History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.13

v1.c8.13

One of the greatest difficulties that exist—perhaps the greatest—in exciting an interest in Indian antiquities arises from the fact, that India has no history properly so called, before the Muhammadan invasion in the 13th century. Had India been a great united kingdom, like China, with a long line of dynasties and well-recorded dates attached to them, the task would have been comparatively easy; but nothing of the sort ever existed within her boundaries. On the contrary, so far as our knowledge extends, India has always been occupied by three or four different races of mankind, who have never amalgamated so as to become one people, and each of these races has been again subdivided into numerous tribes or small nationalities nearly, sometimes wholly, independent of each other—and, what is worse than all, not one of them ever kept a chronicle or preserved a series of dates commencing from any well-known era.¹