The Early History of India - from 600 B.C. to the Islamic Conquest
Vincent Smith
eBook
(Didactic Press, June 19, 2014)
The political history of India begins for an orthodox Hindu more than three thousand years before the Christian era with the famous war waged on the banks of the Jumna, between the sons of Kuru and the sons of PÄndu, as related in the vast epic known as the MahÄbhÄrata. But the modern critic fails to find sober history in bardic tales, and is constrained to travel down the stream of time much farther before he comes to an anchorage of solid fact. In order to be available for the purpose of history, events must be susceptible of arrangement in definite chronological order, and capable of being dated approximately, if not exactly. Facts to which dates cannot be assigned, although they may be invaluable for the purposes of ethnology, philology, and other sciences, are of no use to the historian. Modern research has brought to light innumerable facts of the highest scientific value concerning prehistoric India, but the impossibility of assigning dates to the phenomena discovered excludes them from the domain of the historian, whose vision cannot pass the line which separates the dated from the undated...