Vedic India or Vedic period or Vedic age

Vedic India or Vedic period or Vedic age

The Vedic period or Vedic age (c. 1500 – c. 500 BCE), is the period in the history of the northern Indian subcontinent between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. It gets its name from the Vedas

In addition to the archaeological legacy discussed above, there remains from this period the earliest literary record of Indian culture, the Vedas. Composed in archaic, or Vedic, Sanskrit, generally dated between 1500 and 800 BCE, and transmitted orally, the Vedas comprise four major texts—the Rig-, the Sama-, the Yajur-, and the Atharvaveda. Of these, the Rigveda is believed to be the earliest. The texts consist of hymns, charms, spells, and ritual observations current among the Indo-European-speaking people known as Aryans (from Sanskrit arya, “noble”), who presumably entered India from the Iranian regions.

Nearer India, the Iranian plateau was subject to a similar migration. Comparison of Iranian Aryan literature with the Vedas reveals striking correspondences. Possibly a branch of the Iranian Aryans migrated to northern India and settled in the Sapta Sindhu region, extending from the Kābul River in the north to the Sarasvati and upper Ganges–Yamuna Doab in the south. The Sarasvati, the sacred river at the time, is thought to have dried up during the later Vedic period. Conceived as a goddess (see Sarasvati), it was personified in later Hinduism as the inventor of spoken and written Sanskrit and the consort of Brahma, promulgator of the Vedas. It was in the Sapta Sindhu region that the majority of the hymns of the Rigveda were composed.

The Rigveda is divided into 10 mandalas (books), of which the 10th is believed to be somewhat later than the others. Each mandala consists of a number of hymns, and most mandalas are ascribed to priestly families. The texts include invocations to the gods, ritual hymns, battle hymns, and narrative dialogues. The 9th mandala is a collection of all the hymns dedicated to soma, the unidentified hallucinogenic juice that was drunk on ritual occasions.

Few events of political importance are related in the hymns. Perhaps the most impressive is a description of the battle of the 10 chiefs or kings: when Sudas, the king of the preeminent Bharatas of southern Punjab, replaced his priest Vishvamitra with Vasishtha, Vishvamitra organized a confederacy of 10 tribes, including the Puru, Yadu, Turvashas, Anu, and Druhyu, which went to war against Sudas. The Bharatas survived and continued to play an important role in historical tradition. In the Rigveda the head of a clan is called the raja; this term commonly has been translated as “king,” but more recent scholarship has suggested “chief” as more appropriate in this early context. If such a distinction is recognized, the entire corpus of Vedic literature can be interpreted as recording the gradual evolution of the concept of kingship from earlier clan organization. Among the clans there is little distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan, but the hymns refer to a people, called the dasyus, who are said to have had an alien language and a dark complexion and to worship strange gods. Some dasyus were rich in cattle and lived in fortified places (puras) that were often attacked by the god Indra. In addition to the dasyus, there were the wealthy Panis, who were hostile and stole cattle.

The early Vedic was the period of transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled village communities intermixing pastoral and agrarian economies. Cattle were initially the dominant commodity, as indicated by the use of the words gotra (“cowpen”) to signify the endogamous kinship group and gavishti (“searching for cows”) to denote war. A patriarchal extended family structure gave rise to the practice of niyoga (levirate), which permitted a widow to marry her husband’s brother. A community of families constituted a grama. The term vish is generally interpreted to mean “clan.” Clan assemblies appear to have been frequent in the early stages. Various categories of assemblies are mentioned, such as vidatha, samiti, and sabha, although the precise distinctions between these categories are not clear. The clan also gathered for the yajna, the Vedic sacrifice conducted by the priest, whose ritual actions ensured prosperity and imbued the chief with valour. The chief was primarily a war leader with responsibility for protecting the clan, for which function he received a bali (“tribute”). Punishment was exacted according to a principle resembling the wergild of ancient Germanic law, whereby the social rank of a wronged or slain man determined the compensation due him or his survivors.

