Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/158

122 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY the Indian monasteries and governments. From this period must date the small panelled Buddhas which have been carved all over the older caves, not only at Ajanta, but also at Kenheri, at Karli, and doubtless elsewhere. The great durbar hall at Kenheri (Cave lo) is filled with a splendidly planned and coherent scheme of such decoration. But the artists have not always been so considerate. They have begun their carvings in the midst of older work, and side by side with it — probably wherever they were not stopped by the presence of paintings — without the slightest regard to the appropriateness of the combination. For some years the face of the rock must have swarmed with these industrious sculptors working all at the same time. And then some other political catastrophe stopped all chisels in a moment. The cheerful hum of study and ringing of tools on the stone were suddenly silenced. The caves were swept bare alike of the monks and their students ; and though not destroyed, Ajanta lay for centuries deserted, like the Gandharan monasteries before it.

But some of the Gandharan exiles had taken up the task of general education, and it is probably from the period of the Arab conquest of Gandhara in A.D. 751 that we must date the Brahmanical organisation of learning, reflecting the monastic universities of the Buddhists, in tolls and akaras, together with the widespread diffusion of the Saka or Scythic era, dating from 57 B.C. — in all parts of Northern India. Thus a remote province repaid