects the diversity of the Indus economy. To the farming communities came the produce of the countryside —wheat, barley, a variety of fruits and the earliest cultivated cotton in the world. The seaports were magnificently equipped: the port of Lothal, on the Gulf of Cambay, contained an enclosed brick shipping dock over 700 feet long, controlled by a sluice gate and capable of loading ships at low and high tides. At such ports, Harappan traders dealt in gold and copper, turquoise and lapis lazuli, timber from the slopes of the Himalayas. Harappan ships sailed up the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia, carrying Indian ivory and cotton to the age-old cities of Agade and Ur in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. And all the wealth of farming, trading and shipping contributed to the wealth of the two capitals, the cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

Both capitals were masterpieces of urban planning. Each consisted essentially of a rectangle three miles in circumference, dominated by a fortified citadel as high as a modern five-story building. The citadel, containing a huge granary, a hall for ceremonial assemblies, and a public—perhaps ritualistic-bath, was apparently the center of government and religion. Below it, the city spread out in a rigidly mathematical gridiron pattern, with avenues and streets running north and south, east and west. Solidly built brick houses, shops and restaurants lined the streets, with windowless walls facing the streets themselves, entrances on narrow lanes behind the streets, and rooms graciously arranged around open interior courtyards. Even the sanitary arrangements in these buildings—the most elaborate in the world of that time—bespeak the sophistication of the Indus technology. Indoor baths and privies were connected by a system of drains and water chutes to sewers running beneath the main streets. At intervals, there were openings in the drains for the convenience of official inspectors. As the British archeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler puts it, the planning and sanitary arrangements of the cities present a picture of "middle-class prosperity with zealous municipal controls."

In the arts, the people of these thriving cities excelled in brilliantly decorated wheel-turned pottery and small, beautifully executed figurines. There are pieces in terra cotta and glazed ceramic that apparently represent a "mother goddess," a seated male divinity, and a sacred bull and pipal tree. There are secular and even playful pieces, too: comic grotesques and caricatures; a coquettish bronze figure of a dancing girl, caught in mid-wiggle; and charming terra cotta toys—animals with jiggling heads, tiny ox carts pulled by strings.

As befitted a generally commercial culture, however, the richest store of Indus artifacts was apparently assembled by the merchant class, and for commercial ends. This store consists of soapstone seals, usually about an inch square, and probably designed to identify bales of cotton or bags of grain. Over a thousand such seals have been found at Mohenjo Daro alone; others have turned up as far away as the Persian Gulf and the cities of Mesopotamia. They provide at once an esthete's delight and an archeologist's puzzle. A delight, because they are exquisitely carved with figures of bulls, elephants, tigers, antelopes and other animal residents of the Indus Valley. A puzzle, because they almost invariably bear inscriptions in a delicate pic-tographic style—inscriptions that have obstinately defied all attempts at decipherment.

Because the seal inscriptions provide nearly all the surviving examples of Indus writing, they have been the objects of intense study. About 250 different pictographs have been identified—pictographs that are as different from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform as these two ancient scripts are from each other—but the longest single inscription contains only 17 of these pictographic symbols. Lacking a key to the meanings of individual symbols, scientists can only speculate on this most tantalizing of all clues to the secrets of a civilization.

The seals are also part of another, larger puzzle; the disappearance of the Indus Valley civilization after about 1500 B. C. Toward the end of the thousand-year span of that civilization, the quality of the seals at Mohenjo Daro exhibits a curious decline. They are no longer made of stone, but of clay, and the lifelike engravings give way to crude geometric figures. Indeed, a decline takes place in every area of Mohenjo Daro's life. The pottery, once highly glazed and vividly colored, becomes plain and clumsy ware. Worst of all, the superb planning of the city collapses: the last buildings are mere higgledy-piggledy collections of jerry-built, shoddy hovels. In the end, the city is abandoned.

At Harappa the story is different, but equally baffling. There, archeologists have found no evidence of a slow decline: the life of the city seems simply to stop, while it is still in its maturity and at the height of its material prosperity. Such an ending, of course, is no less final than that of Mohenjo Daro; in the upper Indus Valley, as in the lower, the civilization completely disappeared.

Most archeologists agree that no single explanation can account for the disappearance of the Indus Valley civilization. A thousand years of farming, grazing and timbering may have so impoverished the land that it could no longer support a large and powerful civilization. Evidence of great floods at Mohenjo Daro suggests another explanation. Driven

From the capital again and again, the people of Mo-henjo Daro may have become homeless refugees elsewhere, and the lesser cities of the region may have declined for lack of leadership. Other geological changes, equally slow and irreversible, such as the lifting of an entire coastline, may have assaulted some cities even more directly: it is known, for example, that certain Indus seaports that once stood on the shore of the Arabian Sea now lie as much as 30 miles inland.

