India, Cont.

But once they bit off and chewed a hunk of culture, some of them would settle down to digest and assimilate it.

They learned quickly. Whenever they chose to occupy a town they had razed, they efficiently rebuilt it; and as soon as they got their hands on a few saddled horses they became expert equestrians. Having mastered this latter discipline, they became a swift as well as unstoppable Wehrmacht. (They never forgot the debt they owed the horse.) They also learned to sail.

Great clans of these nomads moved gently into unpopulated areas of interior Europe and cruelly into coastal or riparian cities. Time, isolation and the absorption of words from the languages of the various peoples they subjugated altered their speech. As the centuries and the miles passed between their branchings, they came to call themselves by different names. They were the Germans whose Norse gods Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigga are yet commemorated in our Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and whose language differentiated into Gothic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and ultimately English. They were the Slavic peoples whose language became Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Czech and Polish. As Celts they invaded the British Islands where their language became Gaelic, Manx and Welsh. As Hellenes they sacked the cities of an already ancient Aegean civilization, took from the vanquished their system of writing, adapted it for their own speech by adding vowel symbols to it, and recorded their precious language, Greek. They went down into the Italian peninsula where their language became Latin and eventually, through the efforts of Imperial Rome, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Rumanian, and Italien. They were the Persians and the conquerors of Afghanistan.

It was around 1500 B.C. that they demolished the immaculate cities of the Indus Valley and, crossing that boundary of the then known world, began to trek across northern India, singing their Vedic hymns and calling themselves Aryans which in their language, there called Sanskrit, meant 'aristocrats' or 'nobles.' (They always thought of themselves as noble: Erin, Iran and Aryan are cognates.) The small, dark and peaceful Panis and Dasas farmers they met and conquered gaped at these strange tribes who held their language and their cows so sacred.

The Aryans gaped, too. In fact, the people they encountered in India gave them a culture shock from which they would never recover. It was not simply a racial trauma. They had encountered small, dark people before but they had killed them and taken their lands and property without prejudice; and nubile women - no matter what size or color - were routinely appended to their caravans. What shocked the Aryans was the religion these people practiced.

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