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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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