DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.635#0015
2 BENARES, THE SACRED CITY
Of the antiquity of Benares there can hardly be
any question. From its peculiar situation on the banks
of a splendid river, with its eastern boundary con-
verted by the current into a magnificent natural
amphitheatre, facing the rising sun, it is not un-
reasonable to conjecture that even before the Aryan
tribes established themselves in the Ganges valley,
Benares may have been a great centre of primitive
sun-worship, and that the special sanctity with which
the Brahmins have invested the city is only a tradition
•of those primeval days, borrowed, with so many of
their rites and symbols, from their Turanian pre-
decessors.
The first definite historical event known about
Benares is that the Kasis, one of the Aryan tribes
which were then occupying northern India, established
themselves in the Ganges valley, near Benares, at
a date supposed to be between 1400 and 1000 B.C.
The origin of the Aryans is still a much-debated
question, but the researches of ethnologists have com-
pletely disturbed the theory of philologists, which
placed the home of the Aryan people in Central
Asia, and point to more northern and western
latitudes as the cradle of the race. Certainly the
Aryans brought with them into India all the habits
and ideas of northern people—they were fair-skinned,
ate horse-flesh and beef, and drank fermented liquor—
the soma juice, which they held to be the amrita, or
nectar of the gods. Like the ancient Britons they
were polyandrous. Their religion, at first, was a
simple adoration of the beneficent powers of Nature,
with little of the mysticism and dread, born of a
•tropical environment. They worshipped the sky,
Of the antiquity of Benares there can hardly be
any question. From its peculiar situation on the banks
of a splendid river, with its eastern boundary con-
verted by the current into a magnificent natural
amphitheatre, facing the rising sun, it is not un-
reasonable to conjecture that even before the Aryan
tribes established themselves in the Ganges valley,
Benares may have been a great centre of primitive
sun-worship, and that the special sanctity with which
the Brahmins have invested the city is only a tradition
•of those primeval days, borrowed, with so many of
their rites and symbols, from their Turanian pre-
decessors.
The first definite historical event known about
Benares is that the Kasis, one of the Aryan tribes
which were then occupying northern India, established
themselves in the Ganges valley, near Benares, at
a date supposed to be between 1400 and 1000 B.C.
The origin of the Aryans is still a much-debated
question, but the researches of ethnologists have com-
pletely disturbed the theory of philologists, which
placed the home of the Aryan people in Central
Asia, and point to more northern and western
latitudes as the cradle of the race. Certainly the
Aryans brought with them into India all the habits
and ideas of northern people—they were fair-skinned,
ate horse-flesh and beef, and drank fermented liquor—
the soma juice, which they held to be the amrita, or
nectar of the gods. Like the ancient Britons they
were polyandrous. Their religion, at first, was a
simple adoration of the beneficent powers of Nature,
with little of the mysticism and dread, born of a
•tropical environment. They worshipped the sky,