For the disappearance of the Indus culture in the north, these explanations will not suffice. There, the deathblow to the Indus civilization was sudden and violent. And the dealers of that deathblow, according to some historians, were tall, fair-skinned nomads from Central Asia, who swept into India's northwest plains about the middle of the Second Millennium B. C. Ravaging the country as they came, these nomads put an end to a culture far higher than their own. But they also set the course of all later Indian history.

The invaders called themselves Aryans—"the noble ones"—a word that may come from a long-dead Indo-European language. This language, which probably evolved as a number of closely related dialects, was spoken by great masses of barbarians who began to move out of the steppes of Central Asia about 2000 B. C. Some of these nomadic tribesmen settled in Asia Minor and Persia; others became the ancestors of the Greeks. The Aryans, who may have taken centuries to make their way into India, were probably typical of them all.

As they cut a swath through northwest India and eastward into the Punjab region, the Aryans introduced a pattern of life that was to persist for centuries. Intertribal warfare was common; temporary alliances were formed to conquer or subdue nonAryan peoples. Some of these alliances must have been formed to attack the people of the Indus civilization. For such attacks, the Aryans flung

A MONUMENTAL BATH IS the most impressive structure yet excavated at Mohenjo Daro, a city of some 20,000 people that flourished in the Indus Valley between 2500 and 1500 B. C. Located in the citadel area of the city (map, above), the "Great Bath" was probably used mainly for religious rites, as is suggested by its arrangement of small ceremonial robing and bathing rooms (seen in the cutaway view at right). The rooms surround a courtyard containing a pool some 40 feet long and 8 feet deep, which was waterproofed with bitumen. Water from the pool emptied into a large vaulted drain more than 6 feet high (drawing below) that may have connected with the city's sewage system.

Themselves into battle on light, swift, horse-drawn chariots—against a people who had never seen anything faster or more maneuverable than a lumbering bullock cart. Even the fortified citadels of the Indus cities succumbed to Aryan sieges and storms. In some of their earliest writings, the invaders described successful onslaughts against dark-skinned non-Aryan peoples who lived in purs, or "forts," and they called their war-god puramdara, "fort destroyer." Some archeologists identify one such fortified place, called Hari-Yupuya by the Aryans, as the great Indus city of Harappa.

Throughout the Indus Valley, the conquerors doomed the high urban civilization that preceded them. The Aryans were wandering herdsmen. Their food and clothing came from cattle; cows and bulls were their measure of wealth; and though they eventually took to farming they continued to feel that a man's dignity lay in his herds rather than in his crops. Such a people could not maintain or even comprehend a complex urban culture. Writing, craftsmanship, arts and architecture—these ornaments and achievements of the Indus civilization died in Aryan hands.

For this reason, the early Aryan period is a sort of archeologist's nightmare. The Aryans left no cities and statues, no stone seals, no pots or bricks or cemeteries for scientists to dig up, classify and interpret. What they did leave, however, is one of the most extraordinary bodies of literature in all the world. The great "artifact" of the Aryan culture—and, in fact, very nearly the sole source of information about Aryan history and society during that period—is a collection of religious writings, a set of scriptures.

In India, Aryan priests built up an exhaustive record of their religious beliefs and practices. Composed in a complex poetic style already perfected in pre-Indian days, and passed along by memorization and recitation, this record grew by slow accretion for a thousand years. Its four great books, the Vedas, have given their name to that entire period of Indian history. The years from 1500 to 500 B. C. —the thousand-year period in which the fundamental principles of Hinduism were laid down-are generally called the Vedic Age.

The earliest and most important of the four Vedic books, the Rig Veda, consists of over a thousand hymns—a heterogeneous collection of prayers, instructions for rituals, incantations, poems on nature, and such secular songs as a gambler's lament over his luck at dice. The other three books, more specialized in content, are the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda, which consist respectively of technical instructions for the priests, ritual formulas and magical spells.

During the long Vedic Age, commentaries on the Vedas—and commentaries on these commentaries —were gradually compiled. The Brahmanas, commentaries on the Vedas themselves, discuss specific techniques of rituals in enormous detail. The Aran-yakas, or "forest books," deal with the language of the rituals—phrases, words, syllables, even individual sounds. And in the Upanishads, a collection of philosophical treatises, the main concern is with the mystical significance of ritual rather than its practice: the Upanishads expound a multitude of speculative interpretations of the universe and man's place in it.

