INTRODUCTION.

The Sources.

Ancient India and the Ṛgveda.

The Vedic Indians, whose beliefs and worship we intend to examine, were settled at the time from which the oldest sources originate—this may be, according to the very uncertain estimates that are alone possible here, around the time of 1200 to 1000 BCE¹) — at the Indus and in the Punjab. They were divided into numerous small tribes, ruled by what were likely mostly minor Rājas (kings or chieftains) and a warrior nobility, alongside which even then stood a priestly nobility closed off like a caste. They lived in villages; the older texts show no trace of cities or urban life. Cattle breeding, especially of cows and oxen, far outweighed agriculture in importance: a relationship whose effects often appear in the sphere of religious life in many ways. The art of writing was absent; it was replaced in the priestly schools by the feats of an admirable power of memory.

The immigration of these tribes into India coming from the northwest, their separation from the Indo-Germanic (Indo-European) brother-tribes who had remained united with them the longest,

¹) I cannot consider the attempt by Hermann Jacobi (1850–1937), a German Indologist Jacobi (in the Festive Greeting to Roth original: "Festgruss an Roth", a scholarly tribute volume for Rudolf von Roth, pages 68 and following) to derive a significantly greater age for the Ṛgveda (the oldest collection of Vedic hymns) from astronomical observations to be successful.