TRANSFORMATION IN SANSKRIT STUDIES 107 



Era! Of Alexander himself and his expedition they naturally remem- 

 bered nothing. Up to the time of the Mussulman invasion, too positive 

 and too near to be by any possibility denied, they pictured India 

 happy and blissful, enjoying the willing or compelled respect of all 

 the barbarians of the earth. The positive and exact testimony of the 

 Greeks and Latins exposed the fraud of the Brahmans; Hellenism, 

 it was well known, had penetrated victoriously into the " Holy Land." 

 But it was not enough to bring to light the interested falsehoods of 

 the priestly caste; science undertook the colossal task of restoring 

 to India her lost history. Scattered over the vast expanse of the 

 country, steles, pillars, and rocks could still be met with, on which 

 were traced inscriptions in enigmatic characters, mute witnesses of 

 vanished epochs. The patience of investigators a patience of 

 genius succeeded in breaking through their long silence. After 

 a century of work the political history of the Hindu world begins to 

 appear to us; still broken up by enormous gaps, confused, uncertain, 

 calling for cautious judgment. It is still easy to mention dynasties 

 which waver, according to the differing hypotheses, within a space 

 of three centuries, the length of time which separates Alexander 

 from Augustus, the discovery of America from the Independence of 

 the United States. But, taken as a whole, the picture is already 

 clear. Political India shows a resemblance to religious India in a 

 continual production of small groups which combine together, 

 now and again, to form a system, and fall apart almost immediately. 

 And this history, which was believed to be as old as the world, does 

 not begin before the morrow of the Macedonian invasion! We have 

 not a single line of an inscription which we have the right to date 

 earlier than this. The epigraphy of India begins with the admirable 

 sermons which a Buddhist emperor, Ac.oka, caused to be engraved 

 in every corner of his vast dominions toward the year 250 before 

 the Christian Era. A happy chance, perhaps some deep excavations, 

 may open out to epigraphy a more distant horizon; but at the 

 present time our positive documents do not go beyond the date 

 mentioned. Sanskrit epigraphy begins still later. It appears in ten- 

 tative fashion at about the beginning of the Christian Era, but does 

 not begin to flourish till the middle of the second century. Before 

 this period the authors of the inscriptions used only dialects, related, 

 no doubt, to Sanskrit, but greatly disfigured and altered. I am far 

 from concluding that the Sanskrit language was not formed till this 

 late epoch; but it must be admitted on this testimony that Sanskrit 

 was not one of the vulgar tongues of India three centuries before the 

 birth of Christ. The grammarians who had lovingly fashioned it 

 had detached it from real life when they gave it fixed forms. Doubt- 

 less the divorce only became apparent by degrees; the difference 

 between the spoken language and the written Sanskrit at first only 



