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INTRODUCTION.
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rank in the body politic; when they sought to perpetuate their social ascendancy by strictly defining the privileges and duties of the several classes, and assigning to them their respective places in the gradated scale of the Bråhmanical community. The period during which the main body of the Vedic hymns was composed, in the land of the seven rivers, seems to have been followed by a time of wars and conquests. From the literary products of the succeeding period we can see that the centre of the Aryan civilisation had in the meantime shifted from the region of the Sindhu (Indus) to that of the Yamuna (Jumna) and Ganga. As the conquered districts were no doubt mainly occupied by aboriginal tribes, which had either to retire before their Åryan conquerors, or else to submit to them as Sadras, or serfs, it seems not unnatural to suppose that it was from a sense of the danger with which the purity of the Brâhmanical faith was threatened from the idolatrous practices of the aboriginal subjects, that the necessity of raising an insurmountable barrier between the Aryan freeman and the man of the servile class first suggested itself to the Brâhmans. As religious interests would be largely involved in this kind of class legislation, it would naturally call into play the ingenuity of the priestly order; and would create among them that tendency towards regulating the mutual relations of all classes of the community which ultimately found its legal expression, towards the close of this period, in the Dharma-sätras, the prototypes of the Hindu codes of law.
The struggle for social ascendancy between the priesthood and the ruling military class must, in the nature of things, have been of long duration. In the chief literary documents of this period which have come down to us, viz. the Yagur-veda, the Brahmanas, and the hymns of the Atharva-veda some of which perhaps go back to the time of the later hymns of the Rik, we meet with numerous passages in which the ambitious claims of the Brâhmans are put forward with singular frankness. The powerful personal influence exercised by the Purohitas, as has already been indicated, seems to have largely contributed to the final success of the
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