BOOK II
HISTORY OF THE RĀJPUT TRIBES
CHAPTER 1
The Purānas.
—Being desirous of epitomizing the chronicles of the martial races of Central and Western India, it was essential to ascertain the sources whence they draw, or claim to draw, their lineage. For this purpose I obtained from the library of the Rana of Udaipur their sacred volumes, the Puranas, and laid them before a body of pandits, over whom presided the learned Jati Gyanchandra. From these extracts were made of all the genealogies of the great races of Surya and Chandra, and of facts historical and geographical.Most of the Puranas[1] contain portions of historical as well as geographical knowledge; but the Bhagavat, the Skanda, the Agni, and the Bhavishya are the chief guides. It is rather fortunate than to be regretted that their chronologies do not perfectly agree. The number of princes in each line varies, and names are transposed; but we recognize distinctly the principal features in each, affording the conclusion that they are the productions of various writers, borrowing from some common original source [21].
Deluge Legend.
—The Genesis[2] of India commences with an event described in the history of almost all nations, the deluge, which, though treated with the fancy peculiar to the orientals, is not the less entitled to attention. The essence of the extract from the Agni Purana is this: “When ocean quitted his bounds and caused universal destruction by Brahma’s command, Vaivaswata[3] Manu (Noah), who dwelt near the Himalaya[4] mountains was giving water to the gods in the Kritamala river, when a small fish fell into his hand. A voice commanded him to preserve it. The fish expanded to an enormous size. Manu, with his sons and their wives, and the sages, with the seed of every living thing, entered into a vessel which was fastened to a horn on the head of the fish, and thus they were preserved.”Here, then, the grand northern chain is given to which the abode of the great patriarch of mankind approximated. In the Bhavishya it is stated, that “Vaivaswata (sun-born) Manu ruled at the mountain Sumeru. Of his seed was Kakutstha Raja, who obtained sovereignty at Ayodhya,[5] and his descendants filled the land and spread over the earth.”
I am aware of the meaning given to Sumeru, that thus the Hindus designated the north pole of the earth. But they had also a mountain with this same appellation of pre-eminence of Meru, ‘the hill,’ with the prefix Su, ‘good, sacred’: the Sacred Hill.
Meru, Sumeru.
—In the geography of the Agni Purana, the term is used as a substantial geographical limit;[6] and some of the rivers flowing from the mountainous ranges, whose relative position with Sumeru are there defined, still retain their ancient appellations. Let us not darken the subject, by supposing only allegorical meanings attached to explicit points. In the distribution of their seven dwipas, or continents, though they interpose seas of curds, milk, or wine, we should not reject strong and evident facts, because subsequent ignorant interpolators filled up the page with puerilities [22].This sacred mountain (Sumeru) is claimed by the Brahmans as the abode of Mahadeva,[7] Adiswar,[8] or Baghes[9]; by the Jains, as the abode of Adinath,[10] the first Jiniswara, or Jain lord. Here they say he taught mankind the arts of agriculture and civilized life. The Greeks claimed it as the abode of Bacchus; and hence the Grecian fable of this god being taken from the thigh of Jupiter, confounding meros (thigh) with the meru (hill) of this Indian deity. In this vicinity the followers of Alexander had their Saturnalia, drank to excess of the wine from its indigenous vines, and bound their brows with ivy (vela)[11] sacred to the Baghes of the east and west, whose votaries alike indulge in ‘strong drink.’
These traditions appear to point to one spot, and to one individual, in the early history of mankind, when the Hindu and the Greek approach a common focus; for there is little doubt that Adinath, Adiswara, Osiris, Baghes, Bacchus, Manu, Menes designate the patriarch of mankind, Noah.
