Page:The Cave Temples of India.djvu/30

4 great Mauryan dynasty which they found, or which they placed, on the throne of central India had passed away, her history relapsed, as before, into the same confused, undated, record of faineant kings, which continued almost down to the Moslem conquest, a tangle and perplexity to all investigators. It is only in rare instances that the problems it presents admit of a certain solution, while the records of the past, as they existed at the time when the Greeks visited the country, were, as may well be supposed, even more shadowy than they became in subsequent ages.

It is so strange that a country so early and so extensively civilised as India was, should have no written chronicles, that the causes that led to this strange omission deserve more attention than has hitherto been bestowed on the subject by the learned in Europe. The fact is the more remarkable, as Egypt on the one hand and China on the other, were among the most careful of all nations in recording dates and chronicling the actions of their earlier kings, and they did this notwithstanding all the difficulties of their hieroglyphic or symbolic writing, while India seems to have possessed an alphabet from an early date, which ought to have rendered her records easy to keep and still more easy to preserve. There seems in fact to be no intelligible cause why the annals of ancient India should not be as complete and satisfactory as those of any other country in a similar state of civilisation, unless it lies in the poetic temperament of its inhabitants, and the strange though picturesque variety of the races who dwell within her boundaries, but whose manifold diifferences seem at all times to have been fatal to that unity which alone can produce greatness or stability among nations.

AU this is the more strange, for, looked at on the map, India appears one of the most homogeneous and perfectly defined countries in the world. On the east, the ocean and impenetrable jungles shut her out from direct contact with the limitrophe nations on that side, while in the north the Himalayas forms a practically impassible barrier against the inhabitants of the Thibetan plains. On the west the ocean and the valley of the Indus equally mark the physical features which isolate the continent of India, and mark her out as a separate self-contained country. Within these boundaries there are no great barriers, no physical features, that divide the land into separate well defined provinces, in which we might expect difierent races to be segregated under different forms of