How invaluable such remnants of the ancient race of Harikula! How refreshing to the mind yet to discover, amidst the ruins on the Yamuna, Hercules (Baldeva, god of strength) retaining his club and lion’s hide, standing on his pedestal at Baldeo, and yet worshipped by the Suraseni! This name was given to a large tract of country round Mathura, or rather round Surpura, the ancient capital founded by Surasena, the grandfather of the Indian brother-deities, Krishna and Baldeva, Apollo and Hercules. The title would apply to either; though Baldeva has the attributes of the ‘god of strength.’ Both are es (lords) of the race (kula) of Hari (Hari-kul-es), of which the Greeks might have made the compound Hercules. Might not a colony after the Great War have migrated westward? The period of the return of the Heraclidae, the descendants of Atreus (Atri is progenitor of the Harikula), would answer: it was about half a century after the Great War. [These speculations are worthless.]
It is unfortunate that Alexander’s historians were unable to penetrate into the arcana of the Hindus, as Herodotus appears to have done with those of the Egyptians. The shortness of Alexander’s stay, the unknown language in which their science and religion were hid, presented an insuperable difficulty. They could have made very little progress in the study of the language without discovering its analogy to their own.
[17]. Arrian generally exercises his judgment in these matters, and is the reverse of credulous. On this point he says, “Now to me it seems that even if Herakles could have done a thing so marvellous, he could have made himself longer-lived, in order to have intercourse with his daughter when she was of mature age” [Indika, ix.].
Sandrocottus is mentioned by Arrian to be of this line; and we can have no hesitation, therefore, in giving him a place in the dynasty of Puru, the second son of Yayati, whence the patronymic used by the race now extinct, as was Yadu, the elder brother of Puru. Hence Sandrocottus, if not a Puru himself, is connected with the chain of which the links are Jarasandha (a hero of the Bharat), Ripunjaya, the twenty-third in descent, when a new race, headed by Sanaka and Sheshnag, about six hundred years before Christ, usurped the seat of the lineal descendants of Puru; in which line of usurpation is Chandragupta, of the tribe Maurya, the Sandrocottus of Alexander, a branch of this Sheshnag, Takshak, or Snake race, a race which, stripped of its allegory, will afford room for subsequent dissertation. The Prasioi of Arrian would be the stock of Puru; Prayag is claimed in the annals yet existing as the cradle of their race. This is the modern Allahabad; and the Eranaboas must be the Jumna, and the point of junction with the Ganges, where we must place the capital of the Prasioi. [For Sandrokottos or Chandragupta Maurya see Smith, EHI, 42 ff. He certainly did not belong to the ‘Snake Race.’ The Erannoboas (Skr. Hiranyavaha, ‘gold-bearing’) is the river Son. The Prasioi (Skr. Prāchyās, ‘dwellers in the east’) had their capital at Pātaliputra, the modern Patna (McCrindle, Alexander, 365 f.).]
[18]. Analogous to the maire du palais of the first races of the Franks.
[19]. His daughter’s son. This is not the first or only instance of the Salic law of India being set aside. There are two in the history of the sovereigns of Anhilwara Patan. In all adoptions of this nature, when the child ‘binds round his head the turban’ of his adopted father, he is finally severed from the stock whence he had his birth. [For the early history of Delhi see Smith, EHI, 386 ff.]
[20]. The khil, or iron pillar of the Pandus, is mentioned in the poems of Chand. An infidel Tuar prince wished to prove the truth of the tradition of its depth of foundation: "blood gushed up from the earth’s centre, the pillar became loose (dhili)," as did the fortune of the house from such impiety. This is the origin of Delhi. [The inscription on the pillar proves the falsity of the legend, and the name Delhi is older than the Tuar dynasty (IGI, xi. 233).]
[21]. I doubt if Shahpur is yet known. I traced its extent from the remains of a tower between Humayun’s tomb and the grand column, the Kutb. In 1809 I resided four months at the mausoleum of Safdar Jang, the ancestor of the present [late] King of Oudh, amidst the ruins of Indraprastha, several miles from inhabited Delhi, but with which these ruins forms detached links of connexion. I went to that retirement with a friend now no more, Lieutenant Macartney, a name well known and honoured. We had both been employed in surveying the canals which had their sources in common from the head of the Jumna, where this river leaves its rocky barriers, the Siwalik chain, and issues into the plains of Hindustan. These canals on each side, fed by the parent stream, returned the waters again into it; one through the city of Delhi, the other on the opposite side. [Cunningham (ASR, i. 207 ff.) proved that the true site of the ancient city, Siri, was the old ruined fort to the north-east of Rāī Pithora’s stronghold, which is at present called Shāhpur. This identification has been disputed by C. J. Campbell (JASB, 1866, p. 206). But Cunningham gives good reasons for maintaining his opinion. The place took its name from Sher Shāh and his son Islām or Salīm Shāh. See also Carr Stephens, Archaeological and Monumental Remains of Delhi (1876), pp. 87 f., 190.]