Iron and the RV

[Steve Farmer]

Lance Cousins writes:

> 2. Iron is being mentioned a lot in regard to dating the earliest
> Vedic texts. I wonder how much can be predicated on this basis. After
> all the .Rgveda is not that large a text; so an argument from silence
> is not entirely convincing.

But the Rgveda is *massive* when compared with similar Eurasian
documents redacted before the mid first millennium BCE, including
the Iliad and Odyssey. Nothing even 1/10th its length is found in
China in this period, and China was fairly literate in court
circles, at least going back to the 12th century or so. Since it
deals with weaponry, which is where iron made its first major
cultural impact, moreover, it would be natural to look for
evidence of the metal in early Vedic sources -- and especially in
the RV. Cf. with the Homeric corpus, which speaks more of bronze
than of iron weapons, with iron slipping in the backdoor only in
later strata, apparently introduced towards the end of the first
half of the first millennium. (NB: The fact that later strata of
the Homeric corpus has iron and the RV doesn't does not
*necessarily* make the RV older, since the evidence suggests that
iron technology had a much earlier impact in the eastern
Mediterranean, where the Homeric corpus originated, than in South
Asia.)

> For the sake of argument let us suppose
> that it is actually the case that Tennyson does not mention steam
> engines. (They are certainly not frequent in his verse !) That is of
> course not an argument for redating Tennyson or steam engines. It
> simply tells us about the ideas which Victorians (and many other
> peoples) had as to what is appropriate in poetry. So, if the
> .Rg-vedic texts were composed at a time when iron was known but not
> yet used widely, the absence of mention of it may be due to chance.
> If they were produced at a time when iron was in wide use, then the
> absence can still be accounted for by cultural and literary
> preferences.

I don't think that the analogy really holds, Lance, given the
fact that weapons are frequently mentioned in the RV. We also
have to recall that much of Tennyson's poetry was intentionally
archaicized (think of his King Arthur sagas!) in *reaction* to
the new technologies, which Tennyson and his fellow romantics despised.

> 3. it is important to note that iron probably did not have
> significant advantages over bronze initially. By this I mean that an
> immature iron-working technology might not have had significant
> advantages over a mature bronze-working technology i.e. it was
> probably not sharper, stronger or longer-lasting. It might have been
> cheaper, but that would not have been a major consideration for kings
> who would certainly want the best available for their personal
> weapons. We should probably view iron as the cheepo plastic of the
> late 'Bronze age'. Now of course plastics are increasingly replacing
> metals, but at first they were very much a cheaper and inferior
> product.

Lance makes a critical point, strongly emphasized by Jane
Waldbaum, that is brought out repeatedly in the new volume on
metal use in Eurasia edited by Vincent C. Pigott, _The
Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World_ (University of
Pennsylvania, 1999). This is the volume that contains the
important review by Possehl and Gullapalli that Michael W.
alluded to in his last post. Their review pushes the dates of the
first iron artifacts in most regions of South Asia to around c.
900, with a *slow* expansion down to c. 300 BCE. In his
introduction to the volume as a whole (see esp. p. 7), Piggott
himself puts the dates in South Asia at ca. 700 - 500 BCE --
which is a huge shift from older views that were used to help
date the RV.

I agree with Lance that you can't *prove* a lot from this, but it
does change things appreciably. The old argument had it that the
introduction of iron in South Asia ca. 1200 or even 1300 BCE
(supposedly rapidly bringing on an "Iron Age") meant that the
whole of the RV, which doesn't mention iron, *must* date before
that period. Now it appears that iron came at a much later date
to South Asia -- with important regional differences complicating
things further -- and only slowly replaced bronze, over which it
did not initially offer any technological advantages. This
implies that the RV *may* have continued to undergo significant
changes before the text was "fixed" in the time of the Padapatha
and "Sakalya," whenever that was (late 6th century? -- about the
time of the Persian conquests in the NW?). It doesn't *prove* the
case for later dates of the RV, but it certainly makes the case
far more likely. And that seems right to me from the standpoint
of comparative history, since it brings internal developments in
religious concepts that show up in later strata of the RV
(emerging, I'd argue, from exegetical "reworkings" of earlier
strata -- but that's another issue) much more in accord with
dates for similar developments in stratified traditions elsewhere
in Eurasia. I have a hard time believing that on this level, at
least, India was as unique as a lot of people would like it to
be. (That, of course, is the comparativist in me speaking!)

Steve Farmer