The Hindus can at this time give only a very general idea of the site of Meru; but they appear to localize it in a space of which Bamian, Kabul, and Ghazni would be the exterior points. The former of these cities is known to possess remains of the religion of Buddha, in its caves and colossal statues.[12] The Paropamisan Alexandria is near Bamian; but the Meru and Nyssa[13] of Alexander are placed more to the eastward by the Greek writers, and according to the cautious Arrian between the Cophas and Indus. Authority localizes it between Peshawar and Jalalabad, and calls it Merkoh, or Markoh,[14] "a bare rock 2000 feet high [23] with caves to the westward, termed Bedaulat by the Emperor Humayun from its dismal appearance."[15] This designation, however, of Dasht-i Bedaulat, or ‘unhappy plain,’ was given to the tract between the cities beforementioned [24].
The only scope of these remarks on Sumeru is to show that the Hindus themselves do not make India within the Indus the cradle of their race, but west, amidst the hills of Caucasus,[16] whence the sons of Vaivaswata, or the ‘sun-born,’ migrated eastward to the Indus and Ganges, and founded their first establishment in Kosala, the capital, Ayodhya, or Oudh.
Most nations have indulged the desire of fixing the source whence they issued, and few spots possess more interest than this elevated Madhya-Bhumi, or ‘central region’ of Asia, where the Amu, Oxus, or Jihun, and other rivers, have their rise, and in which both the Surya and Indu[17] races (Sakha) claim the hill,[18] sacred to a great patriarchal ancestor, whence they migrated eastward.
The Rajput tribes could scarcely have acquired some of their still existing Scythic habits and warlike superstitions on the burning plains of Ind.Ind. It was too hot to hail with fervent adoration the return of the sun from his southern course to enliven the northern hemisphere. This should be the religion of a colder clime, brought from their first haunts, the sources of the Jihun and Jaxartes. The grand solstitial festival, the Aswamedha, or sacrifice of the horse (the type of the sun), practised by the children of Vaivaswata, the ‘sun-born,’ was most probably simultaneously introduced from Scythia into the plains of Ind, and west, by the sons of Odin, Woden, or Budha, into Scandinavia, where it became the Hi-el or Hi-ul,[19] the festival of the winter solstice; the grand jubilee of northern nations, and in the first ages of Christianity, being so near the epoch of its rise, gladly used by the first fathers of the church to perpetuate that event[20][25].
1. “Every Purana,” says the first authority existing in Sanskrit lore, “treats of five subjects: the creation of the universe; its progress, and the renovation of the world; the genealogy of gods and heroes; chronology, according to a fabulous system; and heroic history, containing the achievements of demi-gods and heroes. Since each purana contains a cosmogony, both mythological and heroic history, the works which bear that title may not unaptly be compared to the Grecian theogonies” (‘Essay on the Sanskrit and Pracrit Languages,’ by H. T. Colebrooke, Esq.; As. Res. vol. vii. p. 202). [On the age of the Purānas see Smith, EHI, 21 ff.]
2. Resolvable into Sanskrit, janam, ‘birth,’ and is and iswar, ‘lords’ [γένω, γίγνομαι, Skr. root jan, ‘to generate’].
3. Son of the sun.
4. The snowy Caucasus. Sir William Jones, in an extract from a work entitled Essence of the Pooranas, says that this event took place at Dravira in the Deccan.
5. The present Ajodhya, capital of one of the twenty-two satrapies constituting the Mogul Empire, and for some generations held by the titular Vizir, who has recently assumed the regal title. [Ghāziu-d-dīn Haidar in 1819.]
6. “To the south of Sumeru are the mountains Himavan, Hemakūta, and Nishadha; to the north are the countries Nīl, Sveta, and Sringi. Between Hemāchal and the ocean the land is Bhāratkhand, called Kukarma Bhūmi (land of vice, opposed to Āryāvarta, or land of virtue), in which the seven grand ranges are Mahendra, Malaya, Sahya, Suktimat, Riksha, Vindhya, and Paripatra” (Agni Purana).
7. The Creator, literally ‘the Great God.’
8. The ‘first lord.’
9. Baghes, ‘the tiger lord.’lord.’ He wears a tiger’s or panther’s hide; which he places beneath him. So Bacchus did. The phallus is the emblem of each. Baghes has several temples in Mewar. [In identifying Bacchus with a Hindu tiger god the author depended on Asiatic Researches, i. 258, viii. 51. For the Greek story in the text see Quintus Curtius viii. 10; Diodorus iii. 63; Arrian, Anabasis, vii.]
