The History of Antiquity Volume Iv Part 5

We can do no more than make hypotheses about the original contents of the poem on the great war. Against the Kurus, who, at the head of the Bharatas, maintained their supremacy on the upper course of the Yamuna and the Ganges, there rises in rebellion a younger race, the Pandus, who have risen into note among the Panchalas. The sons of Pandu receive in marriage the daughter of the king of the Panchalas, who are situated to the south of the Bharatas on the confluence of the Yamuna and the Ganges; and they are aided by the king of the Matsyas. It is Krishna, a hero of the Yadavas, to whom the Pandus owe their success in council and action. The Epos represents the Pandus as growing up in their childhood in the forest, and afterwards again making their home in the wilderness; they receive half of the kingdom of the Bharatas, and then lose it; and in their half they found Indraprastha to the west of Hastinapura on the Yamuna. From this we may conclude that the supremacy of the Bharatas established by the Kurus was resisted by the Panchalas and Matsyas and a part of the Yadavas--the Yadavas fight in the Epos partly for the Kurus and partly against them--and that a family among these nations, apparently a family of the Panchalas, succeeded in combining this resistance and establis.h.i.+ng another kingdom, with Indraprastha as a centre, beside the kingdom of Hastinapura, from which they finally conquered the Bharatas. This struggle of the Panchalas and Matsyas against the Bharatas is the nucleus of the Epos. A tradition may lie at the base of the statement in the poems, that the nations of the East, the Madras, Kocalas, Videhas and Angas (in north-western Bengal), fight beside the Kurus against the Panchalas and Matsyas: at any rate it would be to the interest of the previous settlers on the Ganges to repel the advance of later immigrants. On the other hand, the Kacis, in the region of the later Benares, may have fought against the Bharatas. However this may be, the race of the Kurus disappeared in a great war, and kings of the race of Pandu ascended the throne of Hastinapura. If, as we have a.s.sumed, the Bharatas had previously forced the Tritsus from the Sarasvati to the Yamuna, and from the Yamuna to the upper Ganges, and from the upper Ganges further east to the Sarayu, they were now, in turn, not indeed expelled, but over-mastered, by the tribes which had followed them and settled on the Yamuna. The metropolis of the kingdom which arose out of these struggles was Hastinapura, the chief city of the Bharatas; under the rule of the race of Pandu it comprised the Bharatas and the Panchalas; in the old ritual of consecration we find the formula: "This is your king, ye Kurus, ye Panchalas."[143]

The original poem no doubt took the part of the Kurus against the Pandus, of the Bharatas against the Panchalas. In some pa.s.sages of the old poem, which have remained intact, Duryodhana, _i.e._ Bad-fighter, is called Suyodhana, _i.e._ Good-fighter. It is not by their bravery but by their cunning that the Pandus were victorious. The words of the dying Duryodhana: "The Pandus have fought with subtlety and shame, and by shame have obtained the victory," are an invention made from this point of view. The vengeance which follows close after the victory of the Pandus, the ma.s.sacre of their army in the following night, through which the life of the dying Duryodhana is prolonged; the fulfilment of the curse which the mother of Duryodhana p.r.o.nounces upon Krishna and the Yadavas--at a later time the tribes of the Yadavas disappeared, at any rate in these regions--all enable us to detect the original form and object of the poem. It was the lament over the fall of the famous race of the Kurus, which had founded the oldest kingdom in India, over the death of Bhishma and his hundred sons, and the narration of the vengeance which overtook the crime of Krishna and the Pandus.

