sation long before the interpretation of her hieroglyphics enabled
us to determine its antiquity, and the discovery of its abundant art
treasures revealed the high degree of culture to which it reached.
Excavations in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates have yielded an
almost equally valuable harvest in regard to Babylonian and Assyrian
civilisation, and Cnossus has told us its scarcely less wonderful story.
Yet the long line of Pharaohs was coming to an end and Egypt was losing
the national independence which she has never once recovered; Nineveh
had fallen and Jerusalem was destroyed; Greece and even Rome had already
started on their great creative careers before any approximately correct
date can be assigned to the stages through which Indian civilisation had
passed. India only becomes historical with the establishment of the
Sasunaga dynasty in the Gangetic kingdom of Magadha, which centred in
what is now Behar, about the year 600 B.C.

As to the state of India before that date, no sort of material evidence
has survived, or at any rate has yet been brought to light--no
monuments, no inscriptions, very little pottery even, in fact very few
traces of the handicraft of man; nor any contemporary records of
undoubted authenticity. Fortunately the darkness which would have been
otherwise Cimmerian is illuminated, though with a partial and often
uncertain light, by the wonderful body of sacred literature which has
been handed down to our own times in the Vedas and Brahmanas and
Upanishads. To none of these books, which have, for the most part,
reached us in various recensions often showing considerable
discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to
ascribe any definite date. But in them we undoubtedly possess a genuine
key to the religious thought and social conceptions, and even
inferentially to the political institutions of the Aryan Hindus through
the many centuries that rolled by between their first southward
migrations into the Indian peninsula and their actual emergence into
history. The Vedic writings constitute the most ancient documents
available to illustrate the growth of religious beliefs founded on pure
Nature-worship, which translated themselves into a polytheistic and
pantheistic idea of the universe and, in spite of many subsequent
transformations, are found to contain all the germs of modern Hinduism
as we know it to-day--and, indeed, of all the religious thought of
India. In the Ve