process of embalmment, to prevent the decomposition of the corpse, and the subsequent ceremony of the 'Opening of the Mouth', designed to revivify the body's ability to take nourishment. 'The after-life was never etherealised in the Egyptian imagination, as it was in some quarters, but we do find that as soon as man could set down his thoughts in writing, the idea that man is more than flesh and blood is there.'33 In Mesopotamia the situation was different. They believed that the gods had withheld immortality from humans-that's what made them human-but man was still regarded as a psycho-physical organism. Unlike the Egyptians, however, they regarded the psychical part as a single entity. This was called the napistu , which, originally meaning 'throat', was extended to denote 'breath', 'life' and 'soul'. This napistu , however, was not thought of as the inner essential self, but the animating life principle and what became of the napistu at death isn't clear. Although they didn't believe in immortality, the ancient Mesopotamians did believe in a kind of post-mortem survival, a contradiction in terms in a way.34 Death, they believed, wrought a terrible change in a person-he was transformed into an etimmu . 'The etimmu needed to be nourished by mortuary offerings, and it had the power to torment the living, if it were neglected...among the most feared of Mesopotamia's demonology were the etimmus of those who had died unknown and received no proper burial rites. But, even when well provided for, the afterlife was grim. They dwelt in kurnu-gi-a , the land of no return, where dust is their food and clay their substance... where they see no light and dwell in darkness.'35 The origins of the Hindu religion are far more problematical than any of the other major faiths. After Sir William Jones, a British judge living and working in India in the late eighteenth century, first drew attention to the similarity of Sanskrit to various European languages, scholars have hypothesised the existence of an early proto-European language, from which all others evolved, and a proto-Indo-Aryan people, who spoke the 'proto-language' and helped in its dispersal. In its neatest form, this theory proposes that these people were the first to domesticate the horse, an advantage which helped their mobility and gave them a power over others. Because of their link to the horse, the proto-Indo-Aryans are variously said to have come from the steppe land between the Black Sea and the Caspian, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea, or from other locations in central Asia. The most recent research locates the homeland in the Abashevo culture on the lower Volga and in the Sintashta-Arkaim culture in the southern Urals. From there, according to Asko Parpola, a Finnish professor of Indology, 'the domesticated horse and the Indo-Aryan language seem to have entered south Asia in the Gandhara grave culture of north Pakistan around 1600 BC'. The most important aspect of their migration is held to have been in north-west India, around the Indus valley, where the great early civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro suffered a mysterious decline in the second millennium BC, for which the Indo-Aryans are held responsible. It is the Indo-Aryans who are held to have composed the Rig Veda . Their place of origin, and their migration, are said to be reflected in the fact that the Finno-Ugaric language shows a number of words borrowed from what became Sanskrit, that the Andronovo tribes of the steppes show a culture similar to that described in the Rig Veda , and that they left a trail of names, chiefly of rivers (words which are known to be very stable), as they moved across central Asia. They also introduced the chariot (and therefore the horse) into India, and iron-again, items mentioned in the Rig Veda .36 Finally, the general setting of the Rig Veda is pastoral, not urban, meaning it was written down before the Indo-Aryans arrived in the mainly urban world of the Indus valley. This view has been severely criticised in recent years, not least by Indian scholars, who argue that this 'migrationist' theory is 'racist', developed by Western academics who couldn't believe that India generated the Rig Veda all by herself. They argue that there is no real evidence to suggest that the Indo-Aryans came from outside and they point out that the heartland of the Rig Veda more or less corresponds to the present-day Punjab. Traditionally, this presented a problem because that name, Punjab, based on the Sanskrit, panca-ap , means 'five rivers', whereas the Rig Veda refers to an area of 'seven rivers' with the Sarasvati as the most majestic.37 For many years no one could identify the Sarasvati among today's rivers, and it was therefore regarded by some as a 'celestial' entity. However, in 1989, archaeologists