The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.s1: B. Sources of History
The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.s1
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B. Sources of History
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The caste-system is the outcome of a long process of social differentiation to which the initial impulse was given by the introduction of a higher civilisation into regions occupied by peoples in a lower stage of culture. The Āryan settlers, as represented by the sacrificial hymns of the Rigveda, were both intellectually and materially advanced. Their language, their religion, and their social institutions were of the Indo-European type like those of the ancient Persians of the Avesta and the Greeks of the Homeric poems; and they were skilled in the arts and in the working of metals.
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The prehistoric archaeology of India has not attracted the attention which it deserves, and many interesting problems connected with the earlier cultures and their relation to the culture of the Rigveda remain to be solved; but there is a general agreement as to the succession of cultural strata in Northern and Southern India. The discoveries of ancient implements seem to prove that in the North the Stone Age is separated from the Iron Age by a Copper Age; while in the South no such transitional stage has been observed—implements of stone are followed without a break by implements of iron. Bronze, it appears, is not found anywhere in India before the Iron Age. If these facts may be held to be established, we must conclude that the chief metal of the Rigveda, *ayas* (Latin *aes*), was copper; and the absence of a Copper Age in Southern India would seem to indicate that the earlier inhabitants generally were still in the Stone Age at the time when the Āryans brought with them the use of copper. Iron was probably not known in the age of the Rigveda; but it undoubtedly occurs in the period immediately following when it is known to the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda as *çyāma ayas* or 'black copper.' Its use was introduced by Indo-Āryan colonisation into Southern India where the Stone Age of culture still prevailed.
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Described in its simplest terms, the earliest history of India is the story of the struggle between two widely different types of civilisation, an unequal contest between metal and stone. All the records for many centuries belong to the higher type. They are exclusively Indo-Āryan. They have been preserved in literary languages developed from the predominant spoken languages under the influence of the different phases of religion which mark stages in the advance of Indo-Āryan culture from the North-West. The language of the Rigveda, the oldest form of Vedic Sanskrit, belongs to the country of the Seven Rivers. The language of the Brāhmaṇas and of the later Vedic literature in the country of the Upper Jumna and Ganges (Brahmarshideça) is transitional. It shades almost imperceptibly into Classical Sanskrit, which is the literary representation of the accepted form of educated speech of the time and region. As fixed by the rules of the grammarians it became the standard language of Brāhman culture in every part of India; and it is still the ordinary medium of communication between learned men, as was Latin in the Middle Ages of Europe.
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In the sixth century b.c., after Indo-Āryan influence had penetrated eastwards beyond the limits of ‘the Middle Country,’ there arose in Oudh (Kosala) and Bihār (Videha and Magadha) a number of religious reactions against the sacerdotalism and the social exclusiveness of Brāhmanism. The two most important of these, Jainism and Buddhism, survived; and, as they extended from the region of their origin, they everywhere gave an impulse to the formation of literary languages from the Prākrits or spoken dialects. The scriptures of the Jains have been preserved in various forms of Māgadhī, the dialect of Bihār, Çaurasenī, the dialect of Muttra, and Māhārāshṭrī, the dialect of the Marāthā country. The Buddhist canon exists in two chief forms—in Pāli, the literary form of an Indo-Āryan Prākrit, in Ceylon; and in Sanskrit in Nepāl. Pāli Buddhism has spread to Burma and Siam. The Sanskrit version of the canon has, in various translations, prevailed in Tibet, China, Japan, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestān, and other countries of the Far East.
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In all the large and varied literatures of the Brāhmans, Jains, and Buddhists there is not to be found a single work which can be compared to the *Histories* in which Herodotus recounts the struggle between the Greeks and Persians, or to the *Annals* in which Livy traces the growth and progress of the Roman power. But this is not because the peoples of India had no history. We know from other sources that the ages were filled with stirring events; but these events found no systematic record. Of the great foreign invasions of Darius, Alexander the Great, and Seleucus no mention is to be discovered in any Indian work. The struggles between native princes, the rise and fall of empires, have indeed not passed similarly into utter oblivion. Their memory is to some extent preserved in epic poems, in stories of the sages and heroes of old, in genealogies and dynastic lists. Such in all countries are the beginnings of history; and in ancient India its development was not carried beyond this rudimentary stage. The explanation of this arrested progress must be sought in a state of society which, as in medieval Europe, tended to restrict intellectual activity to the religious orders. Literatures controlled by Brāhmans, or by Jain and Buddhist monks, must naturally represent systems of faith rather than nationalities. They must deal with thought rather than with action, with ideas rather than with events. And in fact, as sources for the history of religion and philosophy, and for the growth of law and social institutions, and for the development of those sciences which, like grammar, depend on the minute and careful observation of facts, they stand among the literatures of the ancient world unequalled in their fulness and their continuity. But as records of political progress they are deficient. By their aid alone it would be impossible to sketch the outline of the political history of any of the nations of India before the Muhammadan conquest. Fortunately two other sources of information—foreign accounts of India and the monuments of India (especially the inscriptions and coins)—supply to some extent this deficiency of the literatures, and furnish a chronological framework for the history of certain periods.
