The oldest monuments of Indo-Aryan literature, namely the Veda hymns, contain many allusions to historical conditions, which the poet, however, assumed to be well known, or they may have been related in prose passages inserted between the verses which are all that now remain. They mention five peoples, the Turwasa, Jadu, Anu, Druhju and the Puru, who finally won the upper hand after the battle of the ten kings and are called Kuru in the epic. Besides this they mention a series of kings and priests who can, however, be assigned to no definite time or place.
The social conditions are primitive, and whilst the original inhabitants had advanced so far in civilisation that they possessed fortified towns and great wealth in herds, furniture, metal ornaments and good weapons, the Aryans were still in the condition of cattle-breeders, to whom the possessions of the enemy were a welcome spoil. Even in the epic, the Danawa Maja, a Daitja, or enemy of the (Aryan) gods, and architect of the Asuras, builds a palace for the sons of Pandu; for it was from the natives that the Aryans learnt the art of building in stone, they themselves, like other Indo-Europeans, understanding only how to build in wood and piles, or they dwelt in caves.
The Aryan prayers for the prosperity of their own cows, for a rich produce of butter, grass and crops, were directed to divine beings in whom natural phenomena and the elements are personified, but which also embody moral conceptions. But the songs of the Rig-Veda date from such various periods that, side by side with these ideas of a simple age, we also discern a detailed picture of sacrificial rites and an advanced culture, and even the appearance of doubt of the religious verities; it is quite comprehensible that new poems might at any time come into existence, or new families of singers (Rishis) appear on the scene with their store of hymns for sacrificial purposes, until a general collection of songs had been drawn up and adapted to a form of worship regulated in perpetuity by agreement between all the families of Rishis whom their class interests made anxious to be reconciled with one another.
The four Vedas (or collections of ceremonial songs), were supplemented by an enormous mass of literature proceeding from various sections, or schools. This includes, first the Brahmana, works serving to guide the priests in the procedure relating to sacrifices, then those explaining and justifying the application of the verses to each separate part of the service on mythological or symbolic grounds. Here the view taken attains the region of philosophical speculation, so that in these Upanishads, some one hundred and fifty in number, lie the beginnings of a philosophy of religion, and the later works of this class contain a regular philosophical system. The inexhaustible knowledge laid up in these numerous works was finally epitomised in the shortest conceivable form in the so-called Sutra (manuals), which, however, are frequently written only in a language of technical symbols so that they require an explanation from the teacher or a commentary. They are intended to be learnt by heart.
The Vedas cannot have been committed to the Indian writing at a very early period, since we know of none older than the inscriptions of Asoka, which date from the middle of the third century B.C.; one of the writings which here appear, and which runs from left to right, is the Watteluta alphabet, derived from those Arabic alphabets to be seen in the inscriptions found in Harra or Safa in eastern Hauran and deciphered by Halévy in 1877. This character belongs to the Alexandrian period. In the northwest of India a second alphabet is to be found on the Asoka inscriptions and on coins. It runs from right to left and is considered to be the same which was brought here in the Persian epoch and was derived from the Aramaic used in the Persian empire; however, it too may have been introduced later, for it strongly resembles the alphabet of the Blacas papyrus (assigned to the age of the Ptolemies, or, with more probability, to that of the later Persians), and other papyruses of the Alexandrian epoch. It is not conceivable that Asoka and those who issued the coins would have made use of these alphabets if an older and more perfect one had existed in India and been used for the Vedas; but in order to commit the Vedas to writing and to fix their form in all the details of phonetics and accentuation, a character was required whose perfection is only attained by the cultured Devanagari writing, which appears to have been first used in Malwa, the kingdom of Vikramaditya: it is still less conceivable that, for instance, the Pratisakhya sutras of the four Vedas should have had before them a work in a more imperfect writing, since these compendiums of phonology descend to the most extreme subtleties and in doing so presuppose the precise text which we now possess and which must consequently have received a fixed form at least at the epoch of these grammatical works.
If we fix the conquest of the territory of the Ganges in the period at the beginning of the first millennium B.C., we do so on no historical evidence but only on the grounds of the probability that that conquest extended over hundreds of years and that in the first centuries before Christ it was an accomplished fact. The Mahabharata, that vast epic compared with which Homer seems a mere pocket-book, only received its present form some centuries after Christ, and the lists we have of the kings of those peoples who figure in the poem, especially those of the country of Magadha (Behar), are unreliable and vary in the different copies in which they are found.
The spread of the Aryans along the coast of the Deccan and as far as Ceylon, of which the Ramayana gives a fabulous account, is also not chronologically definable, for this poem in twenty-four thousand distiches is also a very late product, and that extension lay far behind it, for in the ancient geographers we already find Aryan names affixed to towns in southern India.
The first piece of information concerning Indian history whose date is certain is that of Darius’ conquest of the territory of the Indus, which formed a Persian satrapy. Since then the western countries of India have been under foreign rulers, first under the Bactrian and Indo-Scythian kings, later on under the Sassanids, as is shown both by Indian coins of contemporary kings with a Sassanian stamp and legends in Pahlavi and Sanskrit and by historical notices concerning the relations of the kings of Marwar to Peroz and Anoscharwan, so that the conquest of Mahmoud of Ghazni and later rulers only renewed the ancient claims of Iran upon Indian possessions.[c]
Ruins of Old Indian Temple at Bombay