10. First lord.
11. Vela is the general term for a climber, sacred to the Indian Bacchus (Baghes, Adiswara, or Mahadeva), whose priests, following his example, are fond of intoxicating beverages, or drugs. The amarbel, or immortal vela, is a noble climber.
12. [“In the Tūmān of Zohāk and Bāmiān, the fortress of Zohāk is a monument of great antiquity, and in good preservation, but the fort of Bāmiān is in ruins. In the mountain-side caves have been excavated and ornamented with plaster and paintings. Of these there are 12,000 which are called Sumaj, and in former times were used by the people as winter retreats. Three colossal figures are here: one is the statue of a man, 80 yards in height; another that of a woman, 50 yards high, and the third that of a child measuring 15 yards. Strange to relate, in one of the caves is placed a coffin containing the body of one who reposes in his last sleep. The oldest and most learned of antiquarians can give no account of its origin, but suppose it to be of great antiquity. In days of old the ancients prepared a medicament with which they anointed corpses and consigned them to earth in a hard soil. The simple, deceived by this art, attribute their preservation to a miracle” (Āīn, ii. 409 f., with Jarrett’s notes). For Bāmiān see EB, iii. 304 f.]
13. Nishadha is mentioned in the Purana as a mountain. If in the genitive case (which the final syllable marks), it would be a local term given from the city of Nissa. [Nysa has no connexion with Nishadha. It probably lay near Jalalabad or Koh-i Mor (Smith, EHI, 53).]
14. Meru, Sanskrit, and Koh, Persian, for a ‘hill.’
15. Asiatic Researches, vol. vi. p. 497. Wilford appears to have borrowed largely from that ancient store-house (as the Hindu would call it) of learning, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World. He combines, however, much of what that great man had so singularly acquired and condensed, with what he himself collected, and with the aid of imagination has formed a curious mosaic. But when he took a peep into “the chorographical description of the Terrestrial Paradise,” I am surprised he did not separate the nurseries of mankind before and after the flood. There is one passage, also, of Sir Walter Raleigh which would have aided his hypothesis, that Eden was in Higher Asia, between the common sources of the Jihun and other grand rivers: the abundance of the Ficus Indica, or bar-tree, sacred to the first lord, Adnath or Mahadeva.
“Now for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, some men have presumed further; especially Gorapius Bocanus, who giveth himself the honour to have found out the kind of this tree, which none of the writers of former times could ever guess at, whereat Gorapius much marvelleth.”
Sir Walter strongly supports the Hindu hypothesis regarding the locality of the nursery for rearing mankind, and that “India was the first planted and peopled countrie after the flood” (p. 99). His first argument is, that it was a place where the vine and olive were indigenous, as amongst the Sakai Scythai (and as they still are, together with oats, between Kabul and Bamian); and that Ararat could not be in Armenia, because the Gordian mountains on which the ark rested were in longitude 75°, and the Valley of Shinar 79° to 80°, which would be reversing the tide of migration. “As they journeyed from the East, they found a plain, in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there” (Genesis, chap. xi. ver. 2). He adds, “Ararat, named by Moses, is not any one hill, but a general term for the great Caucasian range; therefore we must blow up this mountain Ararat, or dig it down and carry it out of Armenia, or find it elsewhere in a warmer country, and east from Shinar.” He therefore places it in Indo-Scythia, in 140° of longitude and 35° to 37° of latitude, “where the mountains do build themselves exceeding high”: and concludes, "It was in the plentiful warm East where Noah rested, where he planted the vine, where he tilled the ground and lived thereon. Placuit vero Noacho agriculturæ studium in qua tractanda ipse omnium peritissimus esse dicitur; ob eamque rem, sua ipsius lingua, Ish-Adamath:[A] hoc est, Telluris Vir, appellatur, celebratusque est. The study of husbandry pleased Noah (says the excellent learned man, Arius Montanus) in the order and knowledge of which it is said that Noah excelled all men, and therefore was he called in his own language, a man exercised in the earth." The title, character, and abode exactly suit the description the Jains give of their first Jiniswara, Adinath, the first lordly man, who taught them agriculture, even to “muzzling the bull in treading out the corn.”