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The foreign authorities naturally belong to those periods in which India was brought most closely into contact with the civilisations of Western Asia and China. The general fact that such intercourse by land and sea existed in very early times is undoubted, but detailed authentic records of political relations are not found before the rise of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C., when Greek writers and the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius enable us to trace the extension of the Persian power from Bactria, the country of the Oxus, to N.W. India. From these sources it is clear that the Persian dominions included Gandhāra (the Districts of Peshāwar and Rāwal Pindi) and the Province of ‘India’ (the Western Punjab together with Sind which still retains its ancient name); and it is probable that these countries remained tributary to the King of Kings until the Persian Empire gave place to the Macedonian.
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Then come the Greek and Roman historians of Alexander the Great, whose detailed accounts of the Indian campaign (327–325 B.C.) throw a flood of light on the political conditions of N.W. India, and carry our geographical knowledge eastwards beyond the Jhelum (Hydaspes), the eastern limit of Gandhāra, to the Beās (Hyphasis). This marks the extent of Alexander’s conquests. Far from securing the dominant position of Northern India, the country of the upper Jumna and Ganges, these conquests failed even to reach the country of the Sarasvatī, the centre of Indo-Aryan civilisation in the age of the Rigveda. Alexander was the conqueror of ‘India’ only in the sense that for a very few years he was master of ‘the country of the Indus.’ The confusion of this geographical term with its later meaning has been the cause of endless misconception all through the Middle Ages even down to the present day.
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The documents of the Persian and Macedonian Empires are succeeded by those of the later Hellenic kingdoms of Syria, Bactria, and Parthia. All these are invaluable as supplying a very remarkable deficiency in the Indian records. They deal with a region which is barely noticed, and with events which are completely ignored, in the Brāhman, Jain, and Buddhist books of the period. These two sources of history are thus independent of each other. The Greek view is mainly confined to the North-West, while the contemporary Indian literatures belong almost exclusively to the Plain of the Ganges.
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After the death of Alexander other Western writers appear who regard India from the point of view of the Maurya Empire with its capital at Pāṭaliputra, the modern Patna. The generation which saw Alexander had not passed away before the kingdom of Magadha (S. Bihār) had brought all the peoples of Northern India under its sway, and established a great power which maintained relations with Alexander’s successors in Western Asia, Egypt, and Europe. And now for the first time the two kinds of historical evidence, the Indian and the foreign, come into direct relations with each other. They refer to the same regions and to the same circumstances; and the light of Greek history is thrown on the obscurity of Indian literature. It was the identification of the Sandrocottus of Greek writers with the Maurya Emperor Chandragupta that established the first fixed point in the chronology of ancient India. Our object in the first two volumes of this History will be to show how far the progress of research starting from this fixed point has succeeded hitherto in recovering the forgotten history of India from the records of the past.
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Unimpeded intercourse with the countries of the West was possible only so long as Northern India remained united under the Maurya dynasty, and Western Asia under the Seleucid successors of Alexander. The process of disintegration began in Western Asia with the defection of Bactria and Parthia about the middle of the third century, and in India probably some thirty years later when the downfall of imperial rule was followed by a period of anarchy and internal strife. These conditions made possible the series of foreign invasions from c. 200 B.C. onwards, which disturbed the North-West during many centuries and severed that region from the ancient civilisation of the Plain of the Ganges. The political isolation of India was completed by the Scythian conquest of Bactria, c. 135 B.C., and by the long struggle between Rome and Parthia which began in 53 B.C. After the Maurya Empire, intercourse tended more and more to be restricted to commerce by land and sea; and for the West, India became more and more the land of mystery and fabulous wealth. Down to the last quarter of the eighteenth century nearly all that was known of its ancient history was derived from the early Greek and Latin writers.
