We now return to the fascinating story of the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages over the north and west of the peninsula. In the tale, captured from the patient study of words and idioms, and finding only occasional support from legend, and practically none from history, since history had not yet begun to exist, we get a singularly moving and interesting picture of the social existence of vanished tribes of men. We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India. Probably the Panjāb in very early times was occupied by several immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians. In the Sanskrit geography of somewhat later times, India is divided into the sacred Madhya-deça, the "Midland," and the rest. Already this Midland country, the home of the latest immigrants, is considered to be the true habitat of civilised Aryans, all the rest of the peninsula being more or less barbarous. It is important that the reader should understand exactly where this Midland lay. On the north it ended below the foot-slopes of the Himalayas. On the south, it was bordered by the Vindhyā hills, the southern boundary of the Gangetic plain. On the west it extended to Sirhind on the eastern limits of what is now the Panjāb. On the east its limit was the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. Its inhabitants, of mixed Aryan and Dravidian origin, had spread eastwards from the upper part of the _do-āb_, the watershed between the two rivers. Their language gradually became the current speech of the Midland. It was cultivated as a literary tongue from early times and came to be known as Sanskrit, the "purified" language. Purified and systematised it was by the labours of grammarians and phoneticians, the most famous of whom is Pānini, who lived and wrote about 300 B.C. To the phonetic acumen of these early grammarians the existing alphabets of northern India, singularly different in arrangement from the confused order of European and Semitic letters, bear testimony. In the Indian alphabets the letters are arranged in order, according to the vocal organs chiefly used in their pronunciation, as Gutturals, Palatals, Cerebrals, Dentals, and Labials. All the phonetic changes which occur in the formation of the numerous compound words are carefully reduced to rule, and the spelling professes to be (what perhaps no spelling ever has been or can be) phonetic. [Illustration: _Plate VI_ A Bhuiyār (_Mirzapur district_)]