peoples first the rigvedic gods are not originally
originally
Indian the most important God was Indra
Indra was the god of thunder he was the
god of rain the God of Thunder and the
god of rain rain he brought down the
water from Sky he brought down the water
from the
sky then there's the Chariots and horses
horses are not known in the indust
civilization and yet they're a key part
of the Society of the rig Vader Chariot
were drawn by the horses they used to
ride the horses and it was very familiar
animal to them and I think that they
tamed the horse at very early
period and another clue is the evidence
of a migration
eastwards so a movement eastwards can be
determined and and some of the rivers
are identified with rivers almost
towards the Afghan border the SWAT sasu
and the caral river this is the first uh
movement of arens is this the name they
called themselves what does it mean it
actually means the Civilized the
S the socialized civilized person
civilized defined person and so they use
the word
Arya that's what they call themselves
yeah so this is a key moment in the
story around 1500 BC after the death of
the Indus cities Aran tribes began to
language the earliest hymns in the rig
fader are mentioned places in the
Northwest where the Aran are first found
inside the
subcontinent they settled in the Valley
of the Indus the river that gave India its
name they fought battles on the carpal
Afghanistan and they herded their cattle
on the river SWAT today in Pakistan's Northwest
Frontier the heart of the early Aran
territory was the region of peshawa in
Pakistan and here I hope to solve
another clue the rig Vader talks about a
sacred drink Central to the aran's
rituals a speciality of the tribes
around here it was called s rig Vader
says it was taken from a mountain plant
didn't have leaves or berries it was a a
brown twig like plant which you crushed
to create a kind of distillation now in
the mountains of Afghanistan there's
still a drink called th today and if
we're likely to find it anywhere will be
peshawa just off the street of
storytellers is the alley of the
apothecaries and here I tried out the
rig Vader's description of the S
plant no not
it a long
St no leaves makes bitter very bitter taste
taste
have fantastic fantastic he has the
yeah can be 1 foot 2ot 3T
this is it this is it smells slightly like
like [Music]
[Music]
Pine if I boil this up in water I should
be able to taste the the bitter taste of
okay we don't know exactly how s was
prepared although we do know that they
sweetened its bitter taste with honey
what we want is a pot of this full
boiling water but a but a lot of a lot
of it so it's s is still used as a
medicine in Central
Asia the active element in the plant is
iDine and the effect that it has
according to the rig Vader is well if
you take too much of it it can cause
nausea it can be frightening it can give
you vertigo um uh it's vomiting if you
take it in the right measure
it enliven the senses sharpens you up
keeps you awake The Poets in the rig
Vader compose their songs often at night
having drunk s and of course Indra King
of the Gods drinks vast quantities of
this perhaps because it's thought to be
well my God look at the color of
it but s's not an Indian plant it
doesn't grow in the humid Plains and
today it's no longer part of Hindu
outside getting a kind of tingling
feeling all
over just sharpens the senses up um
makes you slightly oh go on then inra
penan thank you Shak Shaka slight
feeling all over now slightly
tingling heart beating slightly
faster um sens is just slightly sharpened
sharpened
up this is a really important aspect of
the rig Vader there are many many of the thousand
thousand
devoted to the merits of drinking Som
almost as an elixir of the Gods and
chiefly of the the king of the Gods
himself it also makes you talk too [Music]
[Music]
much so the Northwest Frontier and the
rivers of the Punjab were the first home
of the arens inside
India but the rig Vader suggest they'd
come from much further field beond
beyond the Kaiba pass even beyond the
Kush the clues now point us northwards
[Music]
Asia and our search for the Aran led us
ascad a closed world in the last days of
Bashi and here we gathered supplies for
our journey onwards to the sight of a
Discovery we'd arranged a rendevu out in
the kakum the Black
Desert on the migration route by which
the ancestors of the arens must have
come out of Central Asia in the Bronze [Music]
Age 4,000 years ago this desert was a
fertile Oasis home to thousands of
settlements all of them destroyed by
climate change at the same time as
daro out here we made our rendevu with
Victor sanid so Professor s
is uh to say the least a living legend
one of the great Uh Russian
archaeologists he's been Excavating out
here in the Wilds for many years uh and
found what few
archaeologists are ever lucky enough to
civilization sarun is Excavating a vast
fortified mud Bridge
enclosure and a huge sacred Precinct
altars the material culture here is the
mirror image of the arens of the rig
Vader and their ancient Iranian cousins
religion it is first time we founded in
all archaeology of near East The
Ensemble with