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Of all the factors which contributed to the severance of relations with the West, the extinction of Hellenic civilisation in Bactria was by far the most important. But while the fate of Bactria closed the western outlook, it prepared the way for communication with the Far East; and it is to Chinese authorities that we must turn for the most trustworthy information concerning the events which determined the history of N.W. India during the following centuries. The Scythian (Çaka) invaders of Bactria were succeeded by the Yueh-chi; and when, in the first century A.D., the predominant tribe of the Yueh-chi, the Kushāṇas, extended their dominion in Turkestān and Bactria to N.W. India, the Kushāṇa empire formed a connecting link between China and India and provided the means of an intercourse which was fruitful in results. Buddhism was introduced into China and the other countries of the Far East; and, as the explorations of recent years have shown, an Indian culture, Indian languages, and the Indian alphabets were established in Chinese Turkestān. The most illuminating accounts of India from the end of the fourth to the end of the seventh century are the records of Chinese Buddhists who made the long and toilsome pilgrimage to the scenes of their Master’s life and labours.
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The remaining source of historical information—the inscribed monuments and coins—is the most productive of all. The inscriptions are public or private records engraved in most cases on stone or on copper plates; and they are found in great numbers throughout the sub-continent and in Ceylon. The earliest are the edicts of Açoka incised on rocks or pillars situated on the frontiers and at important centres of the Maurya empire when at the height of its power in the middle of the third century b.c. Others commemorate the deposit of Buddhist relics. Others celebrate the victories of princes, the extent of their conquests, the glories of the founder of the dynasty and of his successors on the throne. Others again place on record the endowments of temples or grants of land. In short, there is scarcely any conceivable topic of public or private interest which is not represented. The inscriptions supply most valuable evidence as to the political, social, and economic conditions of the period and the country to which they belong. They testify on the one hand to the restless activity of a military caste, and on the other to the stability of institutions, which were, as a rule, unaffected by military conquest. One conqueror follows another, but the administration of each individual state remains unchanged either under the same prince or under some other member of his family, and the charters of monasteries are renewed as a matter of course by each new overlord.
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Coins also have preserved the names and titles of kings who have left no other record; and by their aid it is sometimes possible to reconstruct the dynastic lists and to determine the chronology and the geographical extent of ruling powers. But it is only when coin-legends appear as the result of Greek influence in the North-West that this source of history becomes available. The earlier indigenous coinage was little more than a system of weights of silver or copper stamped with the marks of the monetary authorities. The first Indian king whose name occurs on a coin is Sophytes (Saubhūti), a contemporary of Alexander the Great. The legend of his coins is in Greek. After his date no inscribed coins are found for more than a hundred years. During this interval Greek rule in N.W. India had ceased. It was resumed about the beginning of the second century by Alexander's Bactrian successors, who issued in their Indian dominions a bilingual coinage with Greek legends on the *obverse* and a translation of these in an Indian dialect and an Indian alphabet on the *reverse*.
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The fashion of a bilingual coinage thus instituted was continued by the Scythian and Parthian invaders from Irān in the early part of the first century b.c.; and these bilingual coins have supplied the clue to the interpretation of the ancient alphabets, and have enabled scholars during the last three generations to bring to light the long-hidden secrets of the inscriptions and to retrace the outlines of forgotten history.
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Both of the alphabets, now usually known as Brāhmī and Kharoshṭhī, are of Semitic origin; that is to say, they are derived ultimately from the same source as the European alphabets. They were introduced into India at different periods, and probably by different routes. Brāhmī is found throughout the sub-continent and in Ceylon. The home of Kharoshṭhī is in the North-West; and whenever it is found elsewhere it has been imported.
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Brāhmī has been traced back to the Phoenician type of writing represented by the inscription in which Mesha, king of Moab (c. 850, B.C.), records his successful revolt against the kingdom of Israel. It was probably brought into India through Mesopotamia, as a result of the early commerce by sea between Babylon and the ports of Western India. It is the parent of all the modern Indian alphabets.
