The Herakles Legend.
Arrian gives the story thus: "It is further said that he [Herakles][[16]] had a very numerous progeny of children born to him in India ... [31] but that he had only one daughter.[[17]] The name of this child was Pandaia, and the land in which she was born, and with the sovereignty of which Herakles entrusted her, was called after her name Pandaia" (Indika, viii.).
This is the very legend contained in the Puranas, of Vyasa (who was Hari-kul-es, or chief of the race of Hari) and his spiritual daughter Pandaia, from whom the grand race the Pandavas, and from whom Delhi and its dependencies were designated the Pandava sovereignty.
Her issue ruled for thirty-one generations in direct descents, or from 1120 to 610 before Christ; when the military minister,[[18]] connected by blood, was chosen by the chiefs who rebelled against the last Pandu king, represented as “neglectful of all the cares of government,” and whose deposition and death introduced a new dynasty.
Two other dynasties succeeded in like manner by the usurpation of these military ministers, until Vikramaditya, when the Pandava sovereignty and era of Yudhishthira were both overturned.
Indraprastha remained without a sovereign, supreme power being removed from the north to the southern parts of India, till the fourth, or, according to some authorities, the eighth century after Vikrama, when the throne of Yudhishthira was once more occupied by the Tuar tribe of Rajputs, claiming descents from the Pandus. To this ancient capital, thus refounded, the new appellation of Delhi was given; and the dynasty of the founder, Anangpal, lasted to the twelfth century, when he abdicated in favour of his grandson,[[19]] Prithiviraja, the last imperial Rajput sovereign of India, whose defeat and death introduced the Muhammadans.
This line has also closed with the pageant of a prince, and a colony returned from the extreme west is now the sole arbiter of the thrones of Pandu and Timur.
Britain has become heir to the monuments of Indraprastha raised by the descendants of Budha and Ila; to the iron pillar of the Pandavas, "whose pedestal[[20]] [32] is fixed in hell"; to the columns reared to victory, inscribed with characters yet unknown; to the massive ruins of its ancient continuous cities, encompassing a space still larger than the largest city in the world, whose mouldering domes and sites of fortresses,[[21]] the very names of which are lost, present a noble field for speculation on the ephemeral nature of power and glory. What monument would Britain bequeath to distant posterity of her succession to this dominion? Not one: except it be that of a still less perishable nature, the monument of national benefit. Much is in our power: much has been given, and posterity will demand the result.
[1]. The celebrated Goguet remarks on the madness of most nations pretending to trace their origin to infinity. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Scythians, particularly, piqued themselves on their high antiquity, and the first assimilate with the Hindus in boasting they had observed the course of the stars 473,000 years. Each heaped ages on ages; but the foundations of this pretended antiquity are not supported by probability, and are even of modern invention (Origin of Laws).