World Leaders Biography

The Aryans must have come to India five or six thousand years ago, or perhaps even more. Of course they did not all come in a bunch. Army after army, tribe after tribe, family after family, must have come for hundreds of years. Imagine them travelling in long caravans with all their household goods laden on carts or on the backs of animals. They did not come as tourists do nowadays. There was no going back for them. They came to stay, or fight and die. Most of them, as I have told you, came over the mountains of the north-west. But perhaps some came by sea also from the Persian Gulf and went in their little ships up the river Indus. What were these Aryans like? We can find out a lot about them from the books they wrote. Some of these books, like the Vedas, are perhaps the oldest books in the world. Probably they were not written down to begin with. They were learnt by heart and recited and chanted to others. They are written in such beautiful Sanskrit that you can almost sing them.

So far we have discussed very, very old times. We shall now see how man developed and what he did. All these old times are called pre- historic, that is before history, as we have no real history of that period. We have to guess a lot. We are now on the verge or edge of history. Let us see what happened in India first. We have already seen that in the very old times India, like Egypt, had a civilization. There was trade, and ships carried Indian goods to Egypt and Mesopotamia and other countries. In those days the people who lived in India were called Dravidians. They are the people whose descendants live in South India now, around Madras. The Dravidians were invaded by the Aryans from the north. There must have been enormous numbers of these Aryan peoples in Central Asia and not finding enough food there for all, they spread out to other countries. They went in large numbers to Persia and even to Greece further west. They also came to India in crowds over the mountains near Kashmir