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Kharoshṭhī is derived from the Aramaic script, which was introduced into India in the sixth century B.C., when the North-West was under Persian rule, and when Aramaic was used as a common means of communication for the purposes of government throughout the Persian empire. That originally the Aramaic language and alphabet pure and simple were thus imported into Gandhāra, as Bühler conjectured in 1895 (*W.Z.K.M.*, IX, p. 49), has been proved recently by Sir John Marshall's discovery of an Aramaic inscription at Taxila¹. When the first Kharoshṭhī inscriptions appear in the third century B.C., the alphabet has been adapted to express the additional sounds required by an Indian language; but, unlike Brāhmī which has been more highly elaborated, it still bears evident traces of its Semitic origin both in its direction from right to left and in its imperfect representation of the vowels. In the third century A.D. Kharoshṭhī appears more fully developed in Chinese Turkestān where its existence must be attributed to the Kushāṇa empire. In this region, as in India, it was eventually superseded by Brāhmī.
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¹ A. Cowley, *J.R.A.S.*, 1915, p. 346.
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The decipherment of the inscriptions and coins, and the determination of the eras in which many of them are dated, have introduced into the obscurity of early Indian history a degree of chronological order which could not have been conceived at the time when the study of Sanskrit began in Europe. The bare fact that India possessed ancient classical literatures like those of Greece and Rome can scarcely be said to have been known to the Western World before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. At various intervals during more than a hundred years previously a few isolated students chiefly missionaries, those pioneers of learning, had indeed published accounts of Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit grammar; but it was only when a practical need made itself felt, and the serious attention of the administrators of the East India Company's possessions was directed to the importance of studying Sanskrit, that the investigation by Europeans of the ancient languages and literatures of India began in earnest. To meet the requirements of the law-courts the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, had ordered a digest to be prepared by pandits from the authoritative Sanskrit law-books; but when the work was finished no one could be found able to translate it into English. It was therefore necessary to have it translated first into Persian, and from the Persian an English version was made and published by Halhed in 1776. The object-lesson was not lost. Sanskrit was evidently of practical utility; and the East India Company adopted, and never afterwards neglected to pursue, the enlightened policy of promoting the study of the ancient languages and literatures in which the traditions of its subjects were enshrined. It remained for Sir William Jones, Judge of the High Court at Calcutta, to place this study on a firm basis by the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784.
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The inauguration of the study of India's past history came at a fortunate moment; for it is precisely to the last quarter of the eighteenth century that we may trace the growth of the modern scientific spirit of investigation, which may be defined as the recognition of the fact that no object and no idea stands alone by itself as an isolated phenomenon. All objects and all ideas form links in a series; and therefore it follows that nowhere, whether in the realm of nature or in the sphere of human activity, can the present be understood without reference to the past. The first manifestation of this new spirit of enquiry, which was soon to transform all learning, was seen in the study of language. The first Western students of the ancient languages of India were statesmen and scholars who had been educated in the classical literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. They were impressed by the fact, which must indeed be apparent to everyone who opens a Sanskrit grammar, that Sanskrit, both in its vocabulary and in its inflexions, presents a striking similarity to Greek and Latin. This observation immediately raised the question: How is this similarity to be explained? The true answer was suggested by Sir William Jones, whom that sagacious observer, Dr Johnson, recognised as 'one of the most enlightened of the sons of men'¹. In 1786, Sir William Jones wrote:
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¹ G. Birbeck Hill, *Johnsonian Miscellanies*, II, p. 363.
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The *Sanscrit* language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either: yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from *some common source*, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the *Gothick* and the *Celtick*, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the *Sanscrit*; and the old *Persian* might be added to the same family.
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These observations contain the germs of the science of Comparative Philology. The conception of a family of languages, in which all the individual languages and dialects are related as descendants from a common ancestor, suggested the application to language of the historical and comparative method of investigation. The results have been as remarkable as they were unexpected. In the first place, the historical method has shown that living languages grow and change in accordance with certain definite laws, while the comparative study of the lines of development which may be traced historically in the different Indo-European languages has confirmed Sir William Jones's hypothesis that they are all derived 'from some common source,' which, though it no longer exists, may be restored hypothetically. In the second place, since words preserve the record both of material objects and of ideas, a study of vocabularies enables us to gain some knowledge of the state of civilisation, the social institutions, and the religious beliefs of the speakers of the different languages before the period of literary records. Some indication of the light which Comparative Philology thus throws on the history of the Āryan invaders of India is given in the following Chapter.