Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/37

 INTRODUCTION. 7 from the fact, that India has no history properly so called, before the Muhammadan invasion in the I3th century. Had India been a great united kingdom, like China, with a long line of dynasties and well-recorded dates attached to them, the task would have been comparatively easy ; but nothing of the sort ever existed within her boundaries. On the contrary, so far as our knowledge extends, India has always been occupied by three or four different races of mankind, who have never amalgamated so as to become one people, and each of these races has been again subdivided into numerous tribes or small nationalities nearly, sometimes wholly, independent of each other and, what is worse than all, not one of them ever kept a chronicle or preserved a series of dates commencing from any well-known era. 1 The absence of any historical record is the more striking, because India possesses a written literature equal to, if not sur- passing in variety and extent, that possessed by any other nation, before the adoption and use of printing. The Vedas themselves, with their Upanishads and Brahmanas, and the commentaries on them, form a literature in themselves of vast extent, and some parts of which are as old, possibly older, than any written works that are now known to exist ; and the Puranas, though comparatively modern, make up a body of doctrine mixed with mythology and tradition such as few nations can boast of. Besides this, however, are the two great epics, surpassing in extent, if not in merit, those of any ancient nation, and a drama of great beauty, written at periods extending through a long series of years. In addition to these we have treatises on law, on grammar, on astronomy, on metaphysics and mathematics, on almost every branch of mental science a literature extend- ing in fact to many thousand works, but in all this not one book that can be called historical. No man in ancient India, so far as is known, ever thought of recording the events of his own life, or of repeating the previous experience of others, and it was not till shortly before the Christian Era that they thought of establishing eras from which to date deeds or events. All this is the more curious because in Ceylon we have, in the ' Dipawansa,' ' Mahawansa,' and other books of a like nature, 1 The following brief resume of the order to make it readable, all references principal events in the ancient history and all proofs of disputed facts have of India has no pretensions to being a I been here avoided. They will be found complete or exhaustive view of the sub- 1 in the body of the work, where they are ject. It is intended only as such a popular sketch as shall enable the general reader to grasp the main features of the story to such an extent as may enable him to understand what follows. In more appropriate. But without some such introductory notice of the political history and ethnography, the artistic history would be nearly, if not wholly unintelligible.