Early History of the Dekkan down to the Mahomedan Conquest c13.15

c13.15

But the date thus assigned to Gotamîputra is not consistent with that derived from the Mâtsya Purâna Our next endeavour, therefore, should be to ascertain whether none of the Purânas agrees sufficiently with the conclusion arrived at, and, if any does, to account for the [30] great discrepancy between it and the Mâtsya and others That there is very little agreement among them as regards the Andhrabhṛitya dynasty, I have already indicated above The genesis of our Puranic literature seems to be this Certain versified accounts of certain things, purporting to be narrated by a bard to Ṛishis assembled together at a sacrificial session, were handed down orally from generation to generation, and these were after some time committed to writing The later Purâṇas, devoted to the exaltation of a particular deity and to the inculcation of certain doctrines, derived their accounts of these things from the earliest written Purâṇas and not from the oral tradition Of the works of this class which I am going to compare for our present purpose, the oldest appears to me to be the Vâyu, and next to it the Mâtsya The Vishṇu is later, and the Bhâgavata, the latest The text of the old Purâṇas gradually became corrupt, and the authors of the later ones were in some cases misled by their incorrect readings enumeration, the Mâtsya omits two, and the Bhâgavata, one, and the total of the years assigned to each prince in the Vâyu exceeds 112 There is evidently some mistake here, but if we take the general statement to be the correct tradition handed down, the dynasty became extinct in B C 73 The dynasty next mentioned is that of the Kâṇvas or Kâṇvâyanas There were four princes of this line, and they reigned for forty-five years, though the Bhâgavata, through a mistake to be explained hereafter, makes the period to be 345 years They were