Things seemed to be going so well in the region, until around 2000 BCE, when a drought hit, causing much of the population to disperse. Then Aryans from the northwest moved in. These weren’t the blond-haired, blue-eyed soldiers of Nazi lore but black-haired barbarians from Iran. The Aryans took the Indus-Sarasvati culture and codified, condensed, and rewrote it in their native language of Sanskrit. It’s from these Sanskrit translations that we get the Vedas, religious and mystical texts that contain the earliest known documentation of the word “yoga.”
