Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/248

200 cleared small tracts of land, smiling fields covered with waving corn spread for miles around, betokening the spread of civilization and of the civilized arts of life.

Such was the history of Aryan conquests from generation to generation and from century to century in the Philosophic Period, and each succeeding Sutra work shows that the circle of civilization spread wider, and that the zone of unreclaimed barbarism receded farther and farther. And long before the close of this period, in the fourth century B.C., the entire peninsula had been reclaimed, civilized, and Hinduized, and primitive barbarians dwelt only in rocks, forests, and deserts which the Aryans disdained to conquer. It is not merely a story of conquests, which would have little interest for the philosophical reader. It is a story of the spread of Hindu civilization among hitherto unknown countries and aboriginal nations. It was the acceptance, by the Andhras of the Deccan and the Saurashtras of Gujarat, by the Cholas, Cheras, and Pandyas of Southern India, by the Magadhas, the Angas, the Vangas, and the Kalingas of Eastern India, of that superior religion and language and civilization which the Hindu Aryans offered to them. The gift was accepted and cherished, and henceforth the Dravidian and other tribes of Southern and Eastern India were Aryans in religion, language, and civilization. This was the great work and result of the Philosophic Period.

Baudhayana lived probably in the sixth century before Christ, and was one of the earliest of the Sutrakaras. In his time the zone of Hindu kingdoms and