Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/310

 of hymns believed to represent it) we find the Indian Aryans making their settlements in the Panjab. The earliest memorial of these settlements, the Rig-Veda, is a hymnal of unknown age, though from astronomical dates it has been inferred with some probability by European scholars that about 1400 its composition was still going on. Containing 1017 short hymns, consisting in all of 10,580 verses, the Rig-Veda displays a picture of social life in many respects different from any we might imagine from later Indian literature. Among the Aryans, now on the banks of the Indus, the agricultural village community has not yet completely. supplanted the "cattle-pens" of an older pastoral life; and, as in Homeric, early Hebrew, and early Arab times, the chief symbol of wealth is cattle. Divided into various tribes, sometimes at war with themselves, these conquering Aryans occasionally unite against the "black-skinned" aborigines whom they call Dasyus, or "enemies," and Dásas, or "slaves." But though they pride themselves on their fair complexion, and though the Sanskrit word for "colour" (varna) is destined to mark this old difference between the fair-skinned Aryan and his dusky foes by becoming a synonym for "race" or "caste," the system of caste in its later sense is still unknown. "Each father of the family," says Dr. Hunter, whose valuable works on Indian history and social life should be in the hands of every student of Indian languages and antiquities, "is the priest of his own household. The chieftain acts as father and priest to the tribe; but at the greater festivals he chooses some one specially learned in holy offerings to conduct the sacrifice in the name of the people." Thus the Bráhman priesthood, destined to become the great organisers of caste, have as yet no fixed place in the social order. Moreover, kingship seems to