Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/44

 XXXIT

INTRODUCTION.

m

existence of the city, when they relate that Samundra Pala the guise of ajogi juggled the king of Srdvasti out of bis empire, embalm the tradition of a war which subsequent accounts prove to have been among the fiercest and most destructive which have History at once becomes ever laid a flourishing country waste. silent, and not more than three centuries later, when the Chinese pilgrim. Fa Hian, visited in Sravasti one of the most sacred seats of his religion, he found the once populous city, whose circuit of lofty walls enclosing the remains of countless palaces and temples even now attests its former greatness, inhabited by only a few

devotees. Two hundred years later, when repeated the pilgrimage, its desolation was even more complete, and its approach almost impossible by a journey through dense forests full of herds of wild elephants. Its subjection to the power of Patna closes the ancient history of Oudh, and though we may conjecture that on the extinction of that kingdom it fell tinder the dominion of Kanauj, we hear no more of its princes, its saints, or its people, and the break in its records probably marks the extinction of its civilization and the relapse of the greater part of the country into the forests which were afterwards known as Banaudha. It is to this ancient period that the numerous remains of walled towns and forts, which have been erroneously ascribed in popular tradition to the Bhars a people with no high cultivation, but the last of the great extinct powers which ruled in Oudh almost certainly belong. There are probably no remains in India whose exploration under competent supervision would disclose objects of greater interest or throw more copious light on an important and obscure period of history, "With the struggle which ended in the overthrow of Kanauj, the last Hindu empire which had any pretence to include the whole of the continent north of the Vindhyas, and which sealed in blood the final victory of the Brahman over the Buddhist, the modern history of the province opens in dark and doubtful legend. It was the Tharus, if local tradition is to be trusted, who first descended from the hills, and in the eighth or ninth century A.D, cleared the jungles as far as Ajodhya, The aboriginal tribes, who even at the present time are the only people whom a constitution impervious to fever enables to contend with the malaria of the jungles and become the pioneers of civilization were subjected about a century after their settlement to a princely family of Sombansi lineage from the North-West. This family was reigning at or near the ruins of Sravasti when Sayyad destitute

monks and

Hweng Thsang

—

—