In any case certain traits which reappear in the Epic poetry of the Greeks and the Germans--the contest with the bow for Draupadi, the death of the young hero of half-divine descent by an arrow shot in secret, the fall of an ancient hero with his hundred sons, the destruction even of the victors in the great battle--are evidence that old Indo-Germanic conceptions must have formed the basis of the original poem. Even in the form in which we now have them they remind us of the grand, mighty, rude style of the oldest Epic poetry. In other respects also traits of antiquity are not wanting--the marriage of five brothers with one wife, the hazard of goods, kingdom, wife, and even personal liberty, on a single throw of the dice, which is an outcome of the pa.s.sionate nature already known to us through the songs of the Vedas. In the songs of the conquests and struggles on the Yamuna and Ganges, sung by the minstrels to the princes and n.o.bles of these new states, these elements became amalgamated with the praises of the deeds achieved by their ancestors at their first foundation. This is proved by the tone of the poem, which penetrates even the description of the great war. It was only before princes who made war and battle their n.o.blest occupation, before a.s.semblies of a warlike n.o.bility, and in the spirit of such circles, that songs could be recited, telling of the contests in all knightly accomplishments--the wooing of the king's daughter by the bow, the choice of a husband by the princess, who gives her hand to the n.o.blest knight. Only there could such lively and detailed descriptions of single contests and battles be given, and the laws of knightly honour and warfare be extolled with such enthusiasm. These must have penetrated deeply into the minds of the hearers, when the decision in the great battle could be brought about by a breach of these laws, and the destruction of the Yadavas accounted for by a quarrel arising out of a question of this kind. Even the law-book which bears the name of Manu places great value on the laws of honourable contest.[144] Hence we may with certainty a.s.sume that the songs of the princes who conquered the land on the Yamuna and the Ganges, were sung at the courts of their descendants, at the time when the latter, surrounded by an armed n.o.bility, ruled on the Ganges. There, after the tumult of the first period of the settlement had subsided, these songs of the marvels and achievements of ancient heroes, coloured with mythical conceptions, were united into a great poem, the original Epos of the great war, and in this the living heroic song came to an end. In the German Epos, the Nibelungen, we find a foundation of mythical elements, together with historical reminiscences of the wars of Dietrich of Bern, overgrown by the conflicts and destruction of the Burgundians.

At a much later time the Epos of the great war pa.s.sed from the tradition of the minstrels into the hands of the priests, by whom it was recorded and revised from a priestly point of view. Descendants of the Pandus who had overthrown the ancient famous race of the Kurus, and had gained in their place the kingdom of Hastinapura, are said to have remained on the throne for 30 generations in that city, and afterwards at Kaucambi. From other sources we can establish the fact, that at least in the sixth century B.C. the sovereignty among the Kuru-Panchalas belonged to kings who traced their descent from Pandu; and even in the fourth century we have mention of families of Nakula, and Sahadeva, and among the Eastern Bharatas, of descendants of Yudhishthira and Arjuna.[145] Hence the rulers of the tribe of Pandu must have thought it of much importance not to appear as evil-doers and rebels, and to invent some justification of their attack on the Kurus, and the throne of Hastinapura. In this way they would appear both to the Panchalas and the Bharatas as legitimate princes sprung from n.o.ble ancestors, and would share wherever possible in the ancient glory of the kings of the Bharatas, who were sprung from the race of Kuru. This end it was attempted to gain by revision and interpolation; and the views of the priests, which were of later origin, have no doubt supported the subsequent justification of the usurpation of the race of the Pandus. The priestly order might think it desirable to win the favour of the Pandu-kings of Kaucambi. Of this they were secure if they united the ancestors of the race with the family of the Kurus, while at the same time they brought the kings of the Bharatas and Panchalas into connection with priestly views of life by representing their ancestors as patterns of piety, virtue, and respect for priests.

In the old poem, Bhishma, the descendant of Kuru on the throne of the Bharatas, perished, at an advanced age, with his son Suyodhana, and his ninety-nine brothers, in stout conflict against the Pandus, who were at the head of the Panchalas; but his fall was due to the craft of the latter. On the other hand, the revision maintains that king cantanu was the last legitimate Kuru; that his son Bhishma renounced the throne, marriage, and children; that cantanu's younger son died childless; and represents the Dritarashtras and the Pandus as his illegitimate descendants. Thus the Pandus are brought into the race of Kuru, and the claims of the descendants of Dhritarashtra and Pandu are placed on an equality. It was an old custom among the Indians, not wholly removed by the law-book of the priests, even in the later form of the regulation, that if a father remained without a son his brother or some other relation might raise up a son to him by his wife or widow.[146]

According to the poem, the wife of cantanu charged her nearest relation, her natural son, to raise up children to the two childless widows of her son born in marriage. Agreeably to the tendency of the revision, this son is a very sacred and wise person; and thus it is proved that it was within the power of the priests to summon into life the most famous royal families. But great as the freedom of the revision is, it does not venture to deny the right of birth of the Kurus.

