Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/335

 and sculpture attained a high development at Mathurā under these rulers. When the invaders thus rapidly acquired the civilisation of the comparatively small portion of India they conquered, there is no reason to assume the suppression of literary activity in that part of the country, much less in India as a whole.

The main thesis of Professor Max Müller is, that in the middle of the sixth century A.D. the reign of a King Vikramāditya of Ujjain, with whom tradition connected the names of Kālidāsa and other distinguished authors, was the golden age of Indian court poetry. This renaissance theory is based on Fergusson's ingenious chronological hypothesis that a supposed King Vikrama of Ujjain, having expelled the Scythians from India, in commemoration of his victory founded the Vikrama era in 544 A.D., dating its commencement back 600 years to 57 B.C. The epigraphical researches Of Mr. Fleet have destroyed Fergusson's hypothesis. From these researches it results that the Vikrama era of 57 B.C., far from having been founded in 544 A.D., had already been in use for more than a century previously under the name of the Mālava era (which came to be called the Vikrama era about 800 A.D.). It further appears that no Çakas (Scythians) could have been driven out of Western India in the middle of the sixth century, because that country had already been conquered by the Guptas more than a hundred years before. Lastly, it turns out that, though other foreign conquerors, the Hūnas, were actually expelled from Western India in the first half of the sixth century, they were driven out, not by a Vikramāditya, but by a king named Yaçodharman Vishṇuvardhana.

Thus the great King Vikramāditya vanishes from