The early history of India from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan conquest : including the invasion of Alexander the Great / by Vincent A. Smith.

  • Vincent Arthur Smith
Date:
1914
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The early history of India from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan conquest : including the invasion of Alexander the Great / by Vincent A. Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION This edition presents a view of the early history of India as it appears to me after nearly forty years study. It is as accurate and up-to-date as I can make it, but does not pretend to be final, because finality in a work dealing with a subject so pro- gressive is unattainable. The mass of new matter and fresh discussion accumulated since the publica- tion of the last edition, a little more than five years ago, is so great that difficulty has been experienced in maintaining the decision to confine the book within the limits of a single volume of reasonable size and moderate price. It would be much easier to expand it to double the length. Notwithstand- ing constant effort to avoid prolixity and wearisome details, material enlargement, compensated in some measure by certain omissions, has proved inevitable. Readers are invited to remember that the book was designed to be, and still is, primarily a political history. It is not intended to be an encyclopaedia of Indian antiquities, as some critics seem to think that it ought to be. The History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon (1911), planned as a companion volume in order to give the history of Indian artistic utterance so far as it can be recovered, renders unnecessary any detailed account of the subject in this work. Special treatises on the his- tory of literature, science, philosophy, religion, and institutions, so far as they exist, must be consulted