The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c8.s3.166.1

c8.s3.166.1

great discrepancy between it and the Mâtsya and others. That there is very little agreement among them as regards the Andhrabhritya dynasty, I have already indicated above. The genesis of our Purânic literature seems to be this. Certain versified accounts of certain things, purporting to be narrated by a bard to Rishis 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 Purânas, 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 Purânas 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 Vishnu is later, and the Bhâgavata, the latest. The text of the old Purânas gradually became corrupt, and the authors of the later ones were in some cases misled by their incorrect readings into putting forth statements at variance with the original account. Now the four Purânas just mentioned contain general statements about the several dynasties, giving the number of princes belonging to each and its duration in years, and also mention the names of those princes more particularly; while the Vâyu and the Mâtsya give in addition the number of years for which each reigned.