.jpg)
THE OPENING PAGE OF THE BOMBAY EDITION OF THE MAHABHARATA, REDUCED.
CHAPTER IX
THE EPIC AGE—THE MAHABHARATA
THE tide of Aryan conquests rolled onward. If the reader will refer to a map of India, he will find that from the banks of the Sutlaj to the banks of the Jumna and the Ganges, there is not a very wide strip of country to cross. The Aryans, who had colonized the whole of the Panjab, were not likely to remain inactive on the banks of the Sutlaj or of the Sarasvati. Already in the Vedic Period bands of enterprising colonists had crossed those rivers and explored the distant shores of the Jumna and the Ganges, and those noble streams, though alluded to in the hymns as on the very horizon of the Hindu world, were not unknown. In course of time the emigrants to the fertile banks of the two rivers must have increased in number, until they founded a powerful kingdom of their own