Later Vedic period (c. 800–c. 500 BCE)

The principal literary sources from this period are the Sama-, the Yajur-, and the Atharvaveda (mainly ritual texts), the Brahmanas (manuals on ritual), and the Upanishads (Upanisads) and Aranyakas (collections of philosophical and metaphysical discourses). Associated with the corpus are the sutra texts, largely explanatory aids to the other works, comprising manuals on sacrifices and ceremonies, domestic observances, and social and legal relations. Because the texts were continually revised, they cannot be dated accurately to the early period. The Dharma-sutra texts of this period became the nuclei of the socio-legal Dharma-shastras of later centuries.

Historians formerly assigned the two major Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, to this period, but subsequent scholarship has rendered these dates less certain. Both works are mixtures of the historical and the legendary, both were rewritten and edited, both suffered from frequent interpolations even as late as the early centuries CE, and both were later converted into sacred literature with the deification of their heroes. Consequently, important as they are to the literary and religious tradition, they are not easily identified with a historical period. The central event of the Mahabharata, whose geographic setting is the upper Ganges–Yamuna Doab and adjoining areas, is a war between two groups of cousins—the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Though the traditional date for the war is about 3102 BCE, most historians would prefer a later one. The events of the Ramayana relate to the middle Ganges valley and central India, with later interpolations extending the area southward.

The geographic focus of the later Vedic corpus moves from the Sapta Sindhu region into the Ganges–Yamuna Doab and the territories on its fringe. The areas within this land of the aryas, called Aryavarta, were named for the ruling clans, and the area encompassed within Aryavarta gradually expanded eastward. By the end of the period, clan identity had changed gradually to territorial identity, and the areas of settlement came eventually to form states. The people beyond the Aryavarta were termed the mlecchas (or mlechchhas), the impure barbarians unfamiliar with the speech and customs of the aryas.

The literature is replete with the names of clans. The most powerful among them, commanding the greatest respect, was the Kuru-Pancala, which incorporated the two families of Kuru and Puru (and the earlier Bharatas) and of which the Pancala was a confederation of lesser-known tribes. They occupied the upper Ganges–Yamuna Doab and the Kurukshetra region. In the north the Kamboja, Gandhara, and Madra groups predominated. In the middle Ganges valley the neighbours and rivals of the Kuru-Pancalas were the Kashi, Koshala, and Videha, who worked in close cooperation with each other. The Magadha, Anga, and Vanga peoples in the lower Ganges valley and delta were (in that period) still outside the Aryan pale and regarded as mlecchas. Magadha (Patna and Gaya districts of Bihar) is also associated with the vratya people, who occupied an ambiguous position between the aryas and mlecchas. Other mleccha tribes frequently mentioned include the Satvants of the Chambal River valley and, in the Vindhyan and northern Deccan region, the Andhra, Vidarbha, Nishadha, Pulinda, and Shabara. The location of all these tribes is of considerable historical interest, because they gave their names to enduring geographic regions.

By the 5th century BCE, clan identity had changed to territorial identity, and the areas of settlement changed from chiefdoms to kingdoms in some cases. The state was emerging as a new feature. Assemblies such as the sabha and parishad continued as political institutions into later periods. The larger assemblies declined. Rudimentary notions of taxation were the genesis of administration, as were the ratnins (“jewels”), consisting of representatives of various professions advising the chief. A major transformation occurred in the notion of kingship, which ceased to be merely an office of a war leader; territorial identity provided it with power and status, symbolized by a series of lengthy and elaborate ceremonies—the abhishekha, generally followed by major sacrificial rituals, such as the ashvamedha. This ceremony was a famous horse sacrifice, in which a specially selected horse was permitted to wander at will, tracked by a body of soldiers; the area through which the horse wandered unchallenged was claimed by the chief or king conducting the sacrifice. Thus, theoretically at least, only those with considerable power could perform this sacrifice. Such major sacrificial rituals involved a large amount of wealth and a hierarchy of priests. The ceremonies lasted many days and involved a reciprocal economy of gift exchange between the chief and the priest, by which the latter received wealth in kind and the former established status, prosperity, and proximity to the gods.

