but his very name suffices to commemorate his struggle against the northern hordes, as Vikramáditya Sakári, or the Enemy of the Scythians. His reign forms the Augustan era of Sanskrit literature; and tradition has ascribed the highest products of the Indian intellect during many later centuries to the poets and philosophers, or Nine Gems, of his Court. As Chandra Gupta, who freed India from the Greeks, is celebrated in the drama Mudrá-rákshasa; so Vikramáditya, the vanquisher of the Scythians, forms the central royal personage of the Hindu stage.

60 B.C. to

235 A.D.

Vikramaditya's achievements, however, furnished no final Sáka or deliverance, but merely an episode in the long struggle between Scythian era, 78 the Indian dynasties and new races from the north. Another A.D. popular era, the Sáka, literally the Scythian, takes its commencement in 78 A.D.,1 and is supposed to commemorate the defeat of the Scythians by a king of Southern India, Saliváhana." During the seven centuries which followed, three powerful monarchies, the Sáhs, Guptas, and Valabhís, established themselves in Northern and Western India. The Sáhs of Suráshtra Sáh are traced by coins and inscriptions from 60 or 70 B.C. to after dynasty, 235 A.D.3 After the Sáhs come the Guptas of KANAUJ,1 in the North-Western Provinces, the Middle Land (Madhya-desha) of ancient Bráhmanism. The Guptas introduced an era of Gupta their own, commencing in 319 A.D.; and ruled in person or dynasty, by viceroys over Northern India during 150 years, as far to A.D. the south-west as Káthiáwár. The Gupta dynasty was overthrown by foreign invaders, apparently a new influx of Huns or Tartars from the north-west (450-470 A.D.). The Valabhís Valabhí succeeded the Guptas, and ruled over Cutch, the north-western dynasty, 480-722 Districts of Bombay,5 and Málwá, from 480 to after 722 A.D.6 A.D. The Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang, gives a full account of the court and people of Valabhí (630-640 A.D.). Buddhism was the State religion; but heretics (i.e., Bráhmans) abounded; and the Buddhists themselves were divided between the northern

1 Monday, 14th March 78 A.D., Julian style.

* General Cunningham; see also Mr. Edw. Thomas' letter, dated 16th September 1874, to The Academy, which brings this date within the period of the Kanishka family (2 B.C. to 87 A.D.).

3 By Mr. Newton. See Mr. E. Thomas on the Coins of the Sáh Kings, Archæol. Rep. Western India, p. 44 (1876); and Dr. J. Fergusson, Journal Roy. As. Soc., 1880.

Now a town of only 17,000 inhabitants in Farrukhábád District, but with ruins extending over a semicircle of 4 miles in diameter.

Lát-desha, including the collectorates of SURAT, BROACH, KAIRA, and parts of BARODA territory.

The genealogy is worked out in detail by Mr. E. Thomas, ut supra, PP. 80-82.

M

319-470

Long struggle against Scythic invaders,

57 B.C. to 544 A.D.

The preAryan

element in ancient India.

school of the Scythian dynasties, and the southern or Indian school of Asoka. The Valabhís seem to have been overthrown by the early Arab invaders of Sind in the 8th century.

The relations of these three Indian dynasties, the Sáhs, Guptas, and Valabhís, to the successive hordes of Scythians, who poured down on Northern India, are obscure. There is abundant evidence of a long-continued struggle, but the efforts to affix dates to its chief episodes have not yet produced results which can be accepted as final. Two Vikramáditya Sakáris, or vanquishers of the Scythians, are required for the purposes of chronology; and the great battle of Korúr near Múltán, in which the Scythian hosts perished, has been shifted backwards and forwards from 78 to 544 A.D.1 The truth seems to be that, during the first six centuries of the Christian era, the fortunes of the Scythian or Tartar races rose and fell from time to time in Northern India. They more than once sustained great defeats; and they more than once overthrew the native dynasties. Their presence is abundantly attested during the century before Christ, represented by Vikramaditya (57 B.C.); during the 1st century after Christ, represented by the Kanishka family (2 B.C. to 87 A.D.); and thence to the time of Cosmas Indicopleustes, about 535 A.D. The latest writer on the subject believes that it was the white Huns who overthrew the Guptas between 465 and 470 A.D. He places the great battles of Korúr and Maushari, which freed India from the Sákas and Húnas,' between 524 and 544 A.D. Cosmas Indicopleustes, who traded in the Red Sea about 535 A.D., speaks of the Huns as a powerful nation in Northern India in his days.3

