CHAPTER I
ANCIENT INDIA AND THE RIG-VEDA
THE history of Ancient India is a history of thirty centuries of human culture and progress. It divides itself into several distinct periods, each of which, for length of years, will compare with the entire history of many a modern people.
The earliest date claimed by modern scholars for its oldest literary monument, the Rig-Veda, is about 2000 B. c. Even at that remote age, Hindu civilization must have been hundreds or thousands of years old, and from that time the literary works of successive periods form a continuous picture of the culture and the history of India for three thousand years, so full, so clear, that he who runs may read. The oldest records were not written on parchment or inscribed on stone; they were written in the faithful memory of the people, who handed down the precious heritage from century to century with a scrupulous exactitude that would be considered, in modern days, a miracle.
Scholars who have studied the Vedic hymns historic--