The conspicuous display and consumption of these ceremonies have elicited comparison with the potlatch of the Kwakiutl and related North American indigenous peoples. The assumption of such sacrifices was that the clan had settled in a particular area, marking the end of nomadism. This led eventually to the claim of ownership by kings of the wastelands, although a ruler’s right to collect taxes was viewed not as a consequence of his ownership of wasteland but as his wage for protecting society. The new trends emphasized the importance of the priests and the aristocracy (Brahmans and Kshatriyas), who were the mainstay of kingship. The introduction, through royal sacrifices, of notions of divinity in kingship further strengthened the role of the priests. This was also the period in which kingship became hereditary.

The technology of iron, or krishna ayas (“dark metal”), as it was apparently called in later Vedic literature, and the migration into the Ganges valley helped in stabilizing agriculture and settlements. Some of these settlements along the rivers evolved into towns, essentially as administrative and craft centres. By the mid-1st millennium BCE the second urbanization—this time in the Ganges valley—was under way.

The development with the most far-reaching consequences for Indian culture is the structure of society that has come to be called caste. A hymn in the Rigveda contains a description of the primeval sacrifice and refers to the emergence of four groups from the body of the god Prajapati—the Brahmans (Brāhmaṇas), Kshatriyas (Kṣatriyas), Vaishyas (Vaiśyas), and Sudras (Śūdras). This is clearly a mythologized attempt to describe the origin of the four varnas, which came to be regarded as the four major classes in Indian society.

The etymology of each is of interest: Brahman is one who possesses magical or divine knowledge (brahman); Kshatriya is endowed with power or sovereignty (kṣatra); and Vaishya, derived from viś (vish, “settlement”), is a person settled on the land or a member of the clan. The derivation of the term Sudra, however, denoting a member of the group born to serve the upper three varnas, is not clear, which may suggest that it is a non-Aryan word. In addition to varna there are references to jati (birth), which gradually came to acquire a close association with caste and appears to mean the endogamous kinship group.

Origins

See also: Indo-European migrations, Indo-Aryan peoples, Indo-Aryan migration, and Indigenous Aryans.

The commonly accepted period of earlier Vedic age is dated back to the second millennium BCE After the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which occurred around 1900 BCE, groups of Indo-Aryan peoples migrated into north-western India and started to inhabit the northern Indus Valley. The Indo-Aryans represented a sub-group that diverged from the other Indo-Iranian tribes before the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. According to the most widespread hypothesis, the latter originated 

Some writers and archaeologists have opposed the notion of a migration of Indo-Aryans into India.Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton used the term "Indo-Aryan Controversy" for an oversight of the Indo-Aryan Migration theory, and some of its opponents. These ideas are outside the academic mainstream. Mallory and Adams note that two types of models "enjoy significant international currency" as to the Indo-European homeland, namely the Anatolian hypothesis, and a migration out of the Eurasian steppes According to Upinder Singh, "The original homeland of the Indo-Europeans and Indo-Aryans is the subject of continuing debate among philologists, linguists, historians, archaeologists and others. The dominant view is that the Indo-Aryans came to the subcontinent as immigrants. Another view, advocated mainly by some Indian scholars, is that they were indigenous to the subcontinent."

The knowledge about the Aryans comes mostly from the Rigveda-samhita, i. e. the oldest layer of the Vedas, which was composed c. 1500–1200 BCE. They brought with them their distinctive religious traditions and practices. The Vedic beliefs and practices of the pre-classical era were closely related to the hypothesised Proto-Indo-European religion, and the Indo-Iranian religion.According to Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and (present-day) Iran It was "a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements", which borrowed "distinctive religious beliefs and practices" from the Bactria–Margiana culture.

he Rigveda contains accounts of conflicts between the Aryas and the Dasas and Dasyus. It describes Dasas and Dasyus as people who do not perform sacrifices (akratu) or obey the commandments of gods (avrata). Their speech is described as mridhra which could variously mean soft, uncouth, hostile, scornful or abusive. Other adjectives which describe their physical appearance are subject to many interpretations. However, some modern scholars such as Asko Parpola connect the Dasas and Dasyus to Iranian tribes Dahae and Dahyu and believe that Dasas and Dasyus were early Indo-Aryan immigrants who arrived into the subcontinent before the Vedic Aryans.

