India and Ethiopia From The Seventh Century B.C.

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It was some time early in the year 1947 that my esteemed friend, the late Harit Krishna Deb, who had a unique sense of history and of racial and other movements in ancient times, suggested that some names of rulers mentioned in the Satapatha-Brahmana (a later Vedic work generally taken to about eighth century B.C.) were to be identi fied with a number of names of kings ruling in the Near East and Egypt during the first half of the seventh century B.C. (from 700 to 660 B.C.). At my request he wrote a paper on this subject giving a clear exposition of his views, and it was published in the Journal of the Ariatic Society of Calcutta (Letters, Vol. XIV, 2, 1948). His identifications were accepted with reserve by some of our Indo- logical scholars, and they did not respond sympathetically. But it appeared to me that there was a considerable amount of plausibility in his views. All that could be established was that the Satapatha- Brahmana knew the names of at least three potentates of Egypt. and the Near East who ruled in the seventh century B.C. and who were contemporaries-namely, Esarhaddon or Essardanu of Assyria, Menesimordakos of Babylon and Taharqa of the Twenty-fifth (Ethiopian) Dynasty of Egypt. With this synchronism, the date of the final redaction of the Satapatha-Brahmana could reasonably be taken to be the middle of the seventh century B.C. The connexion of Taharqa with Tarksya of the Satapatha- Brahmana brought in its wake the question of a possible connexion between Egypt and Ethiopia and India. Of course Taharqa did not belong to the Ethiopia of the present day. But the Greeks used to call by the name Ethiopia' what was known in ancient times as Nubia and at the present day as 'Northern Sudan'. But the matter was intriguing, and I wanted to clear up my knowledge about Indian connexions with these parts, if there were any, and of what nature they might have been. I was also interested in the Indian-Egyptian and Indian- Ethiopian questions from other aspects as well. At least from the times of Priyadarsin Asoka there was direct connexion between India and Egypt. The Nubians as the Kushaya were known in ancient Persia, and possibly Indians from Gandhara came in touch with these Nubians or Egyptian-Ethiopians in the capital of the Achæmenian empire at Persipolis. Getting interested in the matter I began to study it, and bit by bit certain things began to present themselves to me. These I developed with the accession of new materials, and it was through several stages that the Monograph as presented now gradually took shape. All this is narrated in the course of this Monograph at proper places.