The Gupta period, computing it roughly as lasting from A.D. 320 to 480, synchronises with a great revival of Hinduism, and along with it of literature, the arts and sciences. The Gupta monarchs, as is evident from their coins, although orthodox devotees of Vishṇu, were liberal patrons. Kālidāsa and other writers raised literary Sanskrit to a point of perfection never equalled before or since; the cave frescoes of Ajanta bear witness to the genius of the Gupta painters; the architecture and sculpture of the period show an equally high level of attainment; all the greatest Hindu mathematicians and astronomers flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is, in fact, evident that when the Hindu of to-day harks back to the Golden Age of Hinduism, the picture he draws in his mind is coloured by traditions, which have come to him from books or hearsay, of the age of the Guptas, rather than by the fainter glimmerings of more heroic times from the Vedas or the great Epics. So, too, the splendid gold coinage of the Guptas, with its many types and infinite varieties and its inscriptions in classical Sanskrit, now appearing on Indian coins for the first time, are the finest examples of purely Indian art of this kind we possess. The origin of the Gupta family is obscure. This much seems certain, that the family was not of high caste, perhaps of the lowest. The territory which the Guptas are first found ruling lay near Pāṭaliputra, the modern Patna; it was much enlarged by one Gupta, on the decline of the Kushāṇa power in its eastern territories; he was succeeded by a son, Ghaṭotkacha, who assumed the title of Mahārāja, which brings us out into the light of history; for with the year of his son Chandragupta I’s accession, A.D. 320, the Gupta era starts. It may appear strange that this monarch should have issued no coins of his own, but there seems little reason now to doubt that, to his son and successor, Samudragupta, the real founder of the Gupta Empire, should be assigned those coins (Pl. V, 4) which bear the portraits of Chandragupta and his wife Kumāradevī,[29] a member of the illustrious Lichchavi family reigning at Vaiśālī[30] as early as the seventh century B.C. Samudragupta’s conquests, as we learn from his Allahabad pillar inscription, carved out for him an empire which extended north to the base of the Himalayas, east to the Brahmaputra river, south to the banks of the Narbadā, and west to the Jumna and the Chambal, with a number of protected states on his frontier between those rivers and the Chināb. On the completion of his conquests he revived an ancient Hindu rite in celebrating the Aśvamedha, or Horse-sacrifice. Now the states under Samudragupta’s protection in the Panjāb were the districts of the old Kushāṇa Empire in which the gold coinage current at this time was, as we saw in the last chapter, a degraded form of the Kushāṇa “standing king” and “seated goddess,” Ardokhsho-Lakshmī type: it was from these coins (Pl.