Accounts of military conflicts between the various tribes of Vedic Aryans are also described in the Rigveda. Most notable of such conflicts was the Battle of Ten Kings, which took place on the banks of the river Parushni (modern day Ravi).The battle was fought between the tribe Bharatas, led by their chief Sudas, against a confederation of ten tribes. The Bharatas lived around the upper regions of the river Saraswati, while the Purus, their western neighbours, lived along the lower regions of Saraswati. The other tribes dwelt north-west of the Bharatas in the region of Punjab.Division of the waters of Ravi could have been a reason for the war. The confederation of tribes tried to inundate the Bharatas by opening the embankments of Ravi, yet Sudas emerged victorious in the Battle of Ten Kings. Purukutsa, the chief of the Purus, was killed in the battle and the Bharatas and the Purus merged into a new tribe, the Kuru, after the war.

After the 12th century BCE, as the Rigveda had taken its final form, the Vedic society, which is associated with the Kuru-Pancala region but were not the only Indo-Aryan people in northern India,transitioned from semi-nomadic life to settled agriculture in north-western India.Possession of horses remained an important priority of Vedic leaders and a remnant of the nomadic lifestyle, resulting in trade routes beyond the Hindu Kush to maintain this supply as horses needed for cavalry and sacrifice could not be bred in India.The Gangetic plains had remained out of bounds to the Vedic tribes because of thick forest cover. After 1000 BCE, the use of iron axes and ploughs became widespread and the jungles could be cleared with ease. This enabled the Vedic Aryans to extend their settlements into the western area of the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Many of the old tribes coalesced to form larger political units

The Vedic religion was further developed with the emergence of the Kuru kingdom, systematising its religious literature and developing the Śrauta ritual.It is associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture (c.1200-600 BCE), which did not expand east of the Ganga-Yamnuya Doab. It differed from the related, yet markedly different, culture of the Central Ganges region, which was associated with the Northern Black Polished Ware and the Mahajanapadas of Kosala and Magadha.

In this period the varna system emerged, state Kulke and Rothermund,which in this stage of Indian history were a "hierarchical order of estates which reflected a division of labor among various social classes". The Vedic period estates were four: Brahmin priests and warrior nobility stood on top, free peasants and traders were the third, and slaves, labourers and artisans, many belonging to the indigenous people, were the fourth.This was a period where agriculture, metal, and commodity production, as well as trade, greatly expanded, and the Vedic era texts including the early Upanishads and many Sutras important to later Hindu culture were completed.

Modern replica of utensils and falcon shaped altar used for Agnicayana, an elaborate Śrauta ritual originating from the Kuru Kingdom, around 1000 BCE.

The Kuru Kingdom, the earliest Vedic "state", was formed by a "super-tribe" which joined several tribes in a new unit. To govern this state, Vedic hymns were collected and transcribed, and new rituals were developed, which formed the now orthodox Śrauta rituals. Two key figures in this process of the development of the Kuru state were the king Parikshit and his successor Janamejaya, transforming this realm into the dominant political and cultural power of northern Iron Age India.

The most well-known of the new religious sacrifices that arose in this period were the Ashvamedha (horse sacrifice).This sacrifice involved setting a consecrated horse free to roam the kingdoms for a year. The horse was followed by a chosen band of warriors. The kingdoms and chiefdoms in which the horse wandered had to pay homage or prepare to battle the king to whom the horse belonged. This sacrifice put considerable pressure on inter-state relations in this era. This period saw also the beginning of the social stratification by the use of varna, the division of Vedic society in Kshatriya, Brahmins, Vaishya and Shudra.