Dhritarashtra is the older, Pandu is the younger, of the two sons. In order to clear the younger brother, Dhritarashtra is afflicted with blindness, because his mother could not endure the sight of the great Brahman. Even the son of Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana, is allowed to have the right of birth; it is only maintained that Yudhishthira, Pandu's elder son, was born on the same day. That this insertion of the Pandus into the race of the Kurus in the Epic poem was completed in the fourth century B.C. we can prove.[147] The revision then represents Dhritarashtra as voluntarily surrendering half his kingdom to the sons of Pandu, and this is a great help towards their legitimacy. When the Pandus are resolved on war, Krishna removes Yudhishthira's scruples by a.s.serting "that even in times gone by it has not always been the eldest son who has sat on the throne of Hastinapura." These traits are all tolerably transparent. How weak the position of the Pandus was in the legend, how little could be told of their ancestors and of Pandu himself, is shown in the poem by the fact that the want of ancestors can only be supplemented by inserting the family in the race of the Kurus, and that no definite achievement of Pandu is mentioned. He is allowed to die early, and his sons grow up in the forest. So transparent is the veil thrown over the fact that an unknown family rose to be the leaders of the Panchalas. The insertion of Dhritarashtra is caused by the insertion of Pandu. The Indian poetry of the later period is not troubled by the fact that Bhishma, cantanu's eldest son, renounces the throne in order to allow a blind nephew to reign in his place; that even as a great-uncle he is the mightiest hero of the Kurus, and can only be slain on the battle-field by treachery.

Thus, rightly or wrongly, the Pandus were brought into the family of the Kurus. But why should the elder branch make way for the younger? To explain this circ.u.mstance, the blind king, the honourable Dhritarashtra, _i.e._ "firmly holding to the kingdom," must first fix on Yudhishthira as his successor, to the exclusion of his own sons, and then, even in his own lifetime, divide the kingdom with Yudhishthira. Hence the Pandus could advance claims, and the more fiercely Duryodhana opposed the surrender of his legitimate right, the more does he lose ground from a moral standard against the Pandus. His persecutions and villainies provide the revision with the means to bring the Pandus repeatedly into banishment, and into the forest, from which in the old poem they had been brought to stand at the head of the Panchalas. It is Duryodhana who causes the house of Pandu to be set on fire, who by false play wins Draupadi from Yudhishthira, and treats her despitefully, and takes from him the half of the kingdom. On the other hand, the sons of the Pandus, so far as the lines of the old poem allow, are changed into persecuted innocents, patterns of piety, virtue, and obedience to the Brahmans. It is naturally the form of Yudhishthira which undergoes the main change from these points of view, since he twice succ.u.mbs to the pa.s.sion for the game. By these interpolations his brother Bhima is fortunately put in a position to answer the reproach of the dying Duryodhana--that the Pandus had conquered by treachery and shame--by a.s.serting that they had not laid fire for their enemies as he had, or cheated them in the game, or outraged their women.

The revision carries the justification and legitimisation of the Pandus even beyond the destruction of Duryodhana and the Kurus. Owing to his blindness the king Dhritarashtra could not be brought into the battle and slain there. Where the old poem represents the mother of the slain Kurus as cursing Krishna, the revision interpolates a reconciliation between the aged Dhritarashtra and the destroyers of his race, a reconciliation naturally accomplished through the instrumentality of a Brahman. Hence Yudhishthira is allowed to ascend the throne of Hastinapura with the consent of the legitimate king, and reign in his name. Lastly, in order to remove every stain from the Pandus, they are represented as renouncing the world, and dying on a pious pilgrimage to the divine mountain.

