Chapter 5 India 159includes Greek, Latin, and most European languages, including English (see
chapter 2). The Aryans, like the Hittites and Greeks to whom they were linguis-
tically related, were an Indo-European-speaking society of Bronze-Age tribal
warriors who loved their horses, herded cattle, and were organized patriarchi-
cally under tribal chieftains called rajas. They worshipped male gods whose
names of Indra (Indara in Hittite), Varuna (Uruvna), Mitra (Mitira), and the
Naksatras (Nasatiya) were widely known to Indo-Europeans, as evidenced by
the appearance in Hittite texts of about 1400 B.C.E. Like the Greeks, they
moved into a region where more advanced urban civilizations were already in
decline. Their religion of transcendent gods of the heavens encountered and
partially replaced the earth goddesses of agricultural peoples. And like the
Greeks, they developed epic stories of heroic and embattled kings based on pos-
sible actual events early in the first millennium B.C.E. and much later written
down. The Mahabharata, like the Iliad, is an epic tale of bloody warfare among
related princes, and the Ramayana, like the Odyssey, is the tale of a long exilic
journey in territories of mythical beings ending with a joyful return home. The
kidnapped Helen of Troy whose abduction leads to the Trojan War has her
counterpart in the abduction of Sita, whose rescue dominates the Ramayana.
But might the newcomers not have been new at all, but simply a survival of
the people of IVC? Might the Vedas have been composed in the Indus Valley?
This theory has some popular appeal because it places the most sacred sources
of Hinduism within India, not originating someplace else. However, the textual
evidence does not support this theory. Wendy Doniger, a major authority on
the Vedic literature, evaluates the textual basis for the two theories (2009). If
the Vedas were written in the cities of Indus Valley, she writes, why do they
appear to know nothing of bricks, the basic building material of the Indus peo-
ple? Why do they describe a nomadic lifestyle? Why are they so crazy about
horses? The Indus Valley seals give us a pretty good picture of the animals that
were important to them: bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, tigers, snakes, croco-
diles. Their children fashioned dogs (with collars) out of clay. They had domes-
ticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. But no horses. Whereas the
Rig-Veda is “intensely horsey” (pp. 96–99). Horses are “observed in affection-
ate, minute, often gory, detail.... The Vedic people not only had horses but
were crazy about horses.” Horses did not originate on the subcontinent and do
not thrive there; they have to be constantly imported.
Given the depiction of social life in the Vedas, it seems unlikely these people
were the IVC people. Rather, the “Aryans” of the texts were part of a nomadic
population that originated on the steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains and
spread gradually in the second millennium B.C.E. into Europe, the Mediterra-
nean, the Iranian Plateau, and India. All the languages of North India—Hindi,
Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.—are closely related Indo-European languages.
Indo-European-speaking peoples, whose sacred texts were the Vedas, gradually
moved eastward into the Ganges Valley, forming small kingdoms such as Kuru,
Pancala, Kosala, and Videha. Out of these Late Vedic kingdoms came the tales