Literary and foreign sources

Literary and foreign sources give ancient India a voice, but that voice is partial, purposeful and often much later than the events it describes. Vedic hymns, epics, Buddhist and Jain texts, court literature and foreign accounts must each be read for what they were written to do, not merely for facts they seem to contain. Megasthenes describing the Mauryan court, for example, is valuable precisely because he was an outsider observing a system he did not fully understand. The historian's task is to test such accounts against archaeology, inscriptions and coins.