The Religion of the Veda

Ancient India and the Ṛgveda.

the Iranians, lies in a distant past relative to the time of India’s oldest literary monuments. Yet, when compared to the vast spans of Egyptian or Babylonian history, it should likely be measured on a much smaller scale¹). For those moving southeast, the separation of the Indians from the Iranians represented a renunciation—or the final, concluding step in a renunciation—of participation in the great competition of nations, in which the robust masculinity of the Western nations matured. Oldenberg reflects the common 19th-century European scholarly view that environmental factors and "racial mixing" determined the vitality of a civilization. In the lush silence of their new homeland, those Aryans (a term used here for the ancient Indo-European settlers), brothers to the most noble nations of Europe, mixed with the dark indigenous population of India. They increasingly developed the characteristic traits of Hinduism, enervated by a climate to which their physical type, forged in a temperate zone, could not adapt without severe harm. They were no less weakened by the idle enjoyment offered by this rich land following an easy victory over unequal opponents—defenseless "savages"—and by a life lacking great tasks, the steeling power of suffering, and the stern hand of necessity. The intellectual work produced by this people bears few traces of that laborious struggle which alone is destined to exhaust the depths of reality and bring one's own inner worlds to a vigorous, joyful maturity. With playful ease, they draped the surface of things in images that flowed from their own overabundant imagination—here graceful, there strangely ornate, rich in color but poor in firm, energetically drawn lines; sometimes blurring into one another, sometimes separating again, entwining in ever-new forms...

¹) Evidence for this seems to be, for example, that the use of the war chariot (Streitwagen) was already known when the Indians and Iranians still formed a single people.