to the early histories of both Western and Eastern nations. The application of those principles is not more difficult in the case of India than it is in that of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, or Rome. The real difficulty is the determination of fixed chronological points. A body of history must be supported upon a skeleton of chronology, and without chronology history is impossible.
The Indian nations, in so far as they maintained a record of political events, kept it by methods of their own, which are difficult to understand, and until recently were not at all understood. The eras used to date events not only differ from those used by other nations, but are very numerous and obscure in their origin and application. Cunningham's Book of Indian Eras enumerates more than a score of systems which have been employed at different times and places in India for the computation of dates, and his list might be considerably extended. The successful efforts of several generations of scholars to recover the forgotten history of ancient India have been largely devoted to a study of the local modes of chronological computation, and have resulted in the attainment of accurate knowledge concerning most of the eras used in inscriptions and other documents. Armed with these results, it is now possible for a writer on Indian history to compile a narrative arranged in orderly chronological sequence, which could not have been thought of forty years ago.
At that time the only approximately certain date in the early history of India was that of the accession
