Lecture 7: Ancient India—Sacred Cows and Ayurveda

Ancient India—Sacred Cows and Ayurveda .....................................

Lecture 7

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ecause of the logical structure, cooking methods, ingredients, texture

of dishes, and way of eating, Indian cuisine will be one of the great

culinary traditions spread around the world—especially the places

to which Indians emigrate in the 19th century, including the Caribbean, east

Africa, and Britain. This lecture will cover a few thousand years of ancient

Indian history, from a few thousand B.C. to about 1200 A.D, and you

will learn that ancient India had many different cultures with hundreds of

languages and many different food customs.

Early Indian Civilizations

 The earliest civilizations in India were settled around the Indus

River valley in northwestern India from about 2500 to 1800 B.C.

They built cities like Harappa and Mohenjo Daro that were as

sophisticated, well populated, and wealthy as those in Sumer and

Egypt at the same time. In other words, the same exact pattern of

agriculture and animal domestication, population growth, urban

concentration, and eventually kingdoms arose in these cities as it

did in other ancient civilizations.

 Also as in Egypt and the earliest Greek civilizations (Mycenaeans),

there was a period of turmoil and invasion at about 1500 B.C., a

kind of Dark Ages, that for some reason happens everywhere.

We don’t know quite as much about the earliest civilizations in

India because no one can read their language, so all we have is

archaeological evidence.

 Germans were one people descended from a group we know as

Proto-Indo-Europeans. We know practically nothing about these

people, but linguistic evidence suggests that they existed. For

example, the language of the Aryans who invaded India is called

Sanskrit, and it has certain words and grammatical structure in

common with Archaic Greek and even with ancient Celtic (Irish).