Just as the lack of concrete Aryan remains has frustrated the archeologist, the Vedas and their voluminous commentaries have baffled the historian. Other sacred literatures, including the Bible, often deal with sequences of events in time. The ancient Hebrews, for example, might tell the story of a particular king's defeat in battle because the story revealed something about the way in which God operated in the world. The Vedas, on the other hand, never treat historical events as manifestations of the Aryan gods. For the authors of the Vedas, ritual formed the only direct connection between man and the gods. As a result, the Vedas provide no dates, no dynasties, no wars or peace treaties—no events or series of events that a historian can place in any precise chronology.

The oldest sacred books do, however, reveal a great deal about the Aryan religion and society, and later books reveal how that religion and society slowly changed during the thousand years of the Vedic Age.

We know, for example, that the religion brought to India by the Aryans was, as might be expected, a cult of gods related to the needs of a more northern life—gods of fire, of warming drink and sheer ferocity. We know, too, that these gods were served by a separate priesthood, who performed sacrificial rituals. Indeed, the rite of sacrifice lay at the heart of early Aryan religion. No temples or images were involved: the rite was performed at a simple open altar, where a sacred fire carried to the gods the food and drink that men themselves enjoyed —cooked grain, slaughtered animals, clarified butter and an intoxicating potion called "soma."

Soma itself was one of the Aryan gods. For its preparation, a certain plant, now unknown, was pressed between stones and its juice was mixed with milk. Drunk during the ritual, it induced in the celebrants hallucinations, such as the illusion of enormous size. Until recent studies of psychedelic drugs, historians were at a loss to explain how soma, an unfermented drink, could cause intoxication in those who used it. It now seems likely that the sacred drink was actually a "mind-expanding" antique LSD.

The sacred fire, too, was a god. Agni, the god of fire, had a curious variety of functions and jurisdictions. "Butter-backed and flame-haired," according to the Rig Veda, he lived in three places: on earth, in heaven and throughout the air between. On earth, the sacred fire became the mouth with which the gods consumed burnt offerings. In heaven, Agni was the sun. And in the air he was the lightning, carrying messages up to the gods or bringing the gods down to earth when they were summoned in the rituals.

More human in his characteristics than either Soma or Agni was Indra, the god of heroes and of war, who led the Aryans in battle and used a thunderbolt as a weapon. Pleasure-loving and quite amoral, Indra was a perfect counterpart for the cheerful optimists who worshiped him. (He may, in fact, have been a deification of some early Aryan leader.) His fondness for feasting and drinking, gambling and dancing—and, of course, for making war—reflected the character of a robust, extroverted people who had little of the spirituality and none of the pessimism that are now commonly associated with India.

Among these people, the great cohesive force was not the rule of the gods, but the basic idea of an all-pervading cosmic order called "rita." Rita was the law that both sustained the universe and regulated the conduct of men. It governed such rhythms as those of day and night, or the turning of the seasons, and it fixed the relationships of man to the gods and of a man to other men. Thus, for the Aryans, men were part of the law of nature. If men lied or were carried away by anger or drink, they disturbed the cosmic order.

Rita itself was associated with a god—Varuna, an awesome, unyielding figure who sat in a palace in heaven. Varuna had not created the cosmic order; he was merely its guardian. But he guarded rita so sternly that he became the only god that the Aryans really feared.

Certainly, there was little else they feared. The Vedas picture a people of enormous pride, utterly convinced of their own racial and social superiority. For the local peoples of India, the non-Aryans, they had nothing but contempt and overwhelming scorn. These conquered peoples were completely segregated, forced to live in clusters outside the Aryan village boundaries and banned from Aryan religious rites.

The principle of segregating the non-Aryans also extended to the social order. According to the Vedas, the Aryans came into India loosely divided into three classes. At the top of each tribe were hereditary nobles, who chose one of their number as chief, or raja (an Indo-European word related to the Latin rex, or "king"). The second class consisted of priests, responsible for religious teaching and observances. Then came the ordinary tribesmen, the tenders of cattle. All conquered peoples were herded into a fourth group—a group that was inferior to the other three.

This early class system was not the caste system of modern India; there were, for example, no restrictions on diet or dining practices, on marriage or on hereditary occupation. "A bard [professional poet] am I, my father is a leech [physician] and my mother grinds corn," wrote an anonymous Aryan of the time. Nevertheless, the function of each class and of each member of a class was perfectly clear and distinct. A raja, for instance, probably owned more cattle than any other noble, but his role was simply that of a member of the noble class. He was not considered divine, nor was he a priest-king. The closest he could come to playing a religious role was to request sacrifices for the good of the tribe. Only the priests, a separate class, could perform such sacrifices.