A second revision of the poem--which, as will become clear below, cannot, in any case, have been made before the seventh century B.C.--represents the Pandus as becoming the sons of G.o.ds, and thus makes still easier the task of their justification. It was not by Pandu that Kunti became the mother of Yudhishthira, Arjuna, and Bhima, but the first and most just of all rulers she bore to the very G.o.d of justice.

Hence his claim to the throne and his righteous life were established from the first. The second brother, the great warrior Arjuna, owed his birth to Indra; the third, Bhima, to the strong wind-G.o.d, Vayu; the twin-sons of Madri are then naturally the children of the twins in heaven, the two Acvins. More serious is the change of Krishna, _i.e._ the black, into the G.o.d Vishnu, a.s.sumed in a third revision, which was completed in the course of the fourth century B.C. (Book VI. chap.

viii.). Krishna, after whom the city of Krishnapura on the Yamuna is said to have been named,[148] belongs to the tribe of the Yadavas, who were settled on the Yamuna, in the district of Mathura. He is the son of the cow-herd Nanda and his wife Yacoda; he is himself a cow-herd, drives off herds of cows, carries away the clothes of the daughters of the herdsmen while they are bathing, and engages in many other exploits of a similar kind. He rebels against the king of Mathura, and slays him. His crafty and treacherous plans then bring the heroes of the Kurus to destruction; at length, with his whole nation, he succ.u.mbs to the curse hurled against him by the mother of Duryodhana. Out of this form of the ancient poem the later revision has made an incarnation of Vishnu, the beneficent, sustaining G.o.d. The child of Vasudeva and Devaki, who bears all the marks of Vishnu, is no other than Vishnu, who permits himself to be born from Devaki; he is changed with the child of Yacoda, which was born in the same night. But these new points of view are not thoroughly carried out; the Mahabharata is not consistent about the origin of Krishna or his divine nature. At one time he is a human warrior, at another the highest of the G.o.ds, and the original position both of Krishna and the Pandus is still perceptible.[149]

The second great Epic of the Indians--the Ramayana--is essentially distinguished from the poems of the great war. Here also a legend, or ancient ballads, may have formed the basis; here, too, it is clear that a later redaction has changed the hero of the poem into an incarnation of a G.o.d. But the legend is already changed into the fairy tale, of which the scene is princ.i.p.ally the Deccan, the banks of the G.o.davari, the island of Lanka (Ceylon) where the Aryas first arrived about the year 500 B.C. The cast of the poem as a whole is essentially different from that of the Mahabharata. The old legend may have related the story of a prince who wins his wife by his power to string the great bow of her father, and who, when banished from the banks of the Sarayu, contends in the Himavat, or in the south of the Ganges, against the giants dwelling there. These giants carried off his wife from the forest hut, and he is only able to regain her after severe struggles. Rama, the banished prince, is supposed to be a son of a king of the Kocalas (the Tritsus of the Rigveda), who had taken up their abode on the Sarayu.

Dacaratha, the father of Rama, had apparently reigned a long time before the great war; he was descended from Ikshvaku, the son of Manu.

According to the Vishnu-Purana, Dacaratha is the sixtieth king of this family, the eleventh after Sudas, who repelled the attack of the Bharatas.[150] In their battle the Tritsus were aided by the priest Vasishtha, to whom in the poem of Rama the same place is allotted which in the Mahabharata is first allotted to Vicvamitra and then to Vyasa.