Had Sir Walter been aware that the Hindu sacred books styled their country Aryavarta,[B] and of which the great Imaus is the northern boundary, he would doubtless have seized it for his Ararat. [Needless to say, these speculations are obsolete.]
A. In Sanskrit, Īsh, ‘Lord,’ ādi, ‘the first,’ matti, ‘Earth.’ [The derivation is absurd: matti, ‘clay,’ is modern Hindi.] Here the Sanskrit and Hebrew have the same meaning, ‘first lord of the earth.’ In these remote Rajput regions, where early manners and language remain, the strongest phrase to denote a man or human being is literally ‘earth.’ A chief describing a fray between his own followers and borderers whence death ensued, says, Meri matti māri, ‘My earth has been struck’: a phrase requiring no comment, and denoting that he must have blood in return.
B. Āryāvarta, or the land of promise or virtue, cannot extend to the flat plains of India south of the Himavat; for this is styled in the Purānas the very reverse, kukarma des, or land of vice. [Āryāvarta is the land bounded by the Himalaya and Vindhya, from the eastern to the western seas (Manu, Laws, ii. 22).]
16. Hindu, or Indu-kush or koh, is the local appellation; ‘mountain of the moon.’ [Hindu-kush is said to mean ‘Hindu-slayer’ or ‘Indian Caucasus.’]
17. Solar and lunar.
18. Meru, ‘the hill,’ is used distinctively, as in Jaisalmer (the capital of the Bhatti tribe in the Western Desert), ‘the hill of Jaisal’; Merwara, or the ‘mountainous region’; and its inhabitants Meras, or ‘mountaineers.’ Thus, also, in the grand epic the Ramayana (Book i. p. 236), Mena is the mountain-nymph, the daughter of Meru and spouse of Himavat; from whom sprung two daughters, the river goddess Ganga and the mountain-nymph Parbati. She is, in the Mahabharata, also termed Saila, the daughter of Sail, another designation of the snowy chain; and hence mountain streams are called in Sanskrit silletee [?]. Saila bears the same attributes with the Phrygian Cybele, who was also the daughter of a mountain of the same name; the one is carried, the other drawn, by lions. Thus the Greeks also metamorphosed Parbat Pamer, or ‘the mountain Pamer,’ into Paropamisan, applied to the Hindu Koh west of Bamian: but the Parbat pat Pamer, or ‘Pamer chief of hills,’ is mentioned by the bard Chand as being far east of that tract, and under it resided Hamīra, one of the great feudatories of Prithwiraja of Delhi. Had it been Paropanisan (as some authorities write it), it would better accord with the locality where it takes up the name, being near to Nyssa and Meru, of which Parbat or Pahar would be a version, and form Paronisan, ‘the Mountain of Nyssa,’ the range Nishadha of the Puranas. [The true form is Paropanisos: the suggested derivation is impossible.]
19. Haya or Hi, in Sanskrit, ‘horse’—El, ‘sun’: whence ἵππος and ἕλιος. Ηλ appears to have been a term of Scythian origin for the sun; and Hari, the Indian Apollo, is addressed as the sun. Hiul, or Jul, of northern nations (qu. Noel of France?), is the Hindu Sankrānti, of which more will be said hereafter. [The feast was known as Hvil, Jul, or Yule, and the suggested derivation is impossible.]
20. Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.
CHAPTER 2
Puranic Genealogies.
—The chronicles of the Bhagavat and Agni, containing the genealogies of the Surya (sun) and Indu (moon) races, shall now be examined. The first of these, by calculation, brings down the chain to a period six centuries subsequent to Vikramaditya (A.D. 650), so that these books may have been remodelled or commented on about this period: their fabrication cannot be supposed.Although portions of these genealogies by Sir William Jones, Mr. Bentley, and Colonel Wilford, have appeared in the volumes of the Asiatic Researches, yet no one should rest satisfied with the inquiries of others, if by any process he can reach the fountain-head himself.
