The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

During this night of something like twelve centuries, the important personages whose memory the Hindu chroniclers have preserved to us are few in number. The most celebrated is the legendary Vikramaditya, prince of Malwa, who lived at Ujjain, near the Nerbudda. According to the chronicles, he extended his empire over the whole of India, as far as the southern point of the Deccan. Although his history is nothing but a tissue of fabulous legends, he must certainly have fulfilled an important rôle, since the Hindus date a new era, the Samvat era, from his accession, which they suppose to have taken place 57 B.C.

Unfortunately the Hindu chronicles, according to their wont, have paid little respect to chronology, for an attentive study of the inscriptions and the monuments appears to prove that Vikramaditya reigned six hundred years after the epoch indicated by the books.[18]

It is to the same hero that the Hindu legends attribute the expulsion of the Scythians from India. These people had penetrated to the Greeks of Bactriana two centuries before Christ, and had gradually subdued them. One of their kings, Kanishka, a convert to Buddhism, had shortly before our era founded an empire comprising Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Rajputana. We know nothing of the history of the Scythians in India, unless it be that they propagated the artistic influence of the Greeks, as we see by some statues at Muttra.

According to the inscriptions interpreted by Cunningham, we should probably include amongst the contemporaries of Vikramaditya [see footnote] the Rajah Harshavardhara, who reigned from 607-648 and of whom the Chinese pilgrim, Hwen Tsang, who visited India in 634, speaks as one of the most powerful sovereigns of the north of India. His capital was Kanauj, one of the most ancient cities of India, for a long time the seat of the Gupta dynasty, and supposed to have been one of the cradles of Aryan civilisation. Ptolemy mentions it, 140 years after Christ, under the name of Kanogiya. The kingdom of which it was the capital in the days of Hwen Tsang extended from Kashmir to Assam and from Nepal to the Nerbudda.

Kanauj lies east of Agra, a few miles from the Ganges. All the traditions agree in extolling its splendour. It filled Mahmud of Ghazni with admiration when he attacked it in 1016 A.D. Ferishta says that as he approached it, he saw “a city which raised its head as high as heaven, and which, in fortifications and architecture, could justly boast that it had no rival.”

Of this ancient capital which, if we are to believe Hwen Tsang, was three miles in length, there remains not a stone to tell its history. As in the case of many famous old capitals, the destruction of the monuments anterior to the Mohammedan invasion was so complete that, in spite of all his investigations, Cunningham could not succeed in recovering a single relic. The oldest thing which he observed at Kanauj is an inscription dating only from 1136 and consequently later than the Mohammedan invasion. All the existing monuments of this town are exclusively Mohammedan, though sometimes constructed from the débris of ancient Hindu monuments.