CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE
India like China and Egypt is reputed to be a land of evasive mysteries. Like them it had a self-contained civilisation with apparently no desire to reach out from it to the greater world. To be sure, India was not shut off from outside contact as fully as China, for the Phœnicians were early drawn by its fabled treasures to visit it in a commercial capacity, and tradition relates that, at least once, Assyrian forces had invaded its bounds on a less peaceful mission. But, nevertheless, the share of the Indians themselves in such intercourse was largely passive. They received foreign traders, unlike the early Egyptians; and they repelled foreign invaders; but they themselves seemed just as little inclined as before to spread beyond national bounds. Even the Egyptians had their periods of foreign conquests, when they penetrated Asia, at least as far as the Tigris, but if the Hindus ever yielded to a like impulse there is no record of it preserved to us. Yet their influence upon the nations that traded with them must have been considerable and they thus have a larger share in the scheme of ancient history than China. Even so, however, their place is a minor one compared with that of Egypt and Babylonia. Even were it greater, the records from which to reconstruct its history are meagre and we shall be obliged to content ourselves with a sketch that is at best but fragmentary.
There is another point of view from which the Hindus have an interest exceeding that of even the most important of ancient nations that we have hitherto studied. For with them we come for the first time in contact with the great Aryan race. Hitherto we have traced the history of the Hamitic, Semitic, and Turanian races, but now with the Aryan race we enter upon what may be considered the direct channel of European history, for practically all subsequent history has to do with this race.
Turning then to the Hindus, the easternmost branch of the great Indo-Germanic or Aryan race, we find, as was to be expected, the same utter obscurity as to origin that we have seen encompassing all questions of racial beginnings elsewhere. One perhaps is justified, however, in feeling that in the case of the Hindus secure traditions carry us one stage farther back than is the case, for example, with such races as the Egyptians and Chinese. For it is accepted as a clear historic fact that the Aryan race, who came to be at a very early day,—at least 1000 B.C.,—the absolutely dominant force practically throughout the vast territory of India, had invaded this territory from the northwest; had come, in short, from that Central-Asiatic centre of distribution which we have just spoken of as the long accepted traditional cradle of the Aryan races. Whether at a still earlier period this migration had its source in more distant lands, including ultimately the Atlantic borders of Europe, is altogether problematical, but that the immediate source of invasion was Central Asia is not to be doubted.
The beginning of this invasion in which the Central-Asiatic Aryan people descended upon the northwestern regions of the land, which we now term India, date from a vaguely determined period, which can hardly be more recent than 2000 years B.C. From this beginning the invaders spread farther and farther beyond the Ganges, occupying the great fertile plains of Central India, and ultimately the plateau of the Deccan, and crowding the original inhabitants into out-of-the-way corners of the land till they seemed almost exterminated. This extermination of the original or non-Aryan population of India, however, was only relative, as even now there are many millions of their descendants still living in India; but the invaders became so utterly dominant and so enormously preponderant in numbers that the original inhabitants may practically be disregarded in treating of Indian history.
The exact details of the early history of the Aryans in India are quite unknown. So far as the history of this period can be reconstructed at all, materials for it are furnished, as in the case of the early history of almost all other nations, solely by traditions, which came ultimately, and that at a very early day, to be woven into a system of theology. Here, as elsewhere, those tales and myths of godlike heroes and hero-gods which embalmed the spirit of many aspiring generations, came ultimately, when gathered into books, to be accepted as a divine revelation made to a single early prophet. Here, as among several other nations, there was also built up a great system of national epic poetry. Parts of this are preserved to us under the titles of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and are in themselves, as is always the case with the great national epics, important sources of history if properly interpreted.
The great religious books bore the name of Vedas, and these at a relatively late stage of national evolution,—yet, perhaps as early as 800 or 900 B.C.,—were gathered into a document, which came to be known as Manu’s Code, Manu being a name which signified ethnologically the first man, and the code being of course the supposed divine revelation delivered to that first man. This code in its various departments is the chief source on which historians must draw in interpreting the early history of India. At the time when this code was written, society in India had already reached a relatively high grade of civilisation; in particular, the priests had fixed their firm hold upon the national life, and that strange system of castes, which is so typical a feature in Indian life, had become firmly established.
Some centuries later, the power of the Brahmans was for a time threatened through the advent of a new prophet and philosophical teacher in the person of the prince Buddha. This reformer lived about the 6th century B.C. He was of royal blood, but he early threw aside the prerogatives of his birth and became a peripatetic philosopher. His aim was essentially the same as that which actuated another Aryan, Socrates by name, in the distant land of Greece, at a slightly later period. He strove to inculcate lessons of right living, of practical morality. With religion, as such, he professed to have little concern, yet soon after his death his teachings served as the foundations for a new religious system, which spread rapidly under stimulus of persecution and waged a long, fierce warfare with the established creeds of Brahmanism.