In the land of the Ganges the Brahmans had gained a great victory and carried out a great reform. A new god had thrown the old gods into the background, and with the conception of this new god was connected a new view of the world, at once abstract and fantastic. From this in turn followed a new arrangement of the state, and of the orders, which were now of divine origin, as direct products of creation, and thus became irrevocably fixed. The monarchy itself was of humbler descent than the Brahmans, the first of the earth; to them the warlike nobles were made inferior, while the doctrines of hell and regeneration, which the Brahmans put in the place of the old ideas of life after death, must gradually have brought about the subjugation of the national mind and heart to the new religion. When the Brahmans succeeded in establishing their claims in the land of the Ganges about the year 800 B.C. (as we ventured to assume), the old sacrificial songs and invocations, which they had imported with them from the land of the Indus, were no doubt to a great extent already written down. When the various families of minstrels and priests had first exchanged with each other their special treasures of ancient prayers; when the Brahmans, passing beyond the borders of the separate states, had become amalgamated into one order, and had thus consolidated the existing stock of traditional formulæ and ritual--it must have been felt necessary to preserve this valuable treasure in its greatest possible extent, and, considering the belief of the Aryas in the magical power of these forms, as securely as possible from any change. Whatever might be the assistance which the compact form of these invocations lent to the memory, the body of songs which had now passed from tradition and the possession of the separate families into the general possession of the orders, was too various and comprehensive,--minute and verbal accuracy was too important,--for the resources of even the most careful oral teaching, the strongest and most practised memory. But the process of writing them down was not accomplished at once. In the first case, no doubt, each family added to its own possessions the store of the family most closely connected with it.[188] Beginning from different points, after manifold delays, extensions, and enlargements from the invocations first composed in the land of the Ganges, which allow us to trace the change from the old views to the new system, the collection must at last have comprised all that was essential in the forms and prayers used at offerings and sacrifices.