in old times they destroyed the pre-existing civilization, for instance, in Crete and Etruria. To-day anthropologists say that all the races of the world are more or less mixed and that there never was a distinctive, pure Āryan race. The benefit of the theory of a conquering, civilizing Aryan race is now reserved only for Ancient Indian History, text-books of which teach that the Vedic culture was developed outside India and was imported into that country, ready made, by conquering invaders. But a careful study of the Vedas, such as is found in my Life in Ancient India in the Age of the Mantras, reveals the fact that Vedic culture is so redolent of the Indian soil and of the Indian atmosphere that the idea of the non-Indian origin of that culture is absurd. So we have got to restore, to the word 'Ārya', its original meaning found in the Vedas. The Rishis of the Vedas used the word 'Ārya' without any racial implications, but only in the sense of a people who followed the fire-cult as opposed to the fireless-cult. In the Vedic times two cults prevailed in India: (1) that followed by the Āryas to whom Sanskrit was the sacred tongue, the language of the Gods, who made offerings to the Gods through Agni, because they believed Agni to be the mouth of the Gods, and (2) that followed by the Dasyus whom the Āryas described as anagni, the fireless. Thus Ārya was always in India a cult name, the name of a method of worship, whose main characteristic was the lighting of the sacred fire. There were two forms of the Ārya fire cult—the Grihya and the Śrauta, the cult of one fire and the cult of three fires, the Ekāgni and Tretāgni, the simple domestic fire-rites still performed in the houses chiefly of the Brahmanas and the gorgeous sacrifices, chiefly conducted by Rajas in ancient India up to the age of the Armageddon on the plains of Kurukshetra, and now almost extinct. The Ārya rites, besides being characterized by the mediation of the Fire-God, also required the use of Sanskrit mantras, which were promulgated by the ancient seers called Rishis; the Dasyu rites had no use for fire or for Sanskrit mantras or for a privileged class of expert priests.
When did the Ārya rites rise? It is impossible to determine when the concept of fire as the mouth of the Gods was worked out or when the cult of one-fire began. But it is possible to find out when the three-fire cult commenced. The Vedas and the Purāṇas assert that Purūravas first lighted the triple fire in Pratishṭhāna (now Prayāga or Allahabad); and though many royal dynasties rose and fell during the Age of the Rishis, we learn from Pargiter's Studies of the Traditional History of Ancient India that more than a hundred kings of one dynasty in particular reigned from the time of Purūravas down to the middle of the first millennium before the Christian era. Disregarding the Paurāṇika claim of incredibily long reigns for some of the kings of this dynasty and allowing a modest average of twenty-five years to each of them, we reach the very probable conclusion that the three-fire cult and the promulgation by the Rishis of the associated Vedic mantras on a large scale began about 3000 b.c. Now from the Vedic mantras we learn that there was intimate commercial intercourse, though there were cult rivalries, between Southern and Northern India, from the beginning of the age of the Rishis. South Indian articles like pearl, mother of pearl, scented woods, elephants, gold, the pea-fowl, etc., were used in the land of the Āryas (Āryāvartta); a very careful study of these Vedic mantras also reveals that the languages of South and
