5
the linguistic vehicle of Vedic culture. Hence two thousand years before Pūrūravas lighted the triple-fire at Pratishṭhāna is not at all an exaggerated estimate of the length of the Pre-Vedic Iron Age in ancient India.
In India the Stone Age quietly passed into the Iron Age. In other parts of the world, the Stone Age was followed by the Copper Age, in which people made their tools (and ornaments) of copper and they discovered methods of hardening copper and made copper knives with edges as sharp as steel ones, an art which is now forgotten. The Copper Age was soon followed by the Bronze Age, in which they learnt to make an alloy of copper and tin, which was very much harder than copper. But in South India as in China, no brief Copper Age or long Bronze Age intervened between the Neolithic Age and that of Iron. 'Professor Growland, f.r.s., the great metallurgist and the successful explorer, archæologically, of the Japanese Islands, has expressed the idea that the smelting of iron may have been hit upon by accident while experiments were being made. This lucky accident may well have happened in India, where the iron industry is one of great antiquity (far greater indeed than in Europe, e.g., at Hallstat or Le Tené) and iron ores occur so largely.'[1] An examination of several Neolithic sites proves that the passage from the Lithic to the Iron Age was not catastrophic but that the two ages overlapped everywhere. Stone tools continued to be used long after Iron tools were made, more especially on ceremonial occasions, for the stone tool being the older one, was sacrosanct and alone possessed ceremonial purity, and hence stone tools occur along with iron ones in the graves of the early Iron Age.
Mr. Vincent A. Smith, the historian of India, an expert numismatist and not primarily an investigator of pre-historic antiquities and one totally ignorant of South Indian life or history and of early South Indian artefacts, assumes without a shadow of proof that iron was 'utilized in Northern India from at least 1000 b.c.', and that 'in Southern India the discovery or introduction of iron may have occurred much later and quite independently.'[2] Here are two gratuitous assumptions. The Vedic culture which was developed in India at least before 3000 b.c., was an Iron Age culture. The iron (āyasī) castles, mythological or, actual, spoken of in the Vedic mantras and the distinct reference to śyāmamayas,[3] black metal, are enough to prove this. So far as South India is concerned, Foote, who has examined most South Indian pre-historic sites so far known, has concluded that the antiquity of the iron industry of India is far greater than in Europe; and every one who has opened graves of the later Stone Age and the earlier Iron Age and studied the pottery associated with stone and iron tools and has also carefully examined settlements of those ancient times can easily satisfy himself that iron was discovered and worked in South India many millenniums before the beginnings of the Christian era. Soon after iron was discovered, South Indians learned to isolate from their ores gold, silver and copper and make ornaments and utensils of these metals. They also arrived at the general idea of metal as a material for household utensils in addition to stone and
- ↑ Foote, Prehistoric Antiquities, p. 25.
- ↑ Oxford History of India, p. 4.
- ↑ Atharva Veda, xi. 3, 7.
