تحقيق ما للهند (Al-Biruni's India — Sachau edition, BnF)

dreds and thousands of years, but they were on the eve of entering a period of decline, which preceded and prepared the way for the sway of the Greek mind over the Oriental world.

Our Muhammadan author does not, like Tacitus, portray the infancy of a great nation. At his time the dome of Indian civilization had long ago been finished both at large and in every detail; its initial stages had long ago faded away from the memory of the nation. Like Herodotus in Babylonia and Egypt, Albêrûnî found in India an exotic civilization, as strange and marvellous as it was perfect in its way, but on the eve of being encroached upon by foreign invaders. The time of Albêrûnî, that of the great Maḥmûd of Ghazna, is the end of the political independence of India, and the inauguration of Muhammadan rule, in fact the beginning of a historic development which terminated in the establishment of British rule throughout the whole of the peninsula. Already before Maḥmûd, foreign invaders had conquered parts of India, but they again had in their turn been conquered by Indian civilization, so as to become Indians by the same process of assimilation by which the Bulgarians, originally a Turkish tribe, have become Slavonians and the great tribe of the Ghilzai in Afghanistan, who originally were Turks, have become Afghans. The Muhammadans, however, remained in India what they were when they entered. Though adopting the language of their subjects and many of their customs, they remained in law and religion foreigners to the country. India, as sketched by Albêrûnî, is India at the close of its national existence. Its civilization was then essentially Brahmanical, as it had come to be in a protracted struggle with Buddhism. Albêrûnî does not know Indian Buddhism from personal experience, though it had not yet entirely withdrawn from India and in some parts was still a political power.

The literary predecessors of Albêrûnî were a Greek diplomatist and Buddhist pilgrims from China. About 295 B. C. king Seleucus I. sent Megasthenes as an ambassador to king Sandrocottus or Candragupta in Pâtaliputra or Patna. The envoy traversed nearly the whole breadth of northern India and seems to have had access to good sources of information. Unfortunately his countrymen were not prepared to do justice to his most excellent report, and it is mostly in consequence of this that only fragments of it have been transmitted to our age. Was it an initial stage of Indian civilization which Megasthenes saw and described? Hardly. Civilization in India goes back to a more remote antiquity. Certain parts of his account are evidently derived from Paurânic relating to the Puranas sources and the Purâṇas ancient Hindu texts are not considered as representing a primary stratum of Indian literature.

Four hundred years before Albêrûnî, Hwen-Thsang, a Chinese monk,