The Mauryan Polity c5.s3.t1.19

c5.s3.t1.19

made known the strength of the races which peopled the country. It is not, however, worth while to study their accounts with care, so conflicting are they, and incredible.” On this account these records are not to be discarded as entirely valueless and thus relegated to oblivion. They are useful as supplementing the knowledge which we gather from other sources of evidence, literary and otherwise. Some unintelligible details and facts presented meagrely in contemporary literature would be made intelligible if the writings could in any way help us. The classical writings are, therefore, useful in that they are supplementary. Such being the case any endeavour to find coincidences and differentiations with an accredited work of the period is bound to prove futile. Still we are compelled to do this¹ because scholars have attempted it rightly or wrongly and have drawn conclusions mostly of an untenable character.