Dasyu

Dasa or das is a Sanskrit language word found in ancient Hindu texts such as the Rigveda and Arthashastra. It usually means either "enemy" or "servant".

A third usage, related to the second, is "servant of God", "devotee," "votary" or "one who has surrendered to God"; dasa may be a suffix of a given name to indicate a "servant" of a revered person or deity.

In some contexts, dasa is interchangeable with the Sanskrit words dasyu and asura, both of which have been translated into other languages as words equivalent to "demon", "harmful supernatural force", "slave", "servant" or "barbarian", depending on the context in which the word is used.

Dāsa (Sanskrit: दास) first appears in Vedic texts from the 2nd millennium BCE. There is no consensus on its origins.

Karl Heinrich Tzschucke in 1806, in his translations of the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, noted etymological and phonological parallels between dasa and the ethonyms of the Dahae – Persian داها; Sanskrit Dasa; Latin Dahae; Greek Δάοι Daoi, Δάαι, Δᾶαι Daai and Δάσαι Dasai – a people who lived on the south-eastern shores of the Caspian Sea in ancient times (and from whom modern Dehestan/Dehistan takes its name). Likewise Max Muller proposed that dasa referred to indigenous peoples living in South Asia before the arrival of the Aryans. However, such theories have long been controversial and are considered by many scholars as inconsistent with the broader usage of dasa in the Vedas.

Monier Monier-Williams in 1899, stated that the meaning of dasa varies contextually and means "mysterious forces", "savages", "barbarians" or "demons" in the earliest layer of Vedic literature – in other contexts, is a self-effacing way to refer oneself as "worshipper" or "devotee aiming to honor a deity", or a "servant of god". In later Indian literature, according to Monier-Williams, usage of dasa is used to refer to "a knowing man, or a knower of the universal spirit". In the latter sense, dāsa is masculine, while the feminine equivalent is dāsi. Some early 20th Century translations, such as P. T. Srinivas Iyengar (1912), translate dasa as "slave".

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