Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/45

Rh In those days vast territories were still covered by forest, the home of countless wild beasts and scanty tribes of savage men; but regions of great extent in Northern India had been occupied for untold centuries by more or less civilized communities of the higher races who, from time to time, during the unrecorded past, had pierced the mountain barriers of the north-western frontier. Practically nothing is known concerning the early history of the possibly equally advanced Dravidian races who entered India, perhaps from the valley of the lower Indus, spread over the plateau of the Deccan, and penetrated to the extremity of the Peninsula. Our slender stock of knowledge is limited to the fortunes of the vigorous races, speaking an Aryan tongue, who poured down from the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Pamirs, filling the plains of the Pan jab and the upper basin of the Ganges with a sturdy and quick-witted population, unquestionably superior to the aboriginal races. The settled country between the Himalaya Mountains and the Narmada River was divided into a multitude of independent states, some monarchies, and some tribal republics, owning no allegiance to any paramount power, secluded from the outer world, and free to fight among themselves. The most ancient literary traditions, compiled probably in the fourth or fifth century, but looking back to an older time, enumerate sixteen of such states or powers, extending from Gandhara, on the extreme northwest of the Panjab, the modern districts of Peshawar and Rawalpindi, to Avanti or Malwa, with