The History of Ancient India (Set of 2 Volumes)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The History of Ancient India is a history of thirty centuries of human culture and progress. It divides itself into several distinct periods, each of which, for length of years, will compare with the entire history of many a modern people.

The subject of the present work, about which I wish to say a few words. I have often asked myself: Is it possible, with the help that is now available, to write, in a handy work, a clear, historical account of the Civilization of Ancient India, based on ancient Sanskrit literature, and written in a sufficiently popular manner to be acceptable to the general reader?

The method on which this work has been written is very simple. My principal object has been to furnish the general reader with a practical and handy work on the Ancient History of India. Every chapter in the present work deals with matters about which long researches have been made, and various opinions have been recorded. All the work divided into five parts like: Vedic Period, B.C. 2000 to 1400; Epic Period, B.C. 1400 to 1000; Rationalistic Period, B.C. 1000 to 242; Buddhist Period, B.C. 242 to A.D. 500; Pauranik Period, A.D. 500 to 1194.

Romesh Chunder Dutt, popularly known as R.C. Dutt, was a distinguished Indian bureaucrat, erudite author, and economic historian who flourished from 1848 to 1909. He began his career in the Indian Civil Service and eventually rose to become a member of the Indian Legislative Council, where he passionately advocated for Indian sovereignty as well as progressive economic and social reforms. R.C. Dutt authored several notable publications on Indian history and economics, such as "The Economic History of India" and "India in the Victorian Age."

"If I were asked," says Professor Max Müller, "what I consider the most important discovery which has been made during the Nineteenth Century with respect to the ancient history of mankind, 1 should answer by the following short line:

Sanskrit, DYAUSH Pitar Greek, ΖΕΥΣΓΙΑΤHP (ZEUS PATER)-Latin, JUPITER = Old Norse, TYR."

And certainly, the discoveries which have been made by European scholars within the last hundred years, with the help of the old Aryan language preserved in India, form one of the most brilliant chapters in the history of the advancement of human knowledge. It is not my intention to give a sketch of that history here; but a few facts which relate specially to Indian Antiquities may be considered interesting.

It is about a century since Sir William Jones, startled the scholars of Europe by his translation of Sakuntala, "one of the greatest curiosities," as he said in his preface, "that the literature of Asia has yet brought to light," and one of the tenderest and most beautiful creations of human imagination produced in any age or country. The attention of European literary men was roused to the value and beauty of Sanskrit literature; and the greatest literary genius of the modern age has recorded his appreciation of the Hindu dramatic piece in lines which have been often quoted, in original and in translation :- Would'st thou the life's young blossoms and the fruits of its decline,

And all by which the soul is pleased, enraptured, feasted, fed, Would'st thou the earth and heaven itself in one sweet name combine? I name thee, O Sakuntala. and all at once is said." -Goethe.

Sir William Jones translated Manu, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and lived to continue his researches into the store-house of Sanskrit literature, and acheived valuable results but he did not live to find what he sought, a clue to India's "ancient history without any mixture of fable." For his enthusiastic labours were mostly confined to the later Sanskrit literature, the literature of the Post-Buddhist Era; and he paid little heed to the mine of wealth that lay beyond.

Colebrooke followed in the footstep's of Sir William Jones. He was a mathematician, and was the most careful and accurate Sanskrit scholar that England has ever produced. Ancient Sanskrit literature concealed nothing from his eyes. He gave a careful and accurate account of Hindu Philosophy, wrote on Hindu Algebra and Mathematics, and, in 1805, he first made Europeans acquainted with the oldest work of the Hindu and of the Aryan world, viz., the Vedas. Colebrooke, however, failed to grasp the importance of the discovery he had made, and , declared that the study of the Vedas "would hardly reward the labour of the reader much less that of the translator."

The History of Ancient India is a history of thirty centuries of human culture and progress. It divides itself into several distinct periods, each of which, for length of years, will compare with the entire history of many a modern people.

Other nations claim an equal or even a higher antiquity than the Hindus. The Egyptians have records on their everlasting monuments of a civilization which goes beyond three thousand years before Christ. Assyrian scholars have claimed an equally remote antiquity for the Shumiro-Accadian civilization of Chaldea, which is said to have flourished over a thousand years before Nineveh and Babylon were founded. The Chinese, too, have a history which dates from about 2,400 B.C. For India, modern scholars have not claimed a higher antiquity than 2,000 B. C, though future researches may require an extension of this date.

But there is a difference between the records of the Hindus and the records of other nations. The hieroglyphic records of the ancient Egyptians yield little information beyond the names of kings and pyramid-builders, and accounts of dynasties and wars. The cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria and Babylon tell us much the same story. And even ancient Chinese records shed little light on the gradual progress of human culture and civilization.

Ancient Hindu works are of a different character. If they are defective in some respects, as they undoubtedly are, they are defective as accounts of dynasties, of wars, of so-called historical incidents. On the other hand, they give us a full, connected, and clear account of the advancement of civilization, of the progress of the human mind, such as we shall seek for in vain among the records of any other equally ancient nation. The literature of each period is a perfect picture-a photograph, if we may so call it of the Hindu civilization of that period. And the works of successive periods form a complete history of Hindu civilization for over three thousand years, so full, so clear, that he who runs may read.

Inscriptions on stone and writings on papyri are recorded with a design to commemorate passing events. The songs and hymns and philosophical and religious effusions of a people are an unconscious and true reflection of its civilization and its thought. The earliest effusions of the Hindus were not recorded in writing-they are, therefore, full and unrestricted- they are a natural and true expression of the nation's thoughts and feelings. They were preserved, not on stone, but in the faithful memory of the people, who landed down the great heritage from century to century with a scrupulous exactitude which, in modern days, would be considered a miracle.