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Ancient India has bequeathed to us a vast treasury of texts which represent the intellectual and literary activities of more than two thousand years and cover a wide field. The earliest literary work, the Samhita of the Rigveda, is at least three thousand years old and may be even considerably older. A continuous stream of literature flowing since that remote age, widening in course of centuries and embracing almost all fields of human endeavour excepting political activity throws a light on the civilization of India such as we do not meet with in cases of other ancient cultures. This mass of literature deal with philosophy and religion, including ethics, ritual and ceremonial; cosmogony, cosmology, geography, astronomy and the allied sciences; political and economic doctrines and practices; and in a minor way, with almost all branches of secular life. It includes, besides a mass of religious texts, purely literary works such as epics, lyrics, kavyas (poems), dramas and prose romances, as well as biographies and folk tales. This literature is as bulky in volume as it is varied in its contents. Although it does not help us very much in reconstructing the political history of ancient India, it throws a flood of light on an enables us to trace the various stages in the development of culture and civilization in ancient India, such as is not possible in the case of ancient Egypt, Western Asia and China and even Greece and Rome.
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