Page:Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit, being the Hitopadesa.djvu/9



the family of languages to which English belongs, the Indo-European Family, Sanskrit is eldest brother. The parent language was spoken in a remote prehistoric time by a people living somewhere about the five rivers of the Punjaub. By migrations of that people westward there were afterwards established all the nations of the Iranian, Slavonic, Celtic, Teutonic and Classical stocks. The parent language, Aryan, has itself long since been lost; but its words, subjected to regular varieties of change, have passed into many lands. Additions have been many, but those words of which the roots are common to us all, bear witness to the common origin of the chief nations of Europe, and to their brotherhood with races now in India.

Descendants of that remote prehistoric Aryan people, who remained in India and were less remote, but also prehistoric, spoke Sanskrit. They left in their own tongue sacred books by which Sanskrit was established as a classical language. It was cultivated by the religious orders and used as the language in which all high religious teaching was enshrined. Thus its grammar was studied and preserved, and the language itself, first born of the old Aryan, has been maintained in its purity until this day. As the vernacular speech of a living people, applied to all their common daily wants, Sanskrit has not been used within the memory of man, but in some parts of India the vernacular does not differ from it very greatly.

The oldest Sanskrit books are at the fountain-head of European literature. These are the four Vedas, regarded as the source of all other Sastras or sacred books. The Vedas are written in an Iambic measure of eight syllables, and the earliest of them have been assigned by Sir William Jones to a date as early as 1500 years before Christ. The word Veda means knowledge, but though names of authors of the several parts were preserved, the whole was taken to mean inspired knowledge, "the self-evident word proceeding out of the mouth of God, this is the Veda." The first of the Vedas, called Rig from a word meaning