I. Material Culture of the Aryan Migrants


Elizarenkova [1995:5-6], an eminent Russian Indologists specializing in Vedic studies, speculates that the nomadic/pastoral lifestyle of the incoming [22] Aryan necessitated a Spartan material culture:-



The Aryans did not know strongly built dwellings planed for a long or even for constant life. They lived rather on wheels, moving from one place to another surrounded by their herds, then in a settled way on one and the same place. The carriage was more important, than the house not only because they spent in it as much time or even more, than in a “stationary” house, but because they carriage itself was regarded as a “small” house, “small” homeland, where all was intimately connected with man, and all was for the whole span of one’s life: constant was the ever-moving carriage, variable was the immovable house. They lived in a carriage according to tradition, habit, desire, but in a house - depending on circumstances, needs, to secure future life in a carriage for oneself. It was not the house and the settled way of life that were determinative, but the traveling and its possibilities. A day of travel was followed by a day of rest (yogakhema-), and for the night the carriages were so arranged that they made a circular fortification (“Wagenburg”, as W. Rau calls this arrangement) inside of which the cattle were placed. All the possessions and all the things necessary for life were kept in each cases in carriages or near them, and therefore neither possessions, nor these things could be rich and various. People had at their disposal only things that were of first necessity.



The Aryans did halt temporarily at various places before moving further eastwards, but even such short breaks in their journey did not entail an enhancement in the level of their material culture [ibid: 6-7]:-



But even when the Vedic Aryans had to stop for a longer time (to fill their food supplies by means of agriculture), this stop was temporary and lasted no longer than half a year, from sowing to cutting crop (yava-), and therefore the very form of settled life implied its temporary character, which also limited the increase of the material worked. Nevertheless, it was just during these short days that a social group of people, forming a kind of community the members of which were relatives united by a common cause and common fate, acquired its special and economic projection in the form of settlement – grama- “a village”, that is strictly speaking “aggregate of people living in a village”, and earlier “a crowd”, “mass”, “heap” with the idea of gathering together; cp. Indo-European *ger- “to get together”, “join” (see Pokorny 1, 382-383). Settlements of this kind required innovations in the type of dwelling itself- from shed-awnings above the carriages and mates around them up to the independent from the “carriage-type” dwellings more often of a rectangular, rarer of a circular form with a wooden supporting pillar in the middle of the habitation, dug into the earth deeply enough and bearing on itself a bamboo overhead cover with a kind of walls made by stretched mats of reed and fastened with ropes, with a door, but without windows. Premises for meetings were built more or less similar to human inhabitations as well as objects of economic purpose, for instance, for keeping the cattle, stores of food, wells etc.