lated with the names of their superhuman rulers there are
few[139] dates in the pre-Mohammedan history which can be determined
from purely Indian sources. The fragments of obscure Greek writers and
the notes of a travelling Chinaman furnish more trustworthy data about
important epochs in the history of the Hindus than the whole of their
gigantic literature, in which there has been found no mention of
Alexander's invasion and only scattered allusions to the conquests of
the Sakas, Kushans and Hunas. We can hardly imagine doubt as to the
century in which Shakespeare or Virgil lived, yet when I first studied
Sanskrit the greatest of Indian dramatists, Kalidasa, was supposed to
have lived about 50 B.C. His date is not yet fixed with unanimity but it
is now generally placed in the fifth or sixth century A.D.

This chronological chaos naturally affects the value of literature as a
record of the development of thought. We are in danger of moving in a
vicious circle: of assigning ideas to an epoch because they occur in a
certain book, while at the same time we fix the date of the book in
virtue of the ideas which it contains. Still we may feel some security
as to the sequence, if not the exact dates, of the great divisions in
Indian religious literature such as the period of the Vedic hymns, the
period of the Brahmanas, the rise of Buddhism, the composition of the
two great epics, and the Puranas. If we follow the opinion of most
authorities and accept the picture of Indian life and thought contained
in the Pali Tripitaka as in the main historical, it seems to follow that
both the ritual system of the Brahmanas and the philosophic speculations
of the Upanishads were in existence by 500 B.C.[140] and sufficiently
developed to impress the public mind with a sense of their futility.
Some interval of mental growth seems to separate the Upanishads from the
Brahmanas and a more decided interval separates the Brahmanas from the
earlier hymns of the Rig Veda, if not from the compilation of the whole
collection[141]. We may hence say that the older Upanishads and
Brahmanas must have been composed between 800 and 500 B.C. and the hymns
of the Rig Veda hardly later than 1000 B.C. Many authorities think the
earlier hymns must date from 2000 rather than 1000 B.C. but the
resemblance of the Rig Veda to the Zoroastrian Gathas (which are
generally regarded as considerably later than 1000 B.C.) is plain, and
it will be strange if the two collect