If, after all, these are fabricated genealogies of the ancient families of India, the fabrication is of ancient date, and they are all they know themselves upon the subject. The step next in importance to obtaining a perfect acquaintance with the genuine early history of nations, is to learn what those nations repute to be such.
Doubtless the original Puranas contained much valuable historical matter; but, at present, it is difficult to separate a little pure metal from the base alloy of ignorant expounders and interpolators. I have but skimmed the surface: research, to the capable, may yet be rewarded by many isolated facts and important transactions, now hid under the veil of ignorance and allegory.
Neglect of History by the Hindus.
—The Hindus, with the decrease of intellectual power, their possession of which is evinced by their architectural remains, where just proportion and elegant mythological device are still visible, lost the relish for the beauty of truth, and adopted the monstrous in their writings as well as their edifices. But for detection and shame, matters of history would be hideously distorted even in civilized Europe; but in the East, in the moral decrepitude of ancient Asia, with no judge to condemn, no public to praise, each priestly expounder may revel in an unfettered imagination, and reckon his admirers in proportion to the mixture of the marvellous[1] [26]. Plain historical truths have long ceased to interest this artificially fed people.If at such a comparatively modern period as the third century before Christ, the Babylonian historian Berosus composed his fictions, which assigned to that monarchy such incredible antiquity, it became capable of refutation from the many historians of repute who preceded him. But on the fabulist of India we have no such check. If Vyasa himself penned these legends as now existing, then is the stream of knowledge corrupt from the fountain-head. If such the source, the stream, filtering through ages of ignorance, has only been increased by fresh impurities. It is difficult to conceive how the arts and sciences could advance, when it is held impious to doubt the truth of whatever has been handed down, and still more to suppose that the degenerate could improve thereon. The highest ambition of the present learned priesthood, generation after generation, is to be able to comprehend what has thus reached them, and to form commentaries upon past wisdom; which commentaries are commented on ad infinitum. Whoever dare now aspire to improve thereon must keep the secret in his own breast. They are but the expounders of the olden oracles; were they more they would be infidels. But this could not always have been the case.
With the Hindus, as with other nations, the progress to the heights of science they attained must have been gradual; unless we take from them the merit of original invention, and set them down as borrowers of a system. These slavish fetters of the mind must have been forged at a later period, and it is fair to infer that the monopoly of science and religion was simultaneous. What must be the effect of such monopoly on the impulses and operations of the understanding? Where such exists, knowledge could not long remain stationary; it must perforce retrograde. Could we but discover the period when religion[2] ceased to be a profession [27] and became hereditary (and that such there was these very genealogies bear evidence), we might approximate the era when science attained its height.
The Priestly Office.
—In the early ages of these Solar and Lunar dynasties, the priestly office was not hereditary in families; it was a profession; and the genealogies exhibit frequent instances of branches of these races terminating their martial career in the commencement of a religious sect, or gotra, and of their descendants reassuming their warlike occupations. Thus, of the ten sons of Ikshwaku,[3] three are represented as abandoning worldly affairs and taking to religion; and one of these, Kanina, is said to be the first who made an agnihotra, or pyreum, and worshipped fire, while another son embraced commerce. Of the Lunar line and the six sons of Pururavas, the name of the fourth was Raya; “from him the fifteenth generation was Harita, who with his eight brothers took to the office of religion, and established the Kausika Gotra, or tribe of Brahmans.”From the twenty-fourth prince in lineal descent from Yayati, by name Bharadwaja, originated a celebrated sect, who still bear his name, and are the spiritual teachers of several Rajput tribes.
Of the twenty-sixth prince, Manava, two sons devoted themselves to religion, and established celebrated sects, viz. Mahavira, whose descendants were the Pushkar Brahmans; and Sankriti, whose issue were learned in the Vedas.Vedas. From the line of Ajamidha these ministers of religion were continually branching off.