Such were the social and religious patterns of early Aryan life. During the thousand-year course of the Vedic Age, however, these patterns gradually evolved into different ones, more complex and more rigid. The great force behind this evolution was the same one that had brought Aryans to India in the first place: the constant movement, century after century, of the Aryan people.

Some time after they had learned enough about agriculture to grow crops of their own, the Aryans began to move deeper into India. From their first base, the Indus Valley and the Punjab, their route ran southeast to the middle of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the area of modern Delhi. From there, they probably conquered and colonized their way to the Ganges itself, then followed the river southward to settle the area around Banaras (newly restored to its ancient name, Varanasi). The movement was a gradual one. As many as 600 years probably passed before the Aryans began to penetrate the Deccan.

During this long period of territorial expansion, Aryan tribes fought continually against each other and, more important, against the original inhabitants of the land. Among these indigenous peoples, two groups—the Panis and the Dasas—loom out of the mists of Vedic history. The Panis may have been aboriginal peoples of the very earliest hill cultures in the northwest. Apparently, they offered little resistance to the Aryan advance; for the most part, they appear dimly in the Vedic writings as robbers who stole cattle and had to be punished. Far more formidable—and even more difficult to identify—were the Dasas. They may have been remnants or relatives of the peoples of the Indus civilization; some historians suggest that they were Dravidians, the people of southern India. In any case, they proved far less easy to handle than the Panis. At one time the Dasas raised

10,000 men to oppose the Aryans, but were defeated. As always, the Aryans treated their enemy with complete contempt. In the Vedas, the Dasas are described as "evil-tongued" and "flat-nosed," and in the Aryans' Sanskrit language the very word dasa ultimately came to mean "slave."

The conquest of new lands and contacts with new peoples combined to bring profound changes to the Aryan way of life. Wandering tribes settled in small kingdoms; the tribal chiefs, once chosen by their peers, became power-hungry hereditary kings ruling from permanent capitals. And as kingdoms grew in territory and population, and victors and vanquished fused, the loose classes of Aryan society became more complex.

In the later Vedic Age, a king's realm usually included conquered Aryan tribes and a number of non-Aryan villages. To meet the threat of revolt, and of attacks from outside the kingdom, kings recruited standing armies from the old noble class of warriors. The kings themselves now claimed a rank far above that of other nobles.

The old class of ordinary tribesmen—once the herdsmen among the original nomadic Aryans— became peaceful farmers, cattle breeders, artisans and tradesmen. Meanwhile, descendants of the nonAryan peoples became a fourth class—a class of laborers, who did the drudgery that freed higher classes for their occupations and interests.

The greatest change of all took place among the priests—a change not so much of function as of status. In early Aryan society, the priest class had held the second rank, below the nobles. Now they raised themselves above the nobles, above the kings —even above the gods. They accomplished this feat by giving a new importance—indeed, a new meaning—to religious ritual.

Over the years, the priests had developed enormously complex rituals out of the relatively simple ceremonies of the Rig Veda. In addition, they emphasized the idea that if a ritual were performed incorrectly catastrophe would ensue. If a single brick of the altar were out of line by a hair's breadth, if the sacrificial goat were touched at the wrong spot, then the cosmic order called rita would be upset and chaos would come.

This demand for ritual accuracy may have helped to improve the priests' skill at altar building and their knowledge of anatomy. What was far more important, it exalted the priesthood. Rita depended

More upon the correct performance of rituals than upon the gods for whom rituals were performed. The gods merely guarded rita; the rituals actually affected it. And since only the priests could perform these rituals, the priests held the final responsibility for cosmic order. They were the most important creatures in the universe.

Even the kings assented to the glorification of the priesthood. The Rig Veda assured them that "that king, indeed, overpowers all opposing forces . . . who maintains [the priest] well attended, and praises and honors him as a deity." In turn, the priests gave religious support to the rajas and their expanding kingdoms. At times, that support resulted in curious combinations of piety and power politics. A case in point was the ritual of the "horse sacrifice."

In preparation for the horse sacrifice, a beautiful stallion was consecrated and allowed to wander for a full year. All the territory the stallion entered was claimed for the king who had commissioned the ritual. A band of armed warriors attended the horse, and the kings of usurped lands had to give up their property or fight for it. Finally, the horse was gently herded home and sacrificed in elaborate ceremonies involving hundreds of priests.

Along with the new interdependence of king and priest, there was a new religious justification for the class system. In one of the later Vedic writings, the priests proclaimed that the universe had been born when the gods sacrificed an Ideal Man or World Spirit and created classes of men from parts of his body. A Vedic hymn asks how social classes were created, and, in the answers, gives religious sanction to the four divisions of Aryan society:

When they [the gods] divided the Man, into how many parts did they divide him?

