Abstract
IT is not an easy task to write a popular introduction to the history of ancient India. A race, destitute of the historical sense, has left few records of early events save poems and dreary treatises on belief and ritual, coloured by religious antipathy and prejudices. The age of scientific excavation has scarcely begun, but even now the fresh material daily accumulating—epigraphical, numismatic, artistic—is so abundant and perplexing that the time for its scientific discussion has scarcely yet arrived. The ruling tendency of Indian history has always been centrifugal, and it is only at rare periods—those of Asoka and Harsha—that the story attains ephemeral unity, and, as a whole, it remains a record of the fortunes of petty States, without much material for a continuous sketch of social life or an account of the individual actors in the drama.
Ancient India, from the Earliest Times to the First Century A.D.
By Prof. E. J. Rapson. Pp. viii + 199. (Cambridge University Press, 1914.) Price 3s. net.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ancient India, from the Earliest Times to the First Century A.D.. Nature 93, 664 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/093664a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/093664a0