In the very early periods, the princes of the Solar line, like the Egyptians and Romans, combined the offices of the priesthood with kingly power, and this whether Brahmanical or Buddhist.[4] Many of the royal line, before and subsequent to Rama, passed great part of their lives as ascetics; and in ancient sculpture and drawings the head is as often adorned with the braided lock of the ascetic as with the diadem of royalty.[5]
The greatest monarchs bestowed their daughters on these royal hermits and sages [28]. Ahalya, the daughter of the powerful Panchala,[6] became the wife of the ascetic Gautama. The sage Jamadagni espoused the daughter of Sahasra[7] Arjuna, of Mahishmat,[8] king of the Haihaya tribe, a great branch of the Yadu race.
Among the Egyptians, according to Herodotus [ii. 37, 141], the priests succeeded to sovereignty, as they and the military class alone could hold lands; and Sethos, the priest of Vulcan, caused a revolution, by depriving the military of their estates.
We have various instances in India of the Brahmans from Jamadagni to the Mahratta Peshwa, contesting for sovereignty; power[9] and homage being still their great aim, as in the days of Vishvamitra[10] and Vasishtha, the royal sages [29] whom “Janaka sovereign of Mithila, addressed with folded hands in token of superiority.”
Relations of Rajputs with Brahmans.
—But this deference for the Brahmans is certainly, with many Rajput classes, very weak. In obedience to prejudice, they show them outward civility; but, unless when their fears or wishes interfere, they are less esteemed than the bards.The story of the King Vishvamitra of Gadhipura[11] and the Brahman Vasishtha, which fills so many sections of the first book of the Ramayana,[12] exemplifies, under the veil of allegory, the contests for power between the Brahmanical and military classes, and will serve to indicate the probable period when the castes became immutable. Stripped of its allegory, the legend appears to point to a time when the division of the classes was yet imperfect; though we may infer, from the violence of the struggle, that it was the last in which Brahmanhood could be obtained by the military.
Vishvamitra was the son of Gadhi (of the race of Kausika), King of Gadhipura, and contemporary of Ambarisha, King of Ayodhya or Oudh, the fortieth prince from Ikshwaku; consequently about two hundred years anterior to Rama. This event therefore, whence we infer that the system of castes was approaching perfection, was probably about one thousand four hundred years before Christ.
Dates of the Genealogies.
—If proof can be given that these genealogies existed in the days of Alexander, the fact would be interesting. The legend in the Puranas, of the origin of the Lunar race, appears to afford this testimony.Vyasa, the author of the grand epic the Mahabharata, was son of Santanu (of the race of Hari),[13] sovereign of Delhi, by Yojanagandha, a fisherman’s daughter,[14] [30] consequently illegitimate. He became the spiritual father, or preceptor, of his nieces, the daughters of Vichitravirya, the son and successor of Santanu.
The Herakles Legend.
—Vichitravirya had no male offspring. Of his three daughters, one was named Pandaia[15]; and Vyasa, being the sole remaining male branch of the house of Santanu, took his niece, and spiritual daughter, Pandaia, to wife, and became the father of Pandu, afterwards sovereign of Indraprastha.Arrian gives the story thus: "It is further said that he [Herakles][16] had a very numerous progeny of children born to him in India ... [31] but that he had only one daughter.[17] The name of this child was Pandaia, and the land in which she was born, and with the sovereignty of which Herakles entrusted her, was called after her name Pandaia" (Indika, viii.).
This is the very legend contained in the Puranas, of Vyasa (who was Hari-kul-es, or chief of the race of Hari) and his spiritual daughter Pandaia, from whom the grand race the Pandavas, and from whom Delhi and its dependencies were designated the Pandava sovereignty.
Her issue ruled for thirty-one generations in direct descents, or from 1120 to 610 before Christ; when the military minister,[18] connected by blood, was chosen by the chiefs who rebelled against the last Pandu king, represented as “neglectful of all the cares of government,” and whose deposition and death introduced a new dynasty.
Two other dynasties succeeded in like manner by the usurpation of these military ministers, until Vikramaditya, when the Pandava sovereignty and era of Yudhishthira were both overturned.
