Professor Max Miller is willing to admit that a tribe of Semitic nomads—­fourteen centuries before the year 1 of the Westerns—­knew well the art of writing, and had their historically and scientifically proven “book of the covenant and the tables ’with the writing of God upon them.’” Yet the same authority tells us that the Aryans could neither read nor write until the very close of the Brahmanic period.  “No trace of writing can be discovered (by the philologists) in the Brahmanical literature before the days of Panini.”  Very well, and now what was the period during which this Siva-taught sage is allowed to have flourished?  One Orientalist (Bohtlingk) refers us to 350 B.C., while less lenient ones, like Professor Weber, land the grammarian right in the middle of the second century of the Christian era!  Only, after fixing Panini’s period with such a remarkable agreement of chronology (other calculations ranging variously between 400 B.C. and 460 A.D.), the Orientalists place themselves inextricably between the horns of a dilemma.  For whether Panini flourished 350 B.C. or 180 A.D., he could not have been illiterate; for firstly, in the Lalita Vistara, a canonical book recognized by the Sanskritists, attributed by Max Muller to the third Buddhist council (and translated into Tibetan), our Lord Buddha is shown as studying, besides Devanagari, sixty-three other alphabets specified in it as being used in various parts of India; and secondly, though Megasthenes and Nearchus do say that in their time the laws of Manu were not (popularly) reduced to writing (Strabo, xv. 66 and 73) yet Nearchus describes the Indian art of making paper from cotton.  He adds that the Indians wrote letters on cotton twisted together (Strabo, xv. 53 and 67).  This would be late in the Sutra period, no doubt, according to Professor Miller’s reasoning.  Can the learned gentleman cite any record within that comparatively recent period showing the name of the inventor of that cotton-paper, and the date of his discovery?  Surely so important a fact as that, a novelty so transcendently memorable, would not have passed without remark.  One would seem compelled, in the absence of any such chronicle, to accept the alternative theory—­known to us Aryan students as a fact—­that writing and writing materials were, as above remarked, known to the Brahmans in an antiquity inconceivably remote—­many centuries before the epoch made illustrious by Panini.

Attention has been asked above to the interesting fact that the god Orpheus, of “Thracia” (?) is called the “dark-skinned.”  Has it escaped notice that he is “supposed to be the Vedic Ribhu or Abrhu, an epithet both of Indra and the Sun."* And if he was “the inventor of letters,” and is “placed anterior to both Homer and Hesiod,” then what follows?  That Indra taught writing to the Thracian Pelasgians under the guise of Orpheus,** but left his own spokesmen and vehicles, the Brahmans, illiterate until “the dawn of Christianity?” Or, that the gentlemen of the West are better at intuitional chronology than conspicuous for impartial research?