Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8.4

c8.4

But in India, though writing was known and employed in the third and second millennia B.C., the peculiar script is still undeciphered, and the civilization which produced it is as prehistoric as Minoan Crete, also formally literate but with an unread script. This Indian script may have been used up to about 1500 B.C., but after this there is a complete gap in any known written documents on stone or clay or metal until we come to the inscriptions of Asoka set up about the middle of the third century B.C. For contemporary records of the intervening periods we have to depend on occasional contact with the Western world, where recorded history was an established discipline, or on the information to be extracted from the legendary or liturgical literature of India, orally transmitted for centuries.