India specially identified with the history of Aryan thought and speech.

WITH the vague and sweeping approximativeness with which we are wont to lump our knowledge or imaginings of all such things as are removed veryfar away from us in space or time, or both, we rather incline to think of “ India ” as one country, one nation. How ludicrously wide of the mark such a fancy is, has already been shown, and will appear repeatedly as we advance. Yet it is in so far excusable, that to the European mind, India is identified with one race—the Aryan ; that her history is to us that of this race’s vicissitudes on the Himalayan continent, on which it has been supreme so long, materially and spiritually ; that the history of Indianthought and speech is pre-eminently that of the Aryan mind,—until even now, when races have become so inextricably mixed that there are no longer any Aryan peoples, but only Aryan languages and, perhaps, traits of intellect and character, we turn toIndia as one of the fountain-heads of Aryan life.

Indo-Eranian period.

Not the fountain-head. For we know beyond the need of demonstration that Aryas descended into India after long periods both of stationary life and migrations, in the course of which they traversed the immensities of Central Asia ; we further know almost to a certainty that these Aryas were a dissevered branch from a far greater and more numerous nation, to which we have given the name of Indo- ERANIANS, and which everything—especially the evidence of language and religion—shows to have lived undivided down to a comparatively late period, while and after other swarms had flown, in other directions, away from that primeval Aryan motherhive, like all beginnings, must remain forever wrapped in mystery, though we can partly surmise what its language must have been like—the root of our flexional culture-tongues, and its myths,—the primary conceptions of nature in the working of her divinized forces. 1 We also have good reason to suspect that diversity of feeling in religious matters, deepening in time to a schism, may not have been foreign to the separation.2

The separation

When Zarathushtra embodied this revulsion of feeling, which had attuned his people’s minds to loftier teachings, in his great religious reform, and gave forth that profession of faith which once forever stamped them with the stern earnestness, the somewhat sadly serious spirituality which was to distinguish them from all ancient nations,3—the separation must have been an accomplished fact, perhaps for some time already. It is then that we can imagine the first Aryan detachment—soon to be followed at intervals by others—emerging, still awe-struck and bewildered, with a sense upon them as of a wonderful escape, from the sinuous and beetling mountain passes through which they had followed at a venture the bounding, tumbling Indus where, with a sharp southward bend, the river for which a continent is named, digs and breaks its rocky bed out of gloom and wildness, into a region of sunlight and peaceful plains.

The Punjab, or Saptah-Sindhavah, and its rivers

It was the Punjab. A land of many rivers and broad valleys, of mountains grading down into hills, wooded, forest-clad, of moderate clime and ever-bearing soil. It had everything to invite settler and to keep them a long, long time, even to isolation. For a glance at the map will show that this garden in the shape of a corner or triangle, while fenced from the outer world on two sides by a wellnigh impassable barrier, is on the third side separated   from its own continent by a wide belt of desert ; and its wonderful system of rivers is entirely its own ; their course,—with the exception of the giant, Indus, —begins and ends within its limits. Five bountiful streams descend from various points of extreme Western Himalaya, their courses converging, uniting by twos, now here, now there, until their waters blend into one short but wide, deep, and rapid river which has always borne the collective name PANTCHANADA, “ The Five Rivers”—a name which was transferred, unaltered, to the land itself, and of which “ Punjab ” is the Persian form. 1 The Indus, the while, has been gathering volume and swiftness all by itself, without any contributions from affluents, of which it receives only a few inconsiderable ones in the upper portion of its course before it emerges into the open land. It advances, solitary, majestic, to where the Pantchanada brings it the united tribute of “ The Five,” and then rolls down towards the sea, such a mighty, often storm-tossed, mass of waters, that the early poets habitually described it by that very name, — Samudra—which they used for the accumulation of atmospheric moisture in the shape of rain-clouds—the celestial ocean—and which was given later to the sea itself when the Aryas from the Punjab, probably by navigation down the Indus, reached at last the Indian Ocean. There is a name under which the land we know as Punjab was even more widely designated both in the early or Vedic, and the later, so-called Classic periods: it is Sapta-Sindhavah,—“ the Seven Rivers.”