2

THE PRE-ARYANS.—While Greek and Scythic influences had thus been at work in Northern India during nine centuries (327 B.C. to 544 A.D.), another element was profoundly affecting the future of the Indian people. In a previous section, I have traced the fortunes, and sketched the present condition, of the preAryan 'aborigines.' The Bráhmanical Aryans never accomplished a complete subjugation of these earlier races. The tribes and castes of non-Aryan origin still number about 18 millions

178 A.D. was the popularly received date, commemorated by the Sáka era; 'between 524 and 544 A.D.' is suggested by Dr. Fergusson (p. 284 of Journal Roy. As. Soc., vol. xii.) in the latest discussion of the subject during the present year, 1880.

Dr. J. Fergusson, Journal Roy. As. Soc., pp. 282-284, etc. (1880). 3 Topographia Christiana, lib. xi. p. 338 (Paris 1707); apud Fergusson, ut supra.

in British territory; while the castes who claim a pure Aryan descent are under 16 millions.1 The pre-Aryans have influenced the popular dialects of every Province, and in Southern India they have given their speech to 46 millions of people. The Vedic settlements along the five rivers of the Punjab were. merely colonies or confederacies of Aryan tribes, who had pushed in among a non-Aryan population. When an Aryan family advanced to a new territory, it had often, as in the case of the Pándava brethren, to clear the forest and drive out the aboriginal people. This double process constantly repeated itself; and as late as 1657, when the Hindu Rájá founded the present city of BAREILLY, his first work was to cut down the jungle and expel the Katheriyas. The ancient Brahmanical kingdoms of the Middle Land, or Madhya-desha, in the NorthWestern Provinces and Oudh, were surrounded by non-Aryan peoples. All the legendary advances beyond the centre of Aryan civilisation, narrated in the epic poets, were made into the territory of non-Aryan races. When we begin to catch historic glimpses of India, we find the countries around the Aryan centre ruled by non-Aryan princes. The Nandas, whom Chandra Gupta succeeded in Behar, were a Súdra or nonAryan dynasty; and, according to one account, Chandra Gupta and his grandson Asoka came of the same stock.2

India.

The Buddhist religion did much to incorporate the pre- PreAryan tribes into the Indian polity. During the long struggle Aryan kingdoms against Greco-Bactrian and Scythian inroads (327 B.C. to 544 in A.D.), the Indian aboriginal races must have had an ever- Northern increasing importance, whether as enemies or allies. At the end of that struggle, we discover them in some of the fairest tracts of Northern India. In almost every District throughout Oudh and the North-Western Provinces, ruined towns and forts are ascribed to aboriginal races who ruled at different periods, according to the local legends, between the 5th and 11th centuries A.D. When the Muhammadan conquest supplies a historical footing after 1000 A.D., non-Aryan tribes were in = 1 This latter number includes both Bráhmans (10,131,541) and Kshattriyas and Rájputs (5,641,138). But, as we have seen, some of the Rájput tribes are believed to be of Scythic origin, while others have been incorporated from confessedly non-Aryan tribes (pp. 101, 168). Such nonAryan Rájputs more than outnumber any survivals of the Vaisyas of pure Aryan descent.

2 The Mudrá-rákshasa represents Chandra Gupta as related to the last of the Nandas; the Commentator of the Vishnu Purána says he was the son of a Nanda by a low-caste woman. Prof. Dowson's Dict. Hindu Mythology, etc., p. 68 (Trübner, 1879).

The
Takshaks

of Rawal
Pindi
District.

The
Takshaks.

6th Cen

327 B.C.

78 A.D. 633 A.D.

possession of some of these Districts, and had been lately ousted from others.

