Unfortunately, India preserves no trustworthy Hindú records of the past. Although Herodotus called it the ‘most wealthy and populous country in the world,’ yet the absence of temples and other ruins suggests barbarism when Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Rome, were flourishing. While Buddhism is made to date from the sixth century B.C., and we have subsequent notices of Buddha’s chief worshippers,[698] there was evidently very little civilisation in the days of Alexander (B.C. 327). Nearchus made the Indians ‘write letters on cloth smoothed by being well beaten’; and Strabo (xv. 1) doubts whether India knew the use of writing. They derived their art and literature from Græco-Bactria, and they only degraded the former—Art in her highest form never travels far from the Mediterranean. The beautiful human animals and _mauvais sujets_ who were the citizens of Olympus became in grotesque India blue-skinned, many-headed and multi-armed monsters—the abortions of imagination. India’s two great epics (‘Mahabhárat’ and ‘Ramáyana’) and fifteen Puranas are mere depositories of legendary and imaginative myths, containing few of the golden grains of truth hid in tons of rubbish. All the anthropology we learn from them is that India had a primitive (Turanian?) race, called in contempt Rakshasas or demons. It was mastered by Brahminical attacks, typified in later days by Rama and other heroes, probably during the exodes of Hyksos and Hebrews from Egypt; and long subsequently arose Buddhism, to be followed by the rule of the Moslems and Europeans.[699] The Dhanurvidya,[700] or Bow-Science, contains the fullest description we possess of the ancient Indian arms and war-implements, but the date of composition is exceedingly doubtful. The Hindú delights in vast numbers. Assuming the population of the earth at one thousand and seventy-five billions, his Aksauhini, or complete army, according to the Nitiprakáshika, an abstract Dhanurvidya by the sage Vaishampáyana, amounts to two thousand one hundred and eighty-seven millions of foot, twenty-one thousand eight hundred and seventy millions of horse, two hundred and eighteen thousand seven hundred elephants, and twenty-one thousand eight hundred and seventy chariots. The scale of salaries in gold[701] is equally liberal and absurd.