Concise Encyclopaedia of Ancient India

The present work deals with the history of ancient India from the earliest times to about the middle of the first century A.D.; and it attempts to represent the stage of progress which research has now reached in its task of recovering from the past the outlines of a history which, only a few years ago, was commonly supposed to be irretrievably lost. Well within the memory of contributors to these volumes it was the fashion to say that there was no history of India before the Muhammadan conquests in the eleventh century A.D., and the general opinion seemed to be summed up in the dictum of the cynic who roundly asserted that all supposed dates for earlier events were like skittles — set up simply to be bowled down again. But this gibe, not quite justifiable even when it was uttered, could not be repeated at the present day. It has lost its point: it is no longer even approximately true.
The fragments of fact which have been rescued from the past are now sufficiently numerous and well established to enable us to construct a chronological and geographical framework for the political history of many of the kingdoms and empires of ancient India; and into this framework may be fitted the history of social institutions, which is reflected with unusual clearness in the ancient literatures.
The manner in which modern scholarship has succeeded in throwing light on the dark ages of India, and in revealing order where all seemed to be chaos, is briefly indicated in the latter section of Chapter II which deals with the sources of history. The story of rediscovery of India is a long record of struggles with problems which were once thought to be insoluble, and of the ultimate triumphs of patience and ingenuity. The work supplies all important landmarks in this rediscovery, beginning in 1793, when Sir William Jones supplied ‘the sheet-anchor of Indian chronology’ by his identification of the Sandrocottus of Alexander’s historians with the Chandragupta of Sanskrit literature; the decipherment of the long-forgotten alphabets of the ancient Indian inscriptions by James Prinsep in 1834, Christian Lassen’s first comprehensive summery in his Indisehe Alterthumskunde in 1858; summaries made by Dr Vincent Smith (Early History of India), by Dr L. D. Barnett (Indian Antiquities), and, by the editor of this work (Ancient India, 1914).
The Concise Encyclopaedia of Ancient India marks a new departure. The literature of the subject has become so vast, and is still growing with such rapidity, that the best hope of securing a real advance in the study lay in a division of labour among scholars who have explored at first hand the main sources of information. It is the out-come of the combination of a number of investigators with an editor whose function it has been to coordinate, so far as seemed possible or advisable, results obtained independently.