The Religions of India c8.35

c8.35

The seat of culture shifts in the Brahmanic period, which follows that of the Vedic poems, and is found partly in the ‘holy land’ of the west, and partly in the east (Behār, Tirhut).¹ The literature of this period comes from Aryans that have passed out of the Punjāb. Probably, as we have said, settlements were left all along the line of progress. Even before the wider knowledge of the post-Alexandrine imperial age (at which time there was a north-western military retrogression), and, from the Vedic point of view, as late as the end of the Brahmanic period, in the time of the Upanishads, the north-west seems still to have been familiarly known.²