The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.s1.9

v1.c15.s1.9

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.