Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v2.c30.13

v2.c30.13

Since Mr. M. wrote, the revelation of the architectural antiquities in these isles, consequent to British conquests, establishes the fact that they were colonized by the Suryas, whose mythological and heroic history is sculptured in their edifices and maintained in their writings. Nor should we despair that similar discoveries may yet disclose the link which of yore connected India with Egypt, and to which Ceylon was but the first stepping-stone. That Rama possessed great naval means is beyond doubt, inherited from his ancestor Sagara ‘the sea-king,’ twenty generations before the hero of Lanka, which place I have long imagined to be Ethiopia; whence ancient writers assert Egypt to have had her institutions, and that the Ethiopians were of Indian origin. Cuvier, quoting Syncellus, even assigns the reign with all the knowledge now in our possession, to suppose that the Hindus always confined themselves within their gigantic barriers, the limits of modern India. The cosmography of the Puranas, imperfect and puerile as it is, and some of the texts of Manu, afford abundant evidence of an intimate intercourse between the countries from the Oxus to the Ganges; and even in their allegories, we trace fresh streams of knowledge flowing into India from that central region, stigmatized in latter days as the land of the Barbarian (Mlechchha). Manu corroborates the Puranas, from which we infer the fact that in distant ages one uniform faith extended from Sakadvipa, the continent of the Sakae, to the Ganges.¹ These observations [219] it is necessary to premise before we attempt, by following the tide of Yadu migration during the lapse of thirty centuries, to trace them from Indra-