This is the Hapta-Hendu of the Eranians, the land mentioned in the famous geographical chapter of the Avesta among the earliest creations of Ahura-Mazda, and in the rock-inscription on the tomb of Dareios I. in the list of the Persian Empire’s tributary provinces. It is, indeed, a far more correctly descriptive name, as it takes due count of the Indus,—the SlNDH of Indian antiquity 1 —and includes a seventh river, of high and even sacred legendary fame, the Saraswati, which may be described as the eastern boundary of this first Aryan dominion in India, since it skirts the edge of the Indian desert already mentioned. That river has, in the course of ages, undergone some rather peculiar changes. It springs from the western slopes of the slight watershed which divides the river system of the Punjab and the Indian Ocean from that of Eastern Hindustan and the Gulf of Bengal, and used to accomplish its travels in the customary manner, and end them in the Indus, as indicated on the map by the punctured line which designates its original course. But the Sarasvati does not seem to have had the vigor of its sister-rivers. Perhaps from scantness of water at the start, or from the spongy nature of the soil which, being dry and  , absorbed too much of its volume—be it as it may, its waters gave out, and at some time it stopped midway and got lost in the sands of the desert. This must have happened already at a very early period, for quite ancient manuscripts mentioned the as a landmark, observing that such or such a locality is distant so or so  days’ march from where the Sarasvati disappears into the ground. What is left of it is now known, in its upper course, as the SARSUTI, and, lower down, it changes its name to GHARGHAR. At the present time it has no importance save that which it derives from old poetic and legendary associations and from having been one of the original “ Seven Rivers ” that graced and nourished the first Aryan settlements in the land— “ the Seven Sisters,” or “ the Seven Mothers,” as the ancient bards often gratefully and prettily addressed them in their songs.

Early Aryan life in the Punjab.

A people’s life and pursuits were mapped out for it in such a country: agriculture and cattle breeding— the cornfield and the pasture, the barn and the dairy, together with the few simple auxiliary crafts which make primitive farming self-sufficing — pottery, carpentering, hide-tanning, spinning, and weaving,—these were the departments which claimed nearly the whole attention of the Aryan settlers, the joint and divided labor of their men and women. It would have been strange if the many wide and deep rivers had not encouraged boat-building, even ship-building and navigation ; so that, while the general formation of the land, divided by intersecting mountain spurs into countless valleys, favored the establishment of separate and independent tribes, the many easy ways of communication fostered neighborly intercourse, and laid the beginnings of commerce. These almost ideal conditions for a nation’s development, moreover, though full of the promise of great prosperity, did not in the least dispose it to indolence or effeminacy. For, generous as was the soil, it repaid labor, but would not, like many tropical zones and isles, support the human race in idleness ; balmy as was the climate part of the year, it was not enervating, and winter, snow-clad, was a yearly visitant. Then there were wild animals, especially wolves and bears, to be kept at bay. Last but not least, ample scope was afforded these first Aryas of India for the development of manly and even warlike qualities by their position in a land which they had occupied and held in defiance of a brave and numerous native population who kept up armed resistance probably for centuries, and receded or submitted only step by step. Not for several hundred years did this conquering colonization, pushing slowly eastward, cross the watershed and enter the valley of the Ganges.

Race conflict between Aryas and natives.

The natives, whom the Aryas for a long time gathered under the general Old-Aryan designation of  DasYU, 1 belonged to a black, or at least a very dark race, and everything about them, from their color and flat noses, to their barbarous customs, such as eating raw or barely cooked meat, and their Shamanistic goblin-worship,2 was intensely repulsive to the handsome, gentler mannered and, to a certain degree, religiously refined and lofty-minded Aryas, who strenuously kept away from them and were especially intent on avoiding the moral contamination of association with them precisely in matters of religion and of worship. There is every reason to believe that this spirit of fastidious exclusiveness was the occasion of their collecting and ordering into one body the hymns and sacred songs embodying the religion they brought with them, and which probably had not yet at that early period assumed the finished poetic form under which it has at last descended to us. This work was accomplished by a number of specially gifted men, poets and priests both, the RlSHIS of India’s oldest and sacred literature, at more or less long intervals and at different periods, ranging over certainly the whole of five hundred years, probably much more. The result is the collection known as the Rig-Veda,—“the Veda of praise or of hymns,”—or, to give the full title : the Rig-Veda-Samhita's