The Statistical Survey has brought together many survivals of these obscure races. It would be impossible to follow that survey through each locality; but I propose, with the utmost brevity, to indicate a few of the results. Starting from the West, Alexander the Great found RAWAL PINDI District in the hands of the Takkas or Takshaks, from whom its Greek name of Taxila was derived. This people has been traced to a Scythian migration about the 6th century B.C.1 tury B.C. settlements in the 4th century B.C. seem to have extended from the Paropamisan range 2 in Afghánistán to deep into Northern India. Their Punjab capital, Takshásila, or Taxila, was the largest city which Alexander found between the Indus and the Jhelum (327 B.C.).3 Salihávana, from whom the Sáka or Scythian era took its commencement (78 A.D.), is held by some authorities to have been of Takshak descent. In the 7th century A.D., Taki,5 perhaps derived from the same race, was the capital of the Punjab. The Scythic Takshaks, indeed, are supposed to have been the source of the great Serpent Race, the Takshakas or Nágás, who figure so prominently in Sanskrit literature and art, and whose name is still borne by the Nágá tribes of our own day. The words Nágá and Takshaka in Sanskrit both mean a 'snake,' or tailed monster. As the Takshakas have been questionably connected with the Scythian Takkas, so the Nágás have been derived, by conjecture in the absence of evidence, from the Tartar patriarch Nagas, the second son of Elkhán. The two names, however, seem to have been loosely applied by the Sanskrit writers to a variety of non-Aryan peoples in India, whose religion was of an anti-Aryan type. We learn, for example, how the five Pándava brethren of the Mahabharata burned out the snake-king Takshaka from

The

Nágás.

1 Such dates have no pretension to be anything more than intelligent conjectures based on very inadequate evidence. With regard to the Takshaks, see Colonel Tod and the authorities which he quotes, Rájásthán, vol. i. p. 53 passim, pp. 93 et seq. (Madras Reprint, 1873).

2 Where Alexander found them as the Parae-takae-pahari, or Hill Takae (?).

3 Arrian. The Bráhman mythologists, of course, found an Aryan pedigree for so important a person as King Taksha, and make him the son of Bharata and nephew of Ráma-chandra !

Tod, Rájásthán, vol. i. p. 95 (ed. 1873).

General Cunningham, Anc.

5 Taki, or Asarur, 45 miles west of Lahore. Geog. of Ind., p. 191, and Map VI. (ed. 1871). This Taki lies considerably to the south-east of the Takshásila of Alexander's expedition.

6 Tod, Rájásthán, vol. i. p. 53 (ed. 1873); a doubtful authority.

his primeval Khándava forest. The Takshaks and Nágás were the tree and serpent worshippers, whose rites and objects of adoration have impressed themselves deeply on the architecture and sculptures of India. The names were applied in a confused manner to different races of Scythic origin. The chief authority on Tree and Serpent Wor- Indoship in India has deliberately selected the term 'Scythian' Scythic Nágás; for the anti-Aryan elements, which entered so largely into the Indian religions both in ancient and modern times.1 The Chinese records give a full account of the Nágá geography of ancient India. The Nágá kingdoms were both numerous and powerful, and Buddhism derived many of its royal converts from them. The Chinese chroniclers, indeed, classify the Nágá princes of India into two great divisions, as Buddhists and non-Buddhists. The serpent-worship, which formed so typical a characteristic of the Indo-Scythic races, led the Chinese to confound them with the objects of their adorations; and the Indo-Scythic Nágás would almost seem to be the originals of the Dragon races of Chinese Buddhism and the DragonChinese art. I shall speak of the compromises to which Buddhism submitted, with a view to winning the support of the China. Nágá peoples, when I come to describe the rise of Hinduism.

races of

of Rawal

As the Greek invaders found Ráwal Pindi District in possession of a Scythic race of Takkas in 327 B.C., so the Musalman conqueror found it inhabited by a fierce nonAryan race of Ghakkars thirteen hundred years later. The Ghakkars for a time imperilled the safety of Mahmúd of The Ghazni in ro08. Ferishta describes them as savages addicted Ghakkars to polyandry and infanticide. The tide of Muhammadan Pindi, conquest rolled on, but the Ghakkars remained in possession 1008-1857 of their submontane tract. In 1205, they ravaged the Punjab to the gates of Lahore; in 1206, they stabbed the Muhammadan Sultán in his tent; and in spite of conversion to Islám by the sword, it was not till 1525 that they made their submission to the Emperor Bábar in return for a grant of country. During the next two centuries they rendered great services to the Mughal

1 Dr. J. Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship, pp. 71, 72 (India Museum, 4to, 1868). For the results of more recent local research, see Mr. Rivett-Carnac's papers in the Journal of the As. Soc., Bengal, ‘The Snake Symbol in India,' 'Ancient Sculpturings on Rocks,' 'Stone Carvings at Mainpuri,' etc.; the Honourable Ráo Sáhib Vishvanáks Nárayan Mandlik's 'Serpent-Worship in Western India,' and other essays in the Bombay As. Soc. Journal; also, Reports of Arch. Survey, Western India. * For a summary of their later history, see article on RAWAL PINDI DISTRICT, Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. viii.

A. D.