Without regard to the ancient poems and their strongly-marked traits of great battles and mighty contests, the priests entirely transformed the legend of Rama from their point of view into the form in which it now lies before us; and this took place at a period of Indian life, when the warlike impulse had long given way to peaceful inst.i.tutions, and the requirements of the priests had driven out the military code of honour and martial glory--a time when the weaker sides of the Aryan disposition, submission and sacrifice, had won the victory over the hard and masculine qualities of activity and self-a.s.sertion. The Ramayana gives expression to the feeling of calm subjection, virtuous renunciation, pa.s.sionless performance of duties, patient obedience, unbroken reticence. Throughout, prominence is given to the system of priestly asceticism, of the eremite's life in the forest, of voluntary suicide. Here we can scarcely find any echoes of that desire of honour, that jealousy, that l.u.s.t of battle, and eagerness for revenge, which occur unmistakably in the Mahabharata; nothing remains of the knightly pride which scorns to give a blow forbidden by the rules of the battle.

The hero of the Ramayana is a hero of virtue, not of the battle. He commends without ceasing renunciation and the fulfilment of duties; he abandons throne and kingdom; he gives up his right out of obedience to his father, and respect for a promise made by him; his wife leads him against his will into the desert, because she also knows her duties.

Respect, devotion, and sacrifice in the relation of children to their parents, of younger brothers to the elder, of the wife to her husband, of subjects to their lords, are described with great poetical beauty and power, but often with the weakest sentimentality. The mission of the hero in his banishment is the defence of the settlements of holy penitents against the giants. But his battles are no merely human struggle; he not only strings the bow of civa, he breaks it, so that it sounds like the fall of a mountain or like Indra's thunder. He fights with the bow of Indra and the arrows of Brahman, and at length even with the chariot of Indra against the giants. These battles are no less legendary than are his confederates' against the giants of Lanka, the vulture Jatayu, the apes and bears, which build him a bridge into that island. These are all described with an exaggeration and monstrous unreality into which Indian poetry only strayed after traversing many stages. We do indeed once hear, even in the Ramayana, of heroes "who never turned in the battle, and fell struck in front." Even here, in isolated pa.s.sages, the old manly independence breaks forth, which, conscious of its strength, beats down injustice instead of enduring it, and makes a path for itself, but only in order to place in a still clearer light a quick compliance, a patient fulfilment of duties, and thus allow to the latter a greater advantage.

At this day Epic poetry lives in India in full force, just as it left the hands of the priests. At the close of the Mahabharata we are told: "What the Brahman is to the rest of mankind, the cow to all quadrupeds, the ocean to the pool, such is the Mahabharata in comparison with all other histories." To the readers and hearers of the Mahabharata and Ramayana the best rewards in this life and the next are promised: wealth, forgiveness of sins, entrance into heaven. At all festivals and fairs, at the marriages of the wealthy, episodes from one of the two poems are recited to the eager crowd of a.s.sembled hearers; the audience accompany the acts and sufferings of the heroes with cries of joy or signs of sorrow, with laughter or tears. In the village, the Brahman, sitting beneath a fig-tree, recites the great poems, in the order of the events no doubt, to the community. The interest of the audience never flags. If the piece recited touches on happy incidents--on victory, triumph, happy return home, the marriage or consecration of the heroes, the village is adorned with crowns as at a festival. The Indians live with the forms of their Epos; they know the fortunes of these heroes, and look on them as a pattern or a warning. The priests have fully realised their intention of setting before the nation in these poems a mirror of manners and virtue.

FOOTNOTES:

[120] This follows from the fact that the army of the confederates had to cross the Vipaca and catadru in order to reach the Tritsus.

[121] In the Rigveda king Sudas is at once a son of Divodasa and a scion of the house of the Pijavanas, possibly because Pijavana was the father or some ancestor of Divodasa. In the Samaveda (2, 5, 1, 5) Divodasa is called the n.o.ble. In the book of Manu (7, 41; 8, 110) Sudasa is the son of Pijavana. In the genealogy of the kings of the Kocalas, by whom the Tritsus were destroyed, the Vishnu-Purana mentions in the fiftieth generation after Ikshvaku, the founder of the race, a king Sudasa, the son of Sarvakama, grandson of Rituparna. So also the Harivanca, and in the Vishnu-Purana (ed. Wilson, p. 381) Vasishtha is the priest of king Sudas as well as of Nimi, the son of Ikshvaku. On the other hand the Vishnu-Purana (p. 454, 455) is aware of a second Sudas, the grandson of Divodasa, in the race of the moon. Vicvamitra is himself called a Bharata; we shall see below that the Mahabharata connects Vicvamitra with the genealogy of the kings of the Bharata. Cp. Roth, "Zur Literatur," S. 142 ff. [On the names of Indian rivers, see Muir, _loc.

cit._ 2, 345 ff.]

