There are so many rumors, legends and conjectures associated with the Aryan people that some are already inclined to consider them themselves an invention, and any information about their past is falsification. Due to the fact that the events of their lives separate from us many millennia, it seems that it is simply impossible to understand the intricacies of the wanderings of the Aryan people around the world. But it is worth trying, given how significant the trace that the Aryans left in the history of Eurasia is.
Historians and linguists are not very fond of using the word "Aryans". The fact is that this name of a group of ancient inhabitants of Eurasia, after it was usurped by the adherents of the racial theory from the Third Reich, began to sound, as they say now, "politically incorrect". But the Aryans who existed several millennia ago are not at all to blame for this. So who are the Aryans and where is their ancestral home?
So spoke Tilak
At the end of the 19th century, a lot of noise in the calm world of historians was caused by the theory of an Indian scholar named Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who drew attention to some strange features in the worldview of the ancient Aryans.
He explained them by the acquaintance of this people with the circumpolar regions of the Earth. Tilak interpreted these facts as an argument in favor of the Arctic ancestral home of the Aryans and, in general, all Indo-Europeans. And maybe all of humanity. Since then, the scientific world has split: a few accept Tilak's hypothesis, the overwhelming majority reject it.
The opinion of this very majority is significantly influenced by factors far from science.
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First, Tilak was politically unreliable from the point of view of the British colonialists. In other words, he was a staunch fighter for the independence of India and for this, during the First World War, he tried to establish cooperation with imperial Germany and Sultan's Turkey. So the British tried to discredit Tilak before the world of "whites" in all respects, including his scientific views.
Secondly, Western science is generally not inclined to take seriously the opinion of a person who does not belong to its civilization.
What did Tilak say so seditious? He analyzed the mythological picture of not only the Indian Vedas, but also the Avesta - the holy book of the ancient Iranians. And he pointed out that these sources (especially the Vedas) reflect the physical realities of the circumpolar regions of the Earth.
In particular, the long winter (ten months a year, according to the Avesta), regularly freezing and opening waters. But the most important thing is the polar night, long polar twilight, as well as the light season, which includes only ten lunar months.
Tilak showed that the same ideas are contained in the myths of all Indo-European peoples, but in the Vedas and Avesta they are more fully preserved.
Tilak's conclusions turned out to be quite radical. In addition, he tried to link them into a single scheme with the history of the Earth's ice ages. Tilak argued that the ancestral home of the Aryans was located near the North Pole during warmer climatic eras. The beginning of a cold snap forced the Aryans to move south.
This is how the settling of the Indo-European community and its disintegration began. The fact that the picture of the climatic history of the Earth turned out to be more complex than it was imagined in the time of Tilak, and the dating to which he tried to tie the history of the Aryans was not confirmed, was the third important reason for distrust of his hypothesis.
However, even if Tilak's hypothesis is incorrect in a number of its essential components, the facts he noted still need explanation. It is only clear that the religious beliefs of the Aryans really reflect an acquaintance with life in the northern regions of Eurasia.
Tilak's hypothesis cannot be taken literally. But this is not a reason to completely deny the presence of rational grain in it. Information about the close acquaintance of the ancestors of Indo-Europeans with the circumpolar regions of the Earth can be interpreted in a new way based on modern ideas about the ancient climate and paleogeography of our planet. There is no reason to completely exclude the Arctic from the habitat of people of ancient times.
Throw South
So, 4 thousand years ago, the Aryan tribes, who presumably lived in the steppes of the Urals and the Black Sea region, and before that in more northern regions, migrated to the south. First to Iran, then further to India. It should be noted that India was then inhabited by dark-skinned peoples, the ancestors of today's Dravidians. The Aryans were typical representatives of the European race, white-skinned.
The penetration of the Aryans into India was not a one-time action, but a process stretching over hundreds of years. This period in the history of India is called the Aryan, or Vedic. It was in this era that the greatest monuments of Indian and world culture were created - the poetic epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. Vedic civilization is in many ways a mystery to scientists. There are many speculations, speculations and theories on this topic.
Only the following can be said with certainty. By the middle of the II millennium BC, the Aryan civilization already existed on the territory of North India, the basis of whose worldview was the Vedas and Vedic literature. These ancient sacred texts, in addition to purely religious functions, were a repository of knowledge in all areas of life: military affairs, medicine, urban planning, mathematics, astronomy, and music.
Only a few monuments of Vedic literature have survived to us. The most famous of them are the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as the four Vedas, Upanishads and other scriptures. It was at this time that Indian society began to be divided into classes (varnas): sudras (the then proletariat), vaisyas (merchants and farmers), kshatriyas (warriors and rulers) and brahmanas (priests and mentors) - a tradition that eventually turned into a caste system and is still common in India.
With fire and sword
The settlement of the Aryans across Hindustan proceeded slowly and stretched for centuries. They reached the lower reaches of the Ganges only by the 6th century BC. The Aryans have not been able to settle in South India until now. These were not simple military expeditions that ended with the return of military squads to their former habitats. It was a planned invasion. Moreover, the invaders passed through the lands of their opponents, as they say, with fire and sword.
