90 General Observations on [Feb. 



The brahmans are confessedly a foreign tribe in India, who were 

 located at first in or about the Punjab. 



They must, when they arrived, have been a small body — for they did 

 not spread as a people beyond their original locality until centuries had 

 elapsed.* 



From internal evidence they must have brought along with them 

 (from Persia or the N. "W. perhaps) a well defined system of social 

 polity, and we must suppose a religion. f 



If they had a religion, and had reached a clear stage of moral civili- 

 zation, they must have had a written language : but it is not under 

 this supposition easy to acccunt for their not having preserved any satis- 

 factory written account of themselves, either as an oifset from their 

 parent stock — or as a colony in a foreign land. 



That the want of such records, and of dates, would, under the same 

 supposition, lead to the inference that these brahmans wished to conceal 

 their origin, and to thus give them an opportunity of throwing it back 

 into the impenetrable darkness of the past. Thus for instance, although 

 while first peopling or living in the Punjab, they must have been in con- 

 stant contact with the Asiatic Greek kingdom, yet they have not pre- 

 served any thing I believe regarding them worthy of much notice, unless 

 accidently. 



They appear also not to have left, in their original seat in the Punjab, 

 any marks, architectural or otherwise, by which their residence there 

 could or can be traced, unless there, were, even then amongst them, 

 schismatics, professing Hero worship, or that of Buddha, who might 

 have co-operated in the building of the Chaityas there, all of which lead 



* As. Res. Vol. X. p. 32. The Peish-cara brahmans were Christians and first 

 arrived in Ceylon (from Persia in A. D. 77.) There were Peish-cara kings in In- 

 dian, called the dynasties of Arygo, Saca and Salava, and there were 25 kings of the 

 Sacas. 



•f" Wilford says, that Brahma's heaven lies towards Tartary, and that the Levites 

 were brahmans. 1 Faber considers that Brahma was the Bromius of the Greeks, 

 the Broum of the old Irish — and when the brahmans desired to represent him in 

 conjunction with his three sons Brahma, Vishnu and Siva they depicted him with 

 four heads, but when the triple offspring of the patriarch (Noah) had to be figured, 

 he had three heads only. These were Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, — or the Phoeni- 

 cian Cromus the younger, Jupiter, Belus and Apollo — or Shem, Ham and Japhet.2 

 1 J. A. S. B. Vol. VIII. p. 359, 360. 2 Faber's Cabiri, Vol. II. p. 381. 



