94 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
and those, thirdly, that are purely local and more or less neutral.
The same is true of the Persepolitan pillars and winged animals of the older Mauryan art. Of internationalism these are eloquent, but by no means of intellectual imitation. India, as the producer of so many of the rare and valuable commodities of the world, was the most international of early countries. The positions of her great merchants, such as was that one who excavated the chaitya at Karli, may well have transcended those of kings. Amongst the most important of the world's highways were those that joined Babylon and Nineveh to the Dekkan and to Pataliputra, or Egypt and Arabia to Ceylon and China. It shows the dignity and international standing of India that she should have used freely the best of the a<Je, undeterred by any premature or artificial sense of national boundaries, ^f we take one group of winged animals quoted by Griinwedel from Sanchi, there is even a kind of accuracy of scholarship in the way these are given foreign men, as riders, in their own dress and with their heraldic devices, so to speak, of the time. Those who incline to think that because she used Persepolitan pillars, therefore she derived her civilisation from West Asia, have to ignore the whole matrix of the original and individual in which such elements inhere. The pillars of the chaitya at Karli may go by the name of Persepoli'ian, but the idea of the chaitya-hall itself, for which they are utilised, has never been supposed
