Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/170

130 of the Himalayas. To the present day men in these hills live in independent primitive communities, and have very little concern with chief or king, and it is no wonder that in ancient times they should be known as peoples without kings.

And then, in the very centre of the Hindu world, along the valley of the Ganges, lived the powerful tribes of the Kurus and the Panchalas, and the less known tribes, the Vasas and the Usinaras.

In the west, the deserts of Rajputana were wholly unexplored by the Aryans, and the Bhil aborigines of those deserts and mountains were left undisturbed until new and hardy tribes of invaders entered India after the Christian era.

In the far east, South Behar was not yet Hinduized. A passage in the Atharva-Veda which shows that the people of South Behar did not yet belong to the Hindu confederation alludes in terms of enmity to the Angas and the Magadhas. Bengal proper was as yet unknown.

The whole of India south of the Vindhya range was as yet unoccupied by the Hindus, but the Aitareya Brahmana gives the names of certain degraded barbarous tribes, including the Andhras, who in the Philosophic Period rose to be a great civilized Hindu power in the Deccan.

We have now spoken of all the principal Aryan races and kingdoms which flourished in the Epic Period, and of the non-Aryan kingdoms, which formed a semicircular belt in the south of the Hindu world. But before we take leave of kings, we must make some