Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/44



HE political history of India begins for an orthodox Hindu more than three thousand years before the Christian era with the famous war waged on the banks of the Jumna, between the sons of Kuru and the sons of Pandu, as related in the vast epic known as the Mahabharata. But the modern critic fails to find sober history in bardic tales, and is constrained to travel much farther before he comes to an anchorage of solid fact.

That line which separates the dated from the undated, in the case of India, may be drawn through the middle of the seventh century, a period of progress, marked by the development of maritime commerce and the diffusion of a knowledge of the art of writing. Up to about that time the inhabitants of India, even the most intellectual aces, seem to have been generally ignorant of the art of writing, and to have been obliged to trust to highly trained memory for the transmission of knowledge.