any of them, mean Rama, the son of Cush, I leave others to determine. The mother of the second Rama was named Caushalya, which is a derivative of Cushala; and though his father be distinguished by the title or epithet of Dasaratha, signifying that his war-chariots bore him to all quarters of the world, yet the name of Cush, as the Cashmirians pronounce it, is preserved entire in that of his son and successor, and shadowed in that of his ancestor, Vicushi; nor can a just objection be made to this opinion, from the nasal Arabian vowel in the word Ramah, mentioned by Moses, since the very word Arab begins with the same letter, which the Greeks and Indians could not pronounce; and they were obliged, therefore, to express it by the vowel which most resembled it. On this question, however, I assert nothing; nor on another, which might be proposed, whether the fourth and fifth Avatars be not allegorical stories of the two presumptuous monarchs Nimrod and Belus? The hypothesis, that government was first established, laws enacted, and agriculture encouraged in India by Rama, about 3800 years ago, agrees with the received account of Noah's death, and the previous settlement of his immediate descendants." "Here we have only nine and twenty princes of the Solar line between Rama and Vrihadrana exclusively, and their reigns, during the whole brazen age, are supposed to have lasted nearly 864000 years; a supposition evidently against nature, the uniform course of which allows only a period of eight hundred and seventy, or at the very utmost, of a thousand years for twenty-nine generations. Paricshit, the great nephew and successor of Yudhishthir, who had recovered the throne from Duryodhan, is allowed, without controversy, to have reigned in the interval between the brazen and earthen ages, and to have died at the setting in of the Calijug; so that, if the pundits of Cashmir and Varanes have made a right calculation of Buddha's appearance, the present or fourth age must have begun about a thousand years before the birth of Christ, and consequently the reign of Icshwacu could not have been earlier than four thousand years before that great epoch: and even that date will perhaps appear, when it shall be strictly examined, to be nearly two thousand years earlier than the truth. I cannot leave the third Indian age, in which the virtues and vices of mankind are said to have been equal, without observing, that even the close of it is manifestly fabulous and poetical, with hardly more appearance of historical truth than the Tale of Troy, or of the Argonauts for, Yudhishthir, it seems, was the son of Dherma, the genius of Justice: Bhima of Pavan, or the God of Wind: Arjun of Indra, or the firmament, Nacul and Sahadeva, of the two Cumars, the Castor and Pollux of India; and Bishma, their reputed great uncle, was the child of Ganga, or the Ganges, by Santanu, whose brother Devapi is supposed to be still alive, in the city of Calapa: all which fictions may be charming embellishments of an heroic poem, but are just as absurd in civil history, as the descent of two royal families from the Sun and the Moon." FOURTH AGE. Children of the Sun. Urucriya. Vatsavriddha. Prativyoma. Children of the Moon. Janamejaya. Satanica. Sahasranica. |