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192 INDIA AS DESCRIBED, IN EARLY TEXTS
from abandoned harems of kings, nobles, bankers and others. The Pali Literature clearly attests that some of the leading gaņikās or courtezans of the time made a profitable trade of prostitution by maintaining a regular brothel containing five hundred prostitutes.
In the early Buddhist texts, mention is made of four kinds of slaves: antojātā,8 dhanaickītā, karamarānītā, and samamdāsabyamupagatā, į.e., those who were born of slave parents or begotten on slave women, those purchased with money, those who were reduced to slavery under coercion by bandits, and those who took to slavery of their own accord. The Jatakas contain instances where the slaves were bought för seven hundred kahāpaņas.
Scholars agree that there was nothing like what afterwards came to be the rigorous caste system in India at the time of the rise of Jainism and Buddhism, But this may not wholly be the correct reading of the fact. The evidence of the later Vedio texts 'is conclusive that even after death, the custom was to ereot sepulchres or tombs of different heights to maintain the distinction between the dead
1 Barua, Introduction to History of Indian Prostatunon by Sinha and Basu.
Jataka, w, pp. 60f. and 4865.; Law, Women in Buddhrst Interature, p. 324. * Sumangalavrläsint, 1, p. 300; Jätaka, No. 646.
Jätaka, ii, p. 343.
