The Historians' History of the World 02

It is with this prince that the architectural history of India begins. Several of the columns he caused to be erected are still standing, and the most celebrated monuments, such as those of Bharhut, Sanchi, and Buddha Gaya, whose bas-reliefs are so valuable for the history of Buddhism, are contemporary with his reign or very little later. Nothing remains of the palaces which he himself constructed, but we may suppose that they must have been very handsome, for the pilgrim Fa-Hian, who saw in the fifth century the ruins of the buildings and the tower of the one belonging to him at Pataliputra, asserts that it was too admirable to have been the work of a mortal.

It was this same Asoka who made Buddhism the official religion of India. His religious zeal was very great, for he sent missionaries to all kinds of places, to Ceylon, and even as far as to Ptolemy Philadelphus in Egypt.

The dynasty called that of Maurya, of which Asoka was the most illustrious representative, lasted about a century and a half, i.e., from 312 to 178 B.C. Afterwards the empire founded by Asoka soon split up into petty independent kingdoms under different sovereigns. The kingdom of Magadha, however, continued to exist down to the sixteenth century of our era; but it now included only the very confined district corresponding to the present Behar. The Puranas give lists of the kings of Magadha for a thousand years, but they are very unreliable.

TWELVE CENTURIES OF OBSCURITY

After Asoka, the only Hindu authorities that we have on India down to the time of the Mohammedan invasion, besides the legendary narratives of the Puranas, are furnished by the monuments. These, with the stories of the Chinese pilgrims of which we have spoken, are the only sources from which we may in some sort reconstitute the civilisation of India during that long period.

During this night of something like twelve centuries, the important personages whose memory the Hindu chroniclers have preserved to us are few in number. The most celebrated is the legendary Vikramaditya, prince of Malwa, who lived at Ujjain, near the Nerbudda. According to the chronicles, he extended his empire over the whole of India, as far as the southern point of the Deccan. Although his history is nothing but a tissue of fabulous legends, he must certainly have fulfilled an important rôle, since the Hindus date a new era, the Samvat era, from his accession, which they suppose to have taken place 57 B.C.

Unfortunately the Hindu chronicles, according to their wont, have paid little respect to chronology, for an attentive study of the inscriptions and the monuments appears to prove that Vikramaditya reigned six hundred years after the epoch indicated by the books.[18]

It is to the same hero that the Hindu legends attribute the expulsion of the Scythians from India. These people had penetrated to the Greeks of Bactriana two centuries before Christ, and had gradually subdued them. One of their kings, Kanishka, a convert to Buddhism, had shortly before our era founded an empire comprising Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Rajputana. We know nothing of the history of the Scythians in India, unless it be that they propagated the artistic influence of the Greeks, as we see by some statues at Muttra.

According to the inscriptions interpreted by Cunningham, we should probably include amongst the contemporaries of Vikramaditya [see footnote] the Rajah Harshavardhara, who reigned from 607-648 and of whom the Chinese pilgrim, Hwen Tsang, who visited India in 634, speaks as one of the most powerful sovereigns of the north of India. His capital was Kanauj, one of the most ancient cities of India, for a long time the seat of the Gupta dynasty, and supposed to have been one of the cradles of Aryan civilisation. Ptolemy mentions it, 140 years after Christ, under the name of Kanogiya. The kingdom of which it was the capital in the days of Hwen Tsang extended from Kashmir to Assam and from Nepal to the Nerbudda.

Kanauj lies east of Agra, a few miles from the Ganges. All the traditions agree in extolling its splendour. It filled Mahmud of Ghazni with admiration when he attacked it in 1016 A.D. Ferishta says that as he approached it, he saw “a city which raised its head as high as heaven, and which, in fortifications and architecture, could justly boast that it had no rival.”