The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c20.10.1

v1.c20.10.1

The cycle thus designated as a millennium is one of very varied political fortunes; and the social, political, and religious material of the legal and epical literature must necessarily be explained in accordance with the outward changes. What these changes were is described in detail in other chapters of this work. For our present purpose it is necessary only to recount them in outline. At the end of the sixth century B.C., early in the period to which the Sūtras belong, the Persian Empire held two provinces in N.W. India—Gandhāra, the present districts of Peshāwar and Rāwalpindi, and the ‘Indian’ province, that is to say, the country of the Lower Indus: and the northern part of India generally was dominated by peoples of the Āryan race who had descended from the Punjab and spread eastward for centuries, but not so that the recently acquired territory was thoroughly assimilated to the cults and culture of the invaders, nor so that any one of these invaders had established an empire. Long before the end of this same period, Buddha, Mahāvīra, and other reformers had broken with the cult derived from the Vedic age, and the great empire of Açoka had made a new epoch in political life. This alteration, however, had been introduced, though adventitiously, through outer rather than inner conditions.