Indraprastha remained without a sovereign, supreme power being removed from the north to the southern parts of India, till the fourth, or, according to some authorities, the eighth century after Vikrama, when the throne of Yudhishthira was once more occupied by the Tuar tribe of Rajputs, claiming descents from the Pandus. To this ancient capital, thus refounded, the new appellation of Delhi was given; and the dynasty of the founder, Anangpal, lasted to the twelfth century, when he abdicated in favour of his grandson,[19] Prithiviraja, the last imperial Rajput sovereign of India, whose defeat and death introduced the Muhammadans.
This line has also closed with the pageant of a prince, and a colony returned from the extreme west is now the sole arbiter of the thrones of Pandu and Timur.
Britain has become heir to the monuments of Indraprastha raised by the descendants of Budha and Ila; to the iron pillar of the Pandavas, "whose pedestal[20] [32] is fixed in hell"; to the columns reared to victory, inscribed with characters yet unknown; to the massive ruins of its ancient continuous cities, encompassing a space still larger than the largest city in the world, whose mouldering domes and sites of fortresses,[21] the very names of which are lost, present a noble field for speculation on the ephemeral nature of power and glory. What monument would Britain bequeath to distant posterity of her succession to this dominion? Not one: except it be that of a still less perishable nature, the monument of national benefit. Much is in our power: much has been given, and posterity will demand the result.
1. The celebrated Goguet remarks on the madness of most nations pretending to trace their origin to infinity. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Scythians, particularly, piqued themselves on their high antiquity, and the first assimilate with the Hindus in boasting they had observed the course of the stars 473,000 years. Each heaped ages on ages; but the foundations of this pretended antiquity are not supported by probability, and are even of modern invention (Origin of Laws).
2. It has been said that the Brahmanical religion was foreign to India; but as to the period of importation we have but loose assertion. We can easily give credit to various creeds and tenets of faith being from time to time incorporated, ere the present books were composed, and that previously the sons of royalty alone possessed the office. Authorities of weight inform us of these grafts; for instance, Mr. Colebrooke gives a passage in his Indian Classes: “A chief of the twice-born tribe was brought by Vishnu’s eagle from Saca Dwipa; hence Saca Dwipa Brahmins were known in Jambu Dwipa.” By Saka Dwipa, Scythia is understood, of which more will be said hereafter. Ferishta also, translating from ancient authorities, says, to the same effect, that “in the reign of Mahraje, King of Canouj, a Brahmin came from Persia, who introduced magic, idolatry, and the worship of the stars”; so that there is no want of authority for the introduction of new tenets of faith. [The passage, inaccurately quoted, is taken from Dow i. 16. See Briggs’s translation, i. Introd. lxviii.]
3. See Table I. [now obsolete, not reprinted].
4. Some of the earlier of the twenty-four Tirthakaras, or Jain hierarchs, trace their origin from the solar race of princes. [As usual, Buddhism confused with Jainism.]
5. Even now the Rana of Mewar mingles spiritual duties with those of royalty, and when he attends the temple of the tutelary deity of his race, he performs himself all the offices of the high priest for the day. In this point a strong resemblance exists to many of the races of antiquity.
6. Prince of the country of Panjab, or five streams east of the Indus. [Panchāla was in the Ganges-Jumna Duāb and its neighbourhood.]
7. The legend of this monarch stealing his son-in-law’s, the hermit’s, cow (of which the Ramayana gives another version), the incarnation of Parasuram, son of Jamadagni, and his exploits, appear purely allegorical, signifying the violence and oppression of royalty over the earth (prithivi), personified by the sacred gao, or cow; and that the Brahmans were enabled to wrest royalty from the martial tribe, shows how they had multiplied. On the derivatives from the word gao, I venture an etymology for others to pursue:
ΓΑῙΑ, γέα, γῆ (Dor. γᾶ), that which produces all things (from γάω, genero); the earth.—Jones’s Dictionary.
ΓΆΛΑ, Milk. Gaola, Herdsman, in Sanskrit. Γαλατικοῖ, Κέλτοι, Galatians, or Gauls, and Celts (allowed to be the same) would be the shepherd races, the pastoral invaders of Europe [?].