ABSTRACT

In India the conception of Deity started from very much the same presuppositions as those which found expression in the divine kingship in the Ancient East but the subsequent course of religious development took a different direction. As in Greece, before the arrival of the Indo-European immigrants from the plateau of Central Asia between 2000 and 1500 b.c., with its highly developed pantheon of nature gods, in the third millennium a prehistoric culture was established in the Indus Valley in which the Mother-goddess and the sacred tree played a prominent part. These pre-Aryan people were of a mixed race with a predominant Mediterranean strain. Culturally they were allied to the Proto-Elamites and Sumerians, with whom they shared a common ancestry; and in the light of the latest excavations at Harapp, they appear to have adopted a “citadel-rule” administered by priest-kings as at Sumer and Akkad. 1 When they entered North-west India from Baluchistan they must have been in a relatively advanced state of civilization, comparable to that which obtained in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates and in the Aegean, with a well-planned and highly organized city life, protected by massive defences. 2