Excerpt from A History of Civilisation in Ancient India, Vol. 1 of 2 Coming now to the Epic Age, scholars are generally agreed that the caste system of India first took its rise in this period. But here again we should ever remember that caste rules, with all their potential evils, served in this early period as a sort of moral code for the Aryan Hindus, and tended to unite them by classing them in three great sections, with sanction for inter-caste marriage and religious instruction for all. The caste system of the Epic Period was no more like the system of to-day than the Feudal institutions of the Middle Ages, Which had their object and their use, were like the baronial oppression of the eighteenth century in France. As it was neither possible nor desirable under changed circumstances to restore the old institution of the Middle Ages, the living nations of Europe swept away its de based and oppressive substitute which flourished down to the last century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.