Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/233

PROBLEMS OF INDIAN RESEARCH 185 may safely infer that it was of the form still common in the south of India as that of Narayana. It was probably made in low relief on a rounded panel, and depicted a beautiful youth with a lotus in his hand. In the following year 456 a great piece of engineering, so far west as the Girnar Hill, was completed and consecrated by the building of a temple of Vishnu.

Seven hundred and fifty years earlier, in the year 300 B.C., Megasthenes had noted amongst Indian religious ideas that " Herakles is worshipped at Mathura and Clisobothra." Was this latter the Hellenic pronunciation of "Klisoputa," Krisoputra, Krishnaputa? And is it to be identified with Dwarka, persistently identified with Krishna throughout the Mahabharata without any very satisfactory reason being stated—or with some other town near Mathura, since destroyed?

Now this same Herakles is a figure of wonderful interest. We must remember with regard to the period of which we are now thinking, that Greece was but the remotest province of the Central Asiatic world, and in that world the youngest child of history. Her myths and religious systems had chiefly a central Asiatic origin, and Herakles of Mediterranean fame was doubtless pre-eminently of this order. Probably little ever finds its way into literature of the human significance to human souls of any given religious system, or more particularly of the ideas connected with an ancient god or hero. We may depend upon it that Herakles