[122] Cf. Muir, _loc. cit._ 1^2, 339, where the hymn is translated.

[123] Roth, "Zur Literatur," S. 87, 91 ff. [Rigveda, 3, 33; 7, 83. Muir, _loc. cit._ 322, 323.]

[124] Manu, 1, 67 ff. [Muir, 1, 43 ff.]

[125] Weber, "Jyotisham, Abh. d. Berl. Akad." 1862, s. 23 ff. and below.

[126] With similar exaggeration "Duty" tells king Pariks.h.i.+t at the close of the Mahabharata that her four feet measured 20 yodhanas in the first age, 16 in the second, 12 in the third, whereas now in the Kaliyuga they only measure four yodhanas. The whole narrative is intended to point out that in the Kaliyuga even cudras could become kings. The Vishnu-Purana (ed. Wilson, p. 467) calls the first Nanda who ascended the throne of Magadha in 403 B.C. the son of a cudra woman.

[127] "Bhagavata-Purana," 9, 14.

[128] La.s.sen, "Ind. Alterth." 1^2, 600.

[129] Arrian, "Ind." 7, 8, 9. Plin. 6, 21, 4. Solin. 52, 5. As to the numbers, Bunsen, "aegypt." 5, 156; Von Gutschmid, "Beitrage," s. 64. The duration of the first interruption is lost; but it was less than the second, for Arrian says that the second continued as much as 300 years.

Perhaps the number of the first and third interruptions taken together are as long as the second. Diodorus (2, 38, 39) allots the 52 years to Dionysus, which Arrian gives to Spatembas.

[130] That the Kalpa--_i.e._ the great world-period--was a current conception in the third century B.C. is proved by the inscriptions of Ac.o.ka at Girnar. La.s.sen, _loc. cit._ 2^2, 238.

[131] Not more than nine names can be given to the dynasty of the Nandas, which reigned for 88 years before Chandragupta; seventeen for the dynasty of the caicunagas, even if Kalac.o.ka's sons are all counted as independent regents; and five for the Pradyotas. For the Barhadrathas the Vayu and Vishnu-Puranas give 21 kings after Sahadeva, the Bhagavata-Purana 20, the Matsya-Purana 32. Hence, taking the highest figures, the united dynasties number 64 reigns. To these are to be added the seven names which connect Brihadratha with Kuru, and the 31 or 21 names given in the longer and shorter lists of the Mahabharata between Kuru and Manu.

[132] Von Gutschmid, "Beitrage," s. 76 ff. See below.

[133] P. 484, ed. Wilson.

[134] Von Gutschmid, _loc. cit._ s. 85 ff.

[135] That the main portions of the Epos in their present form cannot be older, is clear from the views of the wors.h.i.+p of Vishnu and civa which prevail in the poem. These forms of wors.h.i.+p first obtained currency in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (see below). It is also clear from the identification of Vishnu and Krishna, of Rama and Vishnu; the deeply felt Brahmanic anti-Buddhist tendencies, seen in such a marked manner in the Ramayana; the form of philosophic speculation, and the application of astrology, which are characteristic of the Epos in its present state; and finally from the mention of the Yavanas as the allies of the Kurus, and Dattamira, _i.e._ Demetrius, the king of the Yavanas. This king reigned in Bactria in the first half of the second century B.C. (La.s.sen, _loc. cit._ 1, 557). Another king of the Yavanas who is mentioned is Bhagadatta, _i.e._ apparently, Apollodotus, the founder of the Graeco-Indian kingdom in the second half of the first century B.C. (Von Gutschmid, "Beitrage," s. 75). We are led to the same result by the descriptions of Indian buildings, of paved roads and lofty temples, which were first built by the Brahmans in opposition to the stupas of the Buddhists. La.s.sen places the important pieces of the Mahabharata, in their present form, between Kalac.o.ka and Chandragupta, _i.e._ between 425-315 B.C. (_loc. cit._ 1^2, 589 ff.) Benfey places them in the third century B.C., A. Weber in the first century. The Mahabharata, which according to the statement found in the poem (1, 81) originally had only 8,800 double-verses, now numbers 100,000: A. Weber, "Acad. Vorlesungen,"

