Early India

As early as 2500BC , the Indus Valley was the centre of a flourishing indiginious culture with social and political sophistication and a pantheon of gods.Artefacts from Indus Valley sites has been found as far south as Bombay, but it was in the great citis of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, in what is now Pakistan, that the power and influence of this civilisation were best demonstrated.
When the Aryans invaded the subcontinent about 1000 years later, they found little resistance from what was by then a decaying culture. The Aryans overcome northern India not only by military superiorities, but also by their cultural and religious vigour, derived from their original homeland in central Asia. Sacrifice lay in their heart of their ritual and was based on a series of sacred texts called the Vedas: one of the Aryans' principle deities was Agni, Lord of the Sacrificial Fire and the Hearth. The chief Aryan gods, such as Varuna and Indra, were warrior deities whose splendor transformed what they saw as the chaotic darkness of the pre-Aryan demon realms, illuminating them with the light of Vedic righteousness and truth.
Chariots(represented symbolically by this 15th-century AD chariot-temple Hampi,Karnataka) carried invading Aryan warriors to astonishing military victories in the 2nd millennium BC. Their reign over northern India,however,was marked by cultural as well as military prowess; their greatest legacy is the Vedas,a prodigious body of verse,philosphy and hymns that is among the world's oldest written sacred scriptures.