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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 2, p. 207.

SANSKRIT LITERATURE 207 The history of ancient Indian literature naturally falls into Two the two main periods of the Vedic and the Sanskrit. The literary former, extending from perhaps as early as I5o0 B. C. to about 200 B. C., embraces in its earlier phase a religious poetical litera- ture which arose in the plain of the Indus, while the products of its latter half, theological treatises in prose, were composed in the plain of the Ganges. During the Vedic age Aryan civilization overspread the whole of Hindustan, the vast tract bounded by the Himalaya and the Vindhya ranges on the north and south, and by the mouths of the Ganges and Indus on the east and west. The Sanskrit period, during which Brahman culture was diffused over the Deccan, or the 'South,' reaches from near the end (c. 300 B.C.) of the Vedic period down to the beginning of the Muhammadan conquest, or about A.D. I ooo000. Generally secular in its subjects, it has notable achievements to show in nearly every department of literature, as well as in various branches of science. Historical works in the true sense are, however, entirely wanting. Hence we usually know nothing at all about the lives of Sanskrit authors, and definite dates do not begin to appear in connexion with them till about A.D. 500. The chronology of the Vedic period is purely conjectural, Paucity of resting on internal evidence alone. Three main literary strata chronolo- can here be distinguished. The lower limit of the second g cannot be placed below 500 B.c., since its latest doctrines are presupposed by Buddhism, and the year of Buddha's death has been calculated, with a high degree of probability, from the recorded dates of the various Buddhist Councils, to be about 480 B.C. The earliest stratum, that of the Vedic hymns, may be assumed roughly to extend from I5oo to 100oo B. C. For the Sanskrit period we have, in addition to internal evidence, a few chronological landmarks furnished by the visits of foreigners. The earliest actual date of this kind is Alexander's invasion of India in 326 B. C. Then came the Greek Megasthenes, who, about 300 B. C., resided for some years at the court of Pataliputra (the modern Patna), and has left a valuable though fragmentary account of India in his time. Many cen- turies later several Chinese pilgrims paid prolonged visits to India. The most important of them were Fa-hian (A.D. 399- 414), Hiuen Tsang (630-45), and I Tsing (671-95). The records of these three travellers are extant and have all been translated into English. Besides shedding light on the social conditions, the religious thought, and the Buddhist antiquities of India in their day, they supply some general and specific facts about