with many Temple which is belong to the
ran religion what date does the site
finish stop being used I think in uh
second millennium BC because the mgap
river coming in West and the Life coming
together with water in West in other
place so change of river and climate
change moves the population moved moved
this is where the the s h was prepared
the sacred drink in this in this kind of
bowl yeah what were the ingredients of
the Sacred drink what went into it oh it
just ingredient yeah poppy poppy
cannabis cannabis ephedra edra have you
tasted no have you made today prob
no two in the morning certainly is for
that when you look at the connections
you've got the sacred drink here the S
you've got the fire altars you've got
the beginnings of very close
similarities with what we heard in the
rig Vader what about horses then uh
Victor yeah have you found evidence of
horses the horse was first domesticated
out here in Central Asia
so this is a foe for a king's morelan yeah
yeah
yeah the horse sacrifice was the
greatest ritual an Aran King could
do all of this King M all of all of
these are are royal tombs and in these
tombs you found wheeled wheeled Vehicles
like carts with four wheels yes with
four wheels yeah really interesting
isn't it you know the rig V when they
talk about the wheels vehicles in the
early rig Vader they use this word Rafa
in Sanskrit Rafa and it's not a chariot
it's it is actually a cart and here
they've actually found the cart inside
of these stps we founded three
Von the origin of the Aran must lie much
further into Central Asia this was
perhaps a staging post for one group out
of many on the way to Iran and India
I'd like to toast you thank you for your
here and that night Under the Stars
another thought came to me about the rig
women the communal drinking the
convivial Feast was that how some of
this ancient poetry was composed by the
Kings Mighty
Indra let your Regal mounts bring you
here to drink
somar the juice which is swifter than thought
thought [Music]
Indra wield your Thunderbolt Indra bring
rain Grant all our desires part the sky
and make all things [Music]
[Music]
visible part the sky and drink s that
opens our mind to the
vastness of your [Music]
[Music] skies
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
Indra It's a Wonderful t izing mystery
isn't it the Aran or to be more precise
the cluster of languages that would
become Modern English German French
Latin and Greek Persian and
Sanskrit where did they come from and
how did they
spread well it may just be that here in
the deserts of
Turkmenistan for the first time we can
pin these people down on their migration
they arrived in this place well before
2000 BC
they defended themselves in these great
mud brick citadels they were cattle
herders they had a class of priests who
performed fire rituals at special altars
and made the sacred intoxicating drink
and they had horses and wheeled
wagons around 1700 1800 BC they moved on
again perhaps this time because of
overpopulation climate change the
shifting of rivers but this time they
moved southwards towards the passes of
the Hindu Kush and the Indian
subcontinent the history of India was
about to enter its defining [Music]
phase now again we need to jump the
Centuries by around a th000 BC Aran
tribes were settled across North India
and fighting each other for Supremacy
and that period of heroic Warfare was
eventually crystallized in a great myth the
the [Music]
[Music]
mahabarata composed in Sanskrit it's the
longest poem in the world and for all
[Music] [Applause]
like Homer's tale of Troy the mahabarata
is a story of war and tragedy a doomsday
epic it harks back to the time when the
AR tribes had settled in India an
archetypal tale of Family Feud that ends
in an apocalyptic battle here at
kurukshetra it's Dawn on the Festival of
the great God Shiva and the pilgrims are
gathering here by the enormous sacred
pool at kurk
chetra to celebrate a battle which in
Indian tradition took place in
for Indian people the battle has always
marked the Divide between the time of
myth and the beginning of real history
it's the last time when men and gods
walked the Earth together the story of
the Rival families the kurus and the
pandas would permeate Indian culture in
all Indian languages a fundamental guide
to how to live your life and do your
duty it's a battlefield for cororo and
P at the time of daper daper is a
chrisan Time Lord krishna's
time all the Warriors they belong to his
own family all family [Music]
[Music]
relatives he don't want to do war with
his own he doesn't want to fight against
War yes and what Krishna say to him then
Krishna teach advise him how to
performance of Duty importance of
Performing Duty for a king your duty is
to fight ah performance of Duty is [Music]
[Music]
must it's really an epic that speaks to
every age it is an epic full of stories
of human beings with feet of clay with
lust and Leery and Ambitions and and and
fears people who have committed acts of
betrayal and and and and and and sold
each other down the river uh it's a
tremendous amount of it it sort of to
read the Mahabharat today is to
recognize how thrilling it must have
