________________
cxvi
LAWS OF MANU.
the so-called Vikramasamvat or, more correctly, the Samvat of the Malavesas, the lords of Malava, which began in 57 B.C. Rudradâman's inscription consequently dates from the year 21-22 A.D., and it is thus certain that the word Pahlava was used in India at the beginning of the first century A.D. These circumstances make it impossible to accept Professor Nöldeke's inferences from the occurrence of the softened Iranian forms. But the mere mention of the Pahlavas would show that Manu's verse cannot have been composed before the beginning of the first century B.C. The Parthian dynasty of the Arsacides was founded in the middle of the third century B.C., and its sixth ruler, Mithradates I, according to some classical authors, invaded India about the middle of the second century. Coins of an Arsaces Theos and of an Arsaces Dikaios, who uses also the Prakrit language and the North-Indian alphabet, have been found in the Panjåb, and belong to the same or a little later times. As the Brahmans are ever ready to give foreign nations, with which they come into contact, a place in their ethnological system, it is quite possible that about the beginning of the first century B.C. an Indian origin might have been invented for the Pahlavas. But even this reduction of the remoter limit of the Manu-smriti is, in my opinion, not quite safe. For though the evidence for the genuineness of Manu X, 43-44 is as complete as possible, and though the varia lectio for Pahlava, which Govinda offers, probably deserves no credit 3, there is yet a circumstance which raises a suspicion against the latter reading. Parallel passages, closely resembling Manu's two verses, are found in the Mahabharata XIII, 33, 21-230 and XIII, 35, 17-18, where the names of the degraded Kshatriya races are likewise enumerated, and the cause of their degradation is stated
* Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, II', 334.
Sallet, Die Nachfalger Alexanders des Gr. pp. 51, 156-157. * The commentators and MSS. all give the two verses. If some MSS. of Medhâtithi read Pabnava for Pablava, that is a clerical mistake caused by the similarity of the subscribed Devanagari la and na. Govinda's var. lect. Pallava is improbable, because the other races mentioned in the second line of verse 44 all belong to the North of India, while the Pallavas are, as far as we know, confined to the South.
Digitized by Google