The basis of the Aryan economy was agriculture and cattle breeding. The Aryans were also skilled warriors who often fought with other Aryan and Dravidian tribes inhabiting North India at the time. Unlike the previous civilization, the Aryans had advanced weapons, including chariots. They built fortresses, the remains of which have survived to this day (for example, on the territory of the ancient capital of Indraprastha near Delhi), as well as skillful, thoughtful fighting techniques. Gradually, the Aryan tribes drove the dark-skinned Dravidian peoples to the south of India.
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, on the territory of Northern India - from the Himalayas to the Vindian Hills and from Afghanistan to Bangladesh - large tribal groups began to form from scattered tribes, which later formed kingdoms. By the end of the Vedic period, there were sixteen major Aryan kingdoms in North India.
In the Vedas, there are stories about some wonderful examples of weapons that the Aryan gods fought with. For example, they talked about vimanas - flying machines with the help of which it was possible to move through the air with great speed. Or about the terrible weapon of the god Indra, the action of which resembled a nuclear bombardment. You can, of course, laugh at the fantasy of the ancient compilers of the Vedas, if not for one archaeological site found on the territory of present-day Pakistan.
We are talking about Mohenjo-Daro (translated from the Sindhi language - "the hill of the dead").
Until now, archaeologists cannot say exactly what this city was actually called and who inhabited it. Only one thing is known for sure - it is one of the greatest cities of antiquity. And one of the most mysterious - he died about 3700 years ago under very unusual and hitherto unexplained circumstances.
Such ancient metropolises rarely fall into decay overnight. And in Mohenjo-Daro everything indicated that the catastrophe came suddenly, almost instantly. The most widespread opinion is that the city fell during the invasion of the Aryans. In the writings of some archaeologists, it was reported that traces of a battle were found during excavations.
In one of the houses, the skeletons of thirteen men, women and one child were found. Their remains bore signs of sudden death. But they were not killed and robbed - some were wearing bracelets, rings, beads. Throughout the city, archaeologists came across similar groups of skeletons, which testified that before their death, people freely walked the streets and were taken by surprise.
From the research carried out, one thing was clear: Mohenjo-Daro was the victim of some kind of disaster. It happened suddenly and did not last long. However, its strength was such that it led to the sudden and complete destruction of the whole city. It is also interesting that almost simultaneously with Mohenjo-Daro, other large cities located nearby died.
Antique Hiroshima?
A very original version of the death of Mohenjo-Daro was presented in their book Atomic Explosion in 2000 BC by the Englishman David Davenport and the Italian Ettore Vincenti. Davenport, an English researcher of the culture and languages of Ancient India, an expert in Sanskrit, was born and lived for some time in India. He was obsessed with the idea of translating ancient Indian texts from Sanskrit into English and an objective interpretation of the philosophical meaning and historical facts set forth in these texts.
He also lived for twelve years in Pakistan, studying the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro. Davenport, together with Vincenti, found that about 3,700 years ago, at the top of the hill around which Mohenjo-Daro was built, an explosion of tremendous force, similar to the impact of an atomic bomb, thundered. Researchers have placed in the mentioned book a diagram of the destruction of buildings.
If you look at it carefully, you can see a well-defined epicenter, inside which all buildings have been swept away. As we move from the center to the periphery, the destruction decreases, gradually fading away.
It becomes clear why the outlying buildings are the best-preserved buildings in Mohenjo-Daro. Upon close examination of the destroyed buildings, the authors found that the diameter of the epicenter of the explosion is about 50 meters. At this place, everything is crystallized and melted, all buildings are wiped off the face of the earth. At a distance of up to 60 meters from the center of the explosion, bricks and stones are melted on one side, which indicates the direction of the explosion.
The researchers also found that the ancient city was destroyed by three powerful shock waves that spread a mile from the epicenter of the explosion. Scattered among the ruins in an area with a radius of over 400 meters are pieces of clay, ceramics and some minerals, which were quickly melted. All the people who were in the epicenter instantly evaporated, so the archaeologists did not find skeletons there.
Researchers sent the so-called black stones, which were scattered across the city's streets, to the Institute of Mineralogy at the University of Rome and to the laboratory of the National Research Council (Italy). It turned out that black stones are fragments of earthenware, sintered at a temperature of about 1400-1600 degrees, and then hardened.
And from one root
So, the ancient Aryans left to conquer India and stayed there forever. But did they all migrate from their ancestral home? Scientists believe not. In the XVI-XIII centuries BC, the state of Mitanni existed in Northern Mesopotamia (Northern Iraq). The surviving names of many of its rulers indicate that they were Aryans. They worshiped the same gods as the Vedic Aryans - Indra, Mitra, Varuna.
Among the Indians, sometimes blue-eyed ones come across, but have no ties with Europeans. Aryan genes awakened?
It is believed that the Mitannian Aryans lived after the Aryan group split into Indo-Aryans and Iranians. Moreover, the Mitannians were precisely the Indo-Aryans, or rather the “Proto-Indo-Aryans,” since they did not reach India.
One should not imagine the migration of the ancient Aryans as a unidirectional process - only from north to south. Their settlement of Iran and India is better known only because later civilization developed in these lands, which preserved the memory of their arrival. Some groups of Aryans probably moved from their ancestral home to the north, west or east. Some part of the Indo-Aryans even came to the Balkans!
Well, the Aryans themselves became the progenitors of peoples speaking languages belonging to the Indo-European group. Our compatriots are among them. So the ancient Aryans are our ancestors, which should not be forgotten.
Andrey Nikiforov