The Kuru kingdom declined after its defeat by the non-Vedic Salva tribe, and the political centre of Vedic culture shifted east, into the Panchala kingdom on the Ganges, under King Keśin Dālbhya (approximately between 900 and 750 BCE).Later, in the 8th or 7th century BCE, the kingdom of Videha emerged as a political centre farther to the East, in what is today northern Bihar of India and southeastern Nepal, reaching its prominence under the king Janaka, whose court provided patronage for Brahmin sages and philosophers such as Yajnavalkya, Uddalaka Aruni, and Gargi Vachaknavi; Panchala also remained prominent during this period, under its king Pravahana Jaivali.

By the 6th century BCE, the political units consolidated into large kingdoms called Mahajanapadas. The process of urbanisation had begun in these kingdoms, commerce and travel flourished, even regions separated by large distances became easy to access Anga, a small kingdom to the east of Magadha (on the door step of modern-day West Bengal), formed the eastern boundary of the Vedic culture. Yadavas expanded towards the south and settled in Mathura. To the south of their kingdom was Vatsa which was governed from its capital Kausambi. The Narmada River and parts of North Western Deccan formed the southern limits. The newly formed states struggled for supremacy and started displaying imperial ambitions.

The end of the Vedic period is marked by linguistic, cultural and political changes. The grammar of Pāṇini marks a final apex in the codification of Sutra texts, and at the same time the beginning of Classical Sanskrit. The invasion of Darius I of the Indus valley in the early 6th century BCE marks the beginning of outside influence, continued in the kingdoms of the Indo-Greeks. Meanwhile, in the Kosala-Magadha region, the shramana movements (including Jainism and Buddhism) objected the self-imposed authority and orthodoxy of the intruding Brahmins and their Vedic scriptures and ritual.] According to Bronkhorst, the sramana culture arose in "greater Magadha," which was Indo-European, but not Vedic. In this culture, kshatriyas were placed higher than Brahmins, and it rejected Vedic authority and rituals

The reconstruction of the history of Vedic India is based on text-internal details, but can be correlated to relevant archaeological details. Linguistically, the Vedic texts could be classified in five chronological strata:

Rigvedic text: The Rigveda is by far the most archaic of the Vedic texts preserved, and it retains many common Indo-Iranian elements, both in language and in content, that are not present in any other Vedic texts. Its time span likely corresponds to the Late Harappan culture, Gandhara Grave culture and Ochre Coloured Pottery culture.

Mantra language texts: This period includes both the mantra and prose language of the Atharvaveda (Paippalada and Shaunmkiya), the Rigveda Khilani, the Samaveda Samhita (containing some 75 mantras not in the Rigveda), and the mantras of the Yajurveda. Many of these texts are largely derived from the Rigveda, but have undergone certain changes, both by linguistic change and by reinterpretation. Conspicuous changes include change of vishva "all" by sarva, and the spread of the kuru- verbal stem (for Rigvedic krno-). This is the time of the early Iron Age in north-western India, corresponding to the Black and Red Ware (BRW) and Painted Grey Ware (PGW) cultures, and the early Kuru Kingdom, dating from c. the 12th to 11th century BCE.

Samhita prose texts: This period marks the beginning of the collection and codification of a Vedic canon. An important linguistic change is the complete loss of the injunctive. The Brahmana part ('commentary' on mantras and ritual) of the Black Yajurveda (MS, KS, TS) belongs to this period. Archaeologically, the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) culture from c. 1000 or 900 BCE corresponds to the Kuru Kingdom and the subsequent eastward shift of the political centre from the Kurus to the Panchalas on the Ganges.

Brahmana prose texts: The Brahmanas proper of the four Vedas belong to this period, as well as the Aranyakas, the oldest of the Upanishads (BAU, ChU, JUB) and the oldest Śrautasutras (BSS, VadhSS). In the east, Videha (N. Bihar and Nepal) is established as the third main political centre of the Vedic period.

Sutra language texts: This is the last stratum of Vedic Sanskrit leading up to c. 500 BCE, comprising the bulk of the Śrauta and Grhya Sutras, and some Upanishads (e.g. KathU, MaitrU).

