    47

    wo

    ven together that the Aryan word gavisti had two meanings.  The

    first: "to search for cows;" the second: "to fight."  On the Indian side of

    the mountains, these violence-prone Iranian cattle herders found a

    people far more sophisticated than they were.  The Iranian intruders

    could neither read nor write.  The people native to India, however,

    excelled at both.  The Iranians had never seen a building more complex

    than a temporary hut.  The Indians had lived for over a thousand years

    in elaborate cities.  But apparently the Iranians had something that the

    Indian inhabitants lacked: an eagerness to fight.  During the next few

    hundred years, the Iranians attacked the indigenous Indian population

    relentlessly, and brutally beat the unfortunate locals into submission.

    It was a pecking order triumph par excellence.  The Iranian invaders

    reduced the Indians to the shameful role of a conquered people and

    declared themselves the lords of the land.96

    But where, pray tell, does the lofty and otherworldly religion fit

    into all of this?  Hinduism was the picture of the invisible world crafted

    over the following centuries by the priests of the Iranians.  At

    Hinduism's heart was a simple notion.  There were several classes of

    human beings, as distinct from each other as worms are distinct from

    lions.  First there were the "twice born"--men favored by the gods with

    all their holy  blessings.  Then there were the shudras and the out-castes,

    loathsome people so beneath the contempt of the heavenly deities that

    the gods refused to accept their prayers.

    The deities had ordained it thus.  They had declared in their

    infinite power that the twice-born were to ride forever on the shoulders

    of the dirtier and humbler classes of men.  For the twice-born were

    close to divinity.  The lower castes were not.  And who were these

    exalted twice-born mortals?  The Iranians.

    This pious self-aggrandizement of a conquering barbarian tribe

    led to the famous Indian caste system.  The top three castes were

    exclusively reserved for the "twice-born" Iranians.  One of these

    privileged orders (Kshatriyas) contained the Iranian warriors and

    aristocrats.  The second (Brahmans) included the Iranian priests (those

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