India, Empire and Chaos
Migration and a New Civilization | The Upanishads | Hinduism in the 500s BCE | the Jains | Buddhism's founder, Siddartha Gautama | Epic Hindu Literature | Chandragupta | the Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka |Military coup and invasions | the Gupta Dynasty
Around the year 1000 BCE, tribes living in the Indus Valley began running from drought. They trekked eastward along the foot of the Himalayan mountains, where jungles were less dense and rivers easier to cross. They entered the plains of the Ganges Valley, and there they found these societies with a more egalitarian organization than they had, and they despised them for being different, for not having kings as autocratic as theirs and for having strange religious beliefs.
By now, these migrating Hindus had iron tools and weapons, iron having spread eastward through Persia. And with their superior weaponry and self-confidence, the migrants advanced against local resistance.
With the Hindu conquests, a complex hierarchy of classes developed. At the top were the priests and their entire families: the Brahmins. Also at the top were the warrior-aristocrats, the Kshatriyas, whose job it was to practice constantly for combat. Neither the Brahmins nor the Kshatriyas conceded superiority to the other, but they agreed that the other classes were lower than they. The first of these lower classes was the Vaishyas and their families: those conquerors who tended cattle and served the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in others ways.
The lowest class was the conquered, darker-skinned people who were servants for the conquerors. The servants were called Shudras. Hindus made these four classifications a part of their mythology and religion.
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