been to hear at the first time somewhere
between between 400 BC and 400 ad which
is roughly the 8800e span during which
composed during that period the tale was
told and retold to a point where it
became a sort of National Library of
India where every tale that had to be
told was incorporated into a retelling
of the [Music]
[Music]
Mahabharat all sorts sorts of things got
tossed into
this literally every single thing that
people want to talk about their times
was interpolated into a retelling of the
Epic so for 800 years the Mahabharat
became the story of [Music]
India and stories too become part of a
nation's identity for they help create a
shared past that binds us all
irrespective of Lang or religion making
an allegiance to the idea of India
itself but was the war more than just
m so these are all places that were
famous in the legend that these names
have not changed till today they bear
the same name the reason is that they
have been under success in 1949 2 years
after Independence a young archaeologist
BB L went to the Citadel of the Waring
Clans at hastinapur to see if history
lay behind the
myth right this is a view of the asapur
mound and we put a long trench right
across the M we are looking at this M
from the West on the Eastern side the
river used to flow right by the side of
the Old River Ganges in ancient
times his guide was not only
archaeological science but the tradition
handed down in the
mahabarata on the western side of the
mount we were getting the painted gra on
the Eastern side we are not getting it
so I was very much worried I spent many
nights without
sleep and the text say a great flood
came in the ganga and washed away Hur a
great flood washed away H and you can
see the man in this figure is pointing
to the erosion Mark left by the river
it's very clear isn't it yeah yeah so so
you'd found the the the key evidence
that the tradition had was correct that
there had been a flood that had
[Music]
yes when you go to hastinapur today
you'd almost think it could be then what
L found under the ground was so similar
to what is still above
it the country people of India live the
same way they build the same kind of houses
ancient hastinapur was recognizable in
the India of [Music]
today this is the trench that Professor
L dug through the mound nearly 60 years
ago it's crumbling now but you can still
make out the the different layers of the
city it's a bit bigger than Troy for the
sake of comparison about 700 yards
across a royal Citadel of one of these
early Kings of the Ganges Valley with
mud brick defenses um store rooms uh
rooms for the Warriors who were their
armed following and somewhere here
presumably a palace although Professor
Nile never found that now what connected
this place with the uh the war in the
mahabarata well remember remember three
three things the legend which named the
place the story of the
flood and the pottery and here's the
pottery this kind of stuff you can pick
up even today after the rains all over
the site they call it painted gray wear
you can see why it's gray beautifully
painted that was the evidence that led
Professor L to believe that there was
truth behind the legend and that the
Great War of the mahabarata really took
place remember this was the first great
excavation done after Independence and
it was of crucial importance for the
Indian people's view of their own
history the mahabarata was their
greatest and most loved epic and here
this excavation seemed to prove that
long before all the colonial periods
which had dominated India there was a
own over the next 3,000 years Greeks and
Huns Turks and Afghans Moguls and
British Alexander tamboline bble will
spell and India's greatest strength as
the oldest civilizations know will be to
adapt and change to absorb the wounds of
history and to use its gifts but somehow
magically always remain India [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Applause]
this is the Sacred City of matura on the
river jumna the cool season is over now
the rains are ending and the heat is
rise the Festival of holy celebrates the
coming of light the Triumph of good the
growth of life and down there there's
bank managers and it boffins rubbing
shoulders with farmers and Rick Shaw men
all of them dancing for a god from [Applause]
[Applause]
prehistory this amazing journey has
already taken us from the deep south of
India to The Wilds of the Hindu Kush in
Central Asia and here to the heart of
the Gangi
plane and already you can
see the cultures and the languages and
the religions of India have been built
up over tens of thousands of years there
the deep current on
which events the great events of History
movements and they make up that deep
and this is just the [Applause]
beginning next in the story of
India Tales of War and Peace and the
power of ideas the greatest warriors the
greatest thinkers the most dangerous
and that story continues next Friday at
mine here on BBC 2 next the 60s chicks
come to terms with aging but not without
a moan grumpy old women on the way [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
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