INTRODUCTION.
From the earliest period at which the mention of India dawns upon us, among the records of the past, her name has been surrounded by a halo of poetic mystery, which even the research and familiarity of modern times, have as yet failed to entirely dispel. Of her own history she tells us but little, and it was only in comparatively modern times, when she came into contact with the more prosaic nations of the outer world, that we learned much regarding her former existence. So far as is at present known, no mention of India has yet been discovered among the records of Egypt or Assyria. No conquest of her country is recorded in the hieroglyphics that adorn the Temples of Thebes, nor been decyphered among the inscriptions on the walls of the palaces of Nineveh. It is even yet uncertain whether the Ophir or Tarshish to which the ships of Solomon traded and "brought back gold, and ivory, and algum trees, and apes, and peacocks," can be considered as places in India, rather than some much nearer localities in Arabia or Africa. The earlier Greek writers had evidently no distinct ideas on the subject, and confounded India with Ethiopia in a manner that is very perplexing. It was not, in fact, till the time of the glorious raid of Alexander the Great, that the East and the West came practically into contact, and we obtain any distinct accounts, on which reliance can be placed, regarding that land which before his time was, to his countrymen, little more than a mythic dream. Fortunately, as we now know, the visit of the Greeks occurred at one of the most interesting periods of Indian history. It was just when the old Vedic period was passing away, to give place to the new Buddhist epoch; when that religion was rising to the surface, which for nearly 1,000 years continued to be the prevailing faith of northern India, at least. Though after that period it disappeared from the land where it originated, it still continues to influence all the forms of religious belief in the surrounding countries, to the present day.
The gleam of light which the visit of the Greeks shed on the internal state of India, though brilliant, was transitory. Before the
