Page:A Comprehensive History of India Vol 1.djvu/50

 16 TTTSTORY OF TXDIA. [Book I.

DC. — authentic information may he ohtaincd indirectly hy meariH ol" cautioiw and legi-

timate deduction. In ancient W(jrkH, not jjroperly hiHt^jrical, the state of wK'iety, and con.se(|uent degree of civilization at the period when they were written, are often exhihited, not lens accurately, and perhaps far more vividly, than if they had been composed for that special purpose; and hence, provided their date can be fixed with any degree of certainty, much informati<jn of an hist^jriwil nature may be easily and safely extracted from them. Of the writings which thas tend to elucidate the primitive history of India, the most valuable are the wjllectioas The vudaa. of aucicnt liymus and prayers, known by the name of Vedas, and the kind of commentary upon them contained in a compilation, which the translation of Sir William Jones has made familiar to English readers under the title of the Institutes of Menu. The Vedas, four in number, prove by diversities both of style and contents, that they are the productions of different periods, between which a considerable interval mvLst have elapsed. According to the Hindoos, they are a little more than 3000 years older than our era, but though this age is short compared with that which figures generally in their chronology, it is doubtless an exaggeration. Mr. Colebrooke, by a very ingenious and convincing process,' has cut off sixteen centuries from the Hindoo date. Founding on a calendar of antique form by which tlie Vedas regulate the times of devotional service, he was able to ascertain the exact position of the solstitial points in accordance with which the calendar was regtdated ; and assuming, as he well might, that the position was not hypothetical, he had only to compare it with the position at present, and calculate how many years must have elapsed in order to produce the difference. The annual precession of the equinoxes is an invariable quantity; and by counting backwards and deducting this quantity successively till the whole amount of difference is exhausted, the true date appears. In this way the completion of the Vedas has been fixed in the fifteenth centm-y before the Chris- institutes tian era. The Institutes of Menu, referring to the Vedas as productions venera-

of Menu.

ble even then for antiquity, must be much more recent. How much, is the im- portant question ; and unfortunately a question which does not admit of a very definite answer. The Institutes themselves give no dates, and any conclusion which can be founded on internal evidence is little better than conjecture. Still, however, though a large margin must be allowed' as a kind of debatable ground on which the sticklers for an earlier and a later period may carry on their wordy warfare, there is enough, both in the comparatively pure and primitive form of the religion inculcated, in the sanction of usages which are known to have become obsolete some centuries before the Cluistian era, and in the omission of religious sects and controversies which would certainly have been mentioned if they had then been in existence, to support the conclusion that the Institutes of Menu must have appeared not later than the fifth, and probably as early as the ninth century B.C. Either period would carry us back to a remote antiquity ;

' Asiatic Researches, vol. viii.