to the supposed conquests of Sesostris and Semiramis, as these are now generally held to have no historical foundation. That the civilization of India may reach back two or three thousand years before the Christian era is, however, not improbable, as the oldest of the Indian sacred writings, the Vêdas, are believed by the best Sanscrit scholars to have been handed down by tradition from about B.C. 1500.[1]
The historian who attempts to trace the operations of men in their commercial pursuits during very remote ages, and to mark the various steps of their progress, will soon have the mortification of finding that the period of authentic history is limited to the time assigned to it in Holy Writ; and that all the speculations about the high civilization of the Hindus before the period usually assigned to the Deluge are mere dreams of antiquarian enthusiasm. There is no reason to doubt that the narrative usually attributed to Moses is the most ancient we can now obtain, whatever modern philosophers may say to the contrary; and it is on the whole, unquestionably, the most in conformity with the facts now deducible from antiquarian or linguistic research. Many centuries must have intervened before the first heathen historian, Herodotus, wrote; and it is simply idle to attempt to write a consecutive record of commercial enterprise for any period preceding written history, as even the sculptured monuments of Egypt and Nineveh add scarcely anything to the pages of the
- ↑ The earliest dated MS. (a Syriac one, now in the British Museum) is dated in the first decade of the fifth century of our era. The Alexandrian codex may be a few years earlier. The oldest Egyptian inscriptions may ascend to B.C. 2000: that on the Moabite stone, perhaps, to B.C. 890.
