13S On the Introduction of Writing into India. £No. 2. 



But though it is certain that the Homeric poets did not write, or, 

 if we are to adopt the legendary language of certain critics, though 

 it is certain that blind Homer did not keep a private secretary, 

 there is no doubt that, at the time of Pisistratus, when the final 

 collection of the Homeric poems took place, that collection was a 

 collection of written poems. Pisistratus possessed a large library, 

 and, though books were not so common in his time as they were at 

 the time of Alcibiades, when every schoolmaster had his Iliad, yet, 

 ever since the importation of paper into Greece, writing was a 

 common acquirement of the educated classes of Greeks. The 

 whole civilisation of Greece, and the rapid growth of Greek litera- 

 ture, has been ascribed to the free trade between Egypt and Greece, 

 beginning with the Saidic dynasty. Greece imported all its paper 

 from Egypt ; and without paper no Greek literature would have been 

 possible. The skins of animals were too rare, and their preparation 

 too expensive, to allow the growth of a popular literature. Hero- 

 dotus mentions it as a peculiarity of the barbarians, that at his time 

 some of them still wrote on skins only. Paper (papyrus or byblus) 

 was evidently to Greece what linen paper was to Europe in the 

 middle ages.* 



Now, if we look for any similar traces in the history of Indian 

 literature, our search is completely disappointed. There is no men- 

 tion of writing materials, whether paper, bark, or skins, at the time 

 when the Indian Diaskeuasts collected the songs of their Rishis ; 

 nor is there any allusion to writing during the whole of the Brah- 

 mana period. This upsets the common theories about the origin of 

 prose literature. According to "Wolf,t prose composition is a safe 

 sign of a written literature. It is not so in India. The whole of the 

 Brahman a literature, however incredible it may seem, shows not a 

 single vestige of the art of writing. Nay, more than this, even 

 during the Sutra period, all the evidence that we can get would lead 

 us to suppose that even then, though the art of writing began to 



* Plin. Hist. Nat. xiii. 13. § 27. : " Cum chartse uau maxime humanitas vita) 

 constat et memoria." 



f Wolf, Prolegomena, lxx — lxxiii. : " Scripturam tentare et communi usui 

 apt are plane idem videtur fuisse atque prosam tentare et in ea excolenda so 

 ponere." 



