imits
of India, though it is possible that the earliest Tamil alphabet may
have been directly derived from the same Semitic source which supplied
both the _dextrorsum_ and the _sinistrorsum_ alphabets of India.

Here then we have the first fact--viz. that writing, even for
monumental purposes, was unknown in India before the third century
B.C.

But writing for commercial purposes was known in India before that
time. Megasthenes was no doubt quite right when he said that the
Indians did not know letters,[268] that their laws were not written,
and that they administered justice from memory. But Nearchus, the
admiral of Alexander the Great, who sailed down the Indus (325 B.C.),
and was therefore brought in contact with the merchants frequenting
the maritime stations of India, was probably equally right in
declaring that "the Indians wrote letters on cotton that had been well
beaten together." These were no doubt commercial documents, contracts,
it may be, with Phenician or Egyptian captains, and they would prove
nothing as to the existence in India at that time of what we mean by a
written literature. In fact, Nearchus himself affirms what Megasthenes
said after him, namely that "the laws of the sophists in India were
not written." If, at the same time, the Greek travellers in India
speak of mile-stones, and of cattle marked by the Indians with various
signs and also with numbers, all this would perfectly agree with what
we know from other sources, that though the art of writing may have
reached India before the time of Alexander's conquest, its employment
for literary purposes cannot date from a much earlier time.

Here then we are brought face to face with a most startling fact.
Writing was unknown in India before the fourth century before Christ,
and yet we are asked to believe that the Vedic literature in its three
well-defined periods, the Mantra, Brahma_n_a, and Sutra periods, goes
back to at least a thousand years before our era.

Now the Rig-Veda alone, which contains a collection of ten books of
hymns addressed to various deities, consists of 1017 (1028) poems,
10,580 verses, and about 153,826 words.[269] How were these poems
composed--for they are composed in very perfect metre--and how, after
having been composed, were they handed down from 1500 before Christ to
1500 after Christ, the time to which most of our best Sanskrit MSS.
belong?

_Entirely by memory._[270] This may sound startling, but--what will