~Kashmir under Hindu Kings.~--For the next century China was at the height of its power. It established a suzerainty over Kashmir, Udyana (Swat), Yasin, and Chitral. The first was at this period a powerful Hindu kingdom. Its annals, as recorded in Kalhana's Rajatarangini, bear henceforward a real relation to history. In 733 A.D. King Muktapida Lalitaditya received investiture from the Chinese Emperor. Seven years later he defeated the King of Kanauj on the Ganges. A ruler who carried his arms so far afield must have been very powerful in the Northern Panjab. The remains of the wonderful Martand temple, which he built in honour of the Sun God, are a standing memorial of his greatness. The history of Kashmir under its Hindu kings for the next 400 years is for the most part that of a wretched people ground down by cruel tyrants. A notable exception was Avantidharman--855-883 A.D.--whose minister, Suyya, carried out very useful drainage and irrigation works. [Illustration: Fig. 58. Martand Temple.] ~The Panjab, 650-1000 A.D.~--We know little of Panjab history in the 340 years which elapsed between the death of Harsha and the beginning of the Indian raids of the Sultans of Ghazni in 986-7 A.D. The conquest of the kingdom of Sindh by the Arab general, Muhammad Kasim, occurred some centuries earlier, in 712 A.D. Multan, the city of the Sun-worshippers, was occupied, and part at least of the Indus valley submitted to the youthful conqueror. He and his successors in Sindh were tolerant rulers. No attempt was made to occupy the Central Panjab, and when the Turkish Sultan, Sabaktagin, made his first raid into India in 986-7 A.D., his opponent was a powerful raja named Jaipal, who ruled over a wide territory extending from the Hakra to the frontier hills on the north-west. His capital was at Bhatinda. Just about the time when the rulers of Ghazni were laying the train which ended at Delhi and made it the seat of a great Muhammadan Empire, that town was being founded in 993-4 A.D. by the Tunwar Rajputs, who then held sway in that neighbourhood. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 4: See Sykes' _History of Persia_, pp. 179-180; also Herodotos III. 94 and 98 and IV. 44.] [Footnote 5: "The Indians clad with garments made of cotton had bows of cane and arrows of cane tipped with iron."--Herodotos VII. 65.] CHAPTER XVIII HISTORY (_continued_). THE MUHAMMADAN PERIOD, 1000-1764 A.D.