Archaeological cultures identified with phases of Vedic material culture include the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture, the Gandhara Grave culture, the Black and red ware culture and the Painted Grey Ware culture.

Ochre coloured pottery culture was first found approximately between 1950-1951, in western Uttar Pradesh, in the Badaun and Bisjuar district.It is thought that this culture was prominent during the latter half of the 2nd millennium, within the transition between the Indus Valley civilization and the end of Harrapan culture. This pottery is typically created with wheel ware, and is ill-fired, to a fine to medium fabric, decorated with a red slip, and occasional black bands1. When this pottery was worked with, it often left an ochre color on the hands, most likely because of water-logging, bad firing, wind action, or a mixture of these factors. This pottery was found all throughout the doab, most of it found in the Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, and Bulandshahr districts, but also existing outside these districts, extending north and south of Bahadrabad. This pottery does however seem to exist within different time frames of popularity, ochre colored pottery seeming to occur in areas such as Rajasthan earlier than we see it in the doab, despite the doab being heavily associated with the culture.

Gandhara grave culture refers to the protohistoric cemeteries found in the Gandhara region, stretching all the way from Bajuar to the Indus . These cemeteries seem to follow a set grave structure and “mortuary practice”, such as inflexed inhumation and cremation. This culture is thought to occur in 3 stages: the lower, in which burials take place in masonry lined pits, the upper, in which urn burials and cremations are added, and the “surface” level, in which graves are covered with huge stone slabs.In the lower stage, excavators found that these graves are typically 2-3 feet deep, and covered with stones on top. After digging out the stones, skeletons were found facing southwest to northeast, with the head facing one direction, and the hands laying on top of one another.Female skeletons were often found wearing hair pins and jewelry Pottery is greatly important to this culture, as pottery was often used as a “grave good”, being buried with the bodies of the dead. Buried alongside the skeletons, we typically see various pots on top of the body, averaging at about 5 or less pieces of pottery per grave. Within this culture we typically see 2 kinds of pottery: gray ware, or red ware.

Black and red ware culture was coined as a term in 1946 by Sir Mortimer Wheeler . The pottery, as the name suggests, typically has a black rim/inside surface, and a red lower half on the outside of the piece. Red-ware pottery tends to fall into 2 categories: offering stands, or cooking vessels. Most of these pieces of pottery were open mouthed bowls that were burnished, painted, or slipped on one side, however, jars, pots, and dishes-on-stands have also been found in small quantities.[Black and red ware, and the surrounding culture, began its spread during the neolithic period and continues until the early medieval period in India, as well as being found in parts of West Asia and Egypt.[There are many theories about the process of its creation, the most popular being the use of an inverted firing technique, or a simultaneous oxidation and reduction firing. One researcher however learned that these 2 theories are quite possibly misguided, as they were able to recreate black and red ware pottery through double firing, one stating “the characteristic colouration of the pottery cannot merely be achieved by inverted firing”.

Painted grey ware culture is a significant pottery style that has been linked to a group of people who settled in Sutlej, Ghagger, and the Upper Ganga/Yamuna Valleys, loosely classified with the early Aryans who migrated to India in the beginning of the Vedic period. It’s also thought that the groups that introduced the painted grey ware culture also brought iron technology to the Indo-gangetic plains, making this pottery a momentous mark of the Northern Indian Iron age. The style of grey-ware often includes clay wheel-thrown into a smooth texture, ash-grey in color, and often decorated with black ink, creating small circular patterns, sometimes spirals, swastikas, or sigmas. Grey-ware pottery is almost exclusively drinking ware, and tends to have 3 different forms: narrow-waisted, tall drinking glasses, middle-sized drinking goblets, and drinking vases with outturned lips. There was a distinct grey ware culture surrounding the establishment of the pottery, but while the culture is significant, grey ware has only made up 10-15% of found Vedic pottery, a majority of the pottery red ware, as grey ware pottery was seen as a “highly valued luxury”.\