“It is clear, therefore, that there is enough evidence of historical memory in India to render the line of investigation adopted here worth pursuing. It is true that Hindu India does not possess a sustained tradition of historiography of the kind we find in other ancient cultures such as Greece, Rome and China. Sometimes cultures exhibit such civilizational gaps. For instance, China has a long history, a history of warfare and chivalry as well, and of course a literary tradition right from Confucius onwards, but it did not produce an epic of the kind we find in Greece, Rome and India.
One reason behind this histographic gap in India could be that historical events in ancient India were recorded on stone rather than paper. This renders the facts narrated above particularly signficant, as they are cut in stone. India has more than 90,000 inscriptions, most of which are still unread.”