Owing to their close relation to the king, to their weapons, and their possessions, the Kshatriyas took the first place in the new states on the Ganges. This they maintained beyond a doubt for centuries in the kingdom of the Bharatas, among the Matsyas and Çurasenas, the Koçalas, Kaçis, Videhas, Magadhas. In the royal houses and the families of the Kshatriyas the achievements of the forefathers continued to live; they preserved the recollection of the wars of conquest, the struggles for the possession of the lands, which they now held. At their festivals and banquets the minstrels sang to them the songs of the ancient heroes, their ancestors, their mighty deeds, their sufferings and death; they extolled the delight in battle and the martial spirit, the knightly temper and mode of combat, and thus at length arose the poem of the great war. If our assumption, that the conquest of the land on the Ganges may have been completed about the year 1400 B.C., is tenable, we might ascribe to the two following centuries the rise of the Kshatriyas, the establishment of their prominent position in the newly-conquered territory, and to the next century the composition of the songs of the great war in their oldest form. In the development of other nations the periods of wide expansion, the rise of the military element, and protracted war, usually repress the influence and importance of the priesthood, but among the emigrant Aryas this could not have been the case. We have already seen that among them the contest of sacrifices preceded the contest of arms. The victory fell to the side whose sacrificial bowl Indra had drained. As the correct offering and correct invocation compelled the gods to come down and fight for the nation whose sacrifice they received, the priests were naturally most indispensable in the time of war. The singers of the sacrificial hymns which caused the gods to come down were identical among the Indians with the priests, and were in fact the priests in the stricter sense. With them, minstrel and priest had one name--Brahmana, _i.e._ one who prays. The hymns of the Vedas showed us how the princes were commanded to set before them at the sacrifice a holy minstrel to offer prayer, and to be liberal to him. The minstrels who accompanied the emigrant tribes to the Yamuna and Ganges had, in those turbulent times, to sing songs of war and victory, as well as to offer prayers at sacrifice, and afterwards to compose the poems on the deeds of the heroes. If the result was that no more new invocations were composed in the period of heroic song, the minstrels nevertheless preserved the old invocations which they had brought with them from the land of the Indus very faithfully. They had imported the ancient worship of their native deities into the new land; they had to preserve the old faith and the old rites at a distance from their ancient home, to offer sacrifice in the old fashion, and thus to win and retain the favour of the gods for