Systems of Sanskrit Grammar
16 Systems of Sanskrit Grammar § 12 - ] known to have formed part of the army of Darius in the battle of Platæ (B. C. 479), India's knowledge of the Greeks can go back to the middle of the fifth century before Christ. The fact is-and scholars are just begin- ing to recognise it-that we have been too hasty in con demning the Pauranic accounts of the frontier tribes and races (e. g. those in the Vishnupurana or in the Maha- bhārata, Bhishmaparvan, Chap. xi) as purely imaginative fabrications. We have so far altogether ignored the extensive commerce and interchange of ideas that went on between the Indian Aryans and their brethren beyond the frontiers as far as the Mediterranean-and this long before B. C. 400. So much so that when other indepen- dent proofs vouch for the antiquity of an author (in the case of Panini we shall discuss these proofs presently) the burden of proof rests with the person who maintains that some specific reference in that author belongs to a later and not to an earlier time, when, so far as facts go, the reference might just as well be to an earlier period. Nay, more. In this particular case Pänini's reference must certainly belong the earlier period. Compared with Katyayana's knowledge about the Yavanas that of Panini is very slight. Panini did not know that the Yavanas had a script of their own (comp. Tanga, Katyayana's värtika 3 to iv. 1.49), or at least in his time there was no current Sanskrit word for that script. Nor was the fact that the Yavanas had a native-place and a kingdom of their own sufficiently known to Sanskrit literature, as is evidenced by Katyayana's vārtika samkeit guteri.. (een) at and form to iv. 1.175-supposing of course that a genuine part of them. Such slight acquain- tance with the Yavanas, therefore, as Panini betrays cannot have belonged to a time subsequent to Alexander's invasion.
