particular has identified Laṅkā with Ceylon. In support of this one may point to the Iliad of Homer, which has a somewhat similar theme, the rape and recovery of Helen by the armies of the Achæans, the basis of which is the historical fact of an expedition against Troy and the destruction of that city. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting this analogy, the most serious of all being the indubitable fact that there is not a tittle of evidence to show that such an expedition was ever made by the Aryans. True, there were waves of emigration from Aryan centres southward in early times; but those that travelled as far as Ceylon went by sea, either from the coasts of Bengal or Orissa or Bombay. Besides, the expedition of Rāma is obviously fabulous, for his army was composed not of Aryans but of apes. All things considered, there seems to be most plausibility in the third hypothesis.[1] Certainly Rāma was a local hero of Ayōdhyā, and probably he was once a real king; so it is likely enough that an old saga (or sagas) attached itself early to his memory. And as his fame spread abroad, principally on the wings of Vālmīki's poem, the honours of semi-
- ↑ I regret that I cannot accept the ingenious hypothesis lately put forward by Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen in his Bengali Ramayanas. The story of the Dasaratha-jātaka seems to me to be a garbled and bowdlerised snippet cut off from a possibly pre-Vālmīkian version of the old Rāma-saga; the rest of the theory appears to be quite mistaken.