What was his mouth, what were his arms, what were his thighs and his feet called?

AN ANCIENT TREE OF LANGUAGE

The Sanskrit characters above may look utterly remote from anything Western, but in fact Sanskrit, the classical language of India, is related to almost all the languages of Europe, including English. The word is "Arya," or "Aryan," the name of the people who began to conquer India about 1500 B. C. Most ancient Indian literature was written in the Aryan tongue, Sanskrit, and Hindi, modern India's national language, is written in characters that are derived from it.

Sanskrit is a branch of a linguistic tree known as Indo-European. The trunk of the tree was a common tongue probably spoken in the region northwest of the Black Sea about 2500 B. C. After the people living in this region migrated in different directions, the tree branched into different but related languages. "Iran," the modern name for Persia, for example, resembles the Sanskrit "Arya." In Celtic the word was transformed into "Erin," which in English became "Ireland." Other examples of word relationships;

Pilar, the Sanskrit word for ¦ father, ' is a close cognate of the Latin pater, the German Vater and the English words “father" and “paternal."

Ayas, meaning "metal” in Sanskrit, comes from the same root word as the Latin aes (bronze), the German Risen (iron) and the English "iron.”

The Sanskrit iras, or "anger," bears a close resemblance to the Latin ira, which became “ire" in English and appears in words like "irascible."

The Indo-European word pets (foot) became pat in Sanskrit and pes in Latin, and appears in such English words as "pedal" and "pedestrian."

Satam, the Sanskrit word for "one hundred," is a cousin of the Latin centum, which lives on in English words like "century" and "centennial."

The brahman [priest] was his mouth, of his arms was made the warrior, his thighs became the vaishya [farmer or merchant],

Of his feet the shudra [servant] was born.

The implications of this primal sacrifice went far beyond the idea of social classes. Every time the priests performed their rites, they mystically repeated the creation of the world; the cosmic order died and was born again. And the death and rebirth of the universe implied the death and rebirth of every living thing in the universe. What is more, it implied a continuous cycle of such deaths and rebirths.

For human beings, this cycle of death and rebirth meant reincarnation, one of the basic concepts of Hinduism. In the earliest statements of the doctrine, reincarnation involved a great deal of traveling on the part of the soul. If a man lived a good life, his soul passed after death to the paradise of the gods. From there it went to the moon, from the moon to empty space, and it then descended to earth again in the form of rain. On earth, in the words of the Upanishads, souls "become food. . . and are offered again in the altar-fire which is man, to be born again in the fire of woman."

The entire journey, though, depended upon whether a man had lived a good or bad life. Only the man who had devoted himself to good pursuits —charity, sacrifice and austerity—would be rewarded by rebirth in a human body. The unrighteous would be reborn as worms, birds or insects. Thus, it was a man's conduct in this life that determined whether his status would rise or fall in future lives, and whether he would be happy or miserable. The Hindu concept of "karma" was slowly being born, and, along with that essentially theological concept, Hinduism's justification for extreme and irremediable inequalities in human society.

Clearly, a thousand years of development and change had brought the Aryans a long way from their beginnings. The purely Aryan tribal life of the early Vedic Age had given way to a complex social order and an advanced religion. The contrasts between the beginning and the end of the age can be briefly summarized.

The Aryans had come to India with simple, direct feelings for men and for the gods. In return for an offering of food or drink poured into a fire at a hearth, men received the blessings of the gods. Girls chose their husbands freely, and shifts of class membership were not impossible. Family life was open and informal, and the patriarchal family way of life was duplicated in tribal life. The chief, like the father of a family, had authority but not absolute authority. His power was subject to common law and Aryan traditions, which he could not override.

A thousand years later, the kings in their palaces were arrogant, ambitious rulers, most of them determined to rule the world. The old, easy family life was overlaid and formalized by religious ideas of divinely ordained hereditary classes, and by a host of restrictions and proscriptions. Religion itself had become two very different things: on the one hand, a great complex of meticulously organized rites; on the other, an intellectual discipline beyond the comprehension of most ordinary people. And priests were by far the most powerful group in the community.

In effect, Hinduism had come into existence. Toward the end of the Vedic Age dramatic protests were to be made against it by such men as Gautama Buddha, the greatest of all Indian religious leaders, but such protests did not alter the fundamentals of Indian religion or society. The Aryan-fostered, priest-led way of life had been securely founded, and would prevail through all the rest of the subcontinent's history.