The list of kings which the Indian pundits or doctors pretend to have compiled according to these Pouranas, are nothing but mere catalogues without any details, or adorned with absurd ones, like those of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, and like those which Trithemus and Saxo Grammaticus have made up for the northern nations[131]. These lists are far from corresponding; none of them supposes a history, or registers, or records; the very basis on which they rest may have been purely imagined by the poets from whose works they have been extracted. One of the pundits who furnished Mr Wilfort with them, acknowledged that he had arbitrarily filled up the spaces between the celebrated kings with imaginary names[132], and avowed that his predecessors had done the same. If this be true of the lists obtained by the English at the present day, how should it not be so of those given by Abou-Fazel, as extracts from the annals of Cachmere[133], and which, besides, full of fables as they are, do not extend farther back than 4300 years, of which more than 1200 are occupied with names of princes whose reigns, in as far as regards their duration, remain undetermined. Even the era, accordingly, from which the Indians count their years at the present day, which commences fifty-seven years before Christ, and which bears the name of a prince called _Vicramaditjia_, or _Bickermadjit_, bears it only by a sort of convention; for we find, according to the synchronisms attributed to Vicramaditjia, that there may have been at least three, and perhaps so many as eight or nine, princes of this name, who have all similar legends, and who have all waged war with a prince named _Saliwahanna_; and, further, we cannot well make out whether this period, the fifty-seventh year before the Christian era, is that of the birth, reign, or death of the hero whose name it bears.[134]