The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.s1.5

v1.c15.s1.5

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.