s. 176. The old form of the Mahabharata is much anterior to the fifth century B.C.; certain pa.s.sages of the present poem are much later: A.

Weber, "Indische Skizzen," s. 37, 38. When Dion Chrysostom remarks (2, 253, ed. Reiske) that the Homeric poems were sung by the Indians in their own language--the sorrows of Priam, the lamentation of Hecuba and Andromache, the bravery of Achilles and Hector--La.s.sen is undoubtedly right in referring this statement to the Mahabharata, and putting Dhritarashtra in the place of Priam, Gandhari and Draupadi in the place of Andromache and Hecuba, Arjuna and Suyodhana or Karna in the place of Achilles and Hector ("Alterth." 2^2, 409). It is doubtful whether the remark of Chrysostom is taken from Megasthenes. That the Ramayana is later in style than the Mahabharata will become clear below.

[136] "Vishnu-Purana," ed. Wilson, p. 380, _seqq._

[137] La.s.sen, "Ind. Alterth." 1^2, Anhang xviii. n. 4.

[138] In the Rigveda we find: "If you, Indra and Agni, are among the Druhyus, a.n.u.s or Purus, come forth."

[139] La.s.sen, _loc. cit._ 1, xxii. n. 15.

[140] "Rigveda," 1, 31, 4; 1, 31, 17; 7, 18, 13.

[141] According to the Brahmanic recension of the poem which we now possess, Samvarana is able to obtain the daughter of the G.o.d only by the mediation of a sacred priest. The king therefore bethinks him of Vasishtha, who ascends to the G.o.d of light and obtains his daughter for the king. La.s.sen, "Ind. Alterth." 1^2, Anhang xxvi.

[142] La.s.sen, "Ind. Alterth." 1^2 656, n. and 1^2 850.

[143] A. Weber, "Ind. Literaturgesch." s. 126^2.

[144] Manu, 7, 90, 93. Yajnavalkya, 1, 323-325.

[145] Panini in M. Muller, "Hist. of anc. Sanskrit Literature," p. 44, _n._ 2.

[146] Manu, 9, 59.

[147] M. Muller, _loc. cit._

[148] "Vishnu-Purana," ed. Wilson, p. 440. La.s.sen, "Ind. Alterth." 1^2, 68 ff.

[149] In Panini Krishna is called a G.o.d, but also a hero. M. Muller, "Hist. of anc. Sanskrit Lit." p. 45 _n._

[150] On the form of the Rama legend in the Dacaratha-Jataka, cf. A.

Weber, "Abh. Berl Akad." 1870. The Vishnu-Purana enumerates 33 kings of the Kocalas from Dacaratha to Brihadbala, who falls in the great battle on the side of the Kurus. Including these this Purana makes 60 kings between Manu and Dacaratha. For the same interval the Ramayana has only 34 names, of which some, like Yagati, Nahusha, Bharata, are taken from the genealogical table of the kings of the Bharata, others, like Pritha and Tricanku, belong to the Veda. We have already seen that the series of the Bharata kings give about ten generations between the time when they gained the upper hand on the Yamuna and upper Ganges, _i.e._ the time of Kuru and Duryodhana. The Kocalas forced eastward by the Bharatas would thus have existed on the Sarayu from 23 generations before Kuru.

Wilson, "Vishnu-Purana," p. 386.