To the supremacy which the Brahman, as the expounder of the scriptures and of the laws deduced from them, and the ordained dispenser of divine favour, through prayer and sacrifice, was able to arrogate to his own caste, the code of Manu, above all others, bears emphatic witness: 

The very birth of Brahmans is a constant incarnation of Dharma....  When a Brahman springs to light he is born above the world, the chief of all creatures, assigned to guard the treasury of duties, religious and civil.  Whatever exists in the world is all in effect, though not in form, the wealth of the Brahman, since the Brahman is entitled to it all by his primogeniture and eminence of birth.

Every offence committed by a Brahman involves a relatively slight penalty; every offence committed against him the direst punishment.  Next to the Brahman, but far beneath him, is the Kshatrya and beneath him again the Vaishya.  The Shudras are the fourth caste that exists chiefly to serve the three twice-born castes, and above all the Brahman.  As Sir William Jones observes in the preface to the translation which he was the first to make a little more than a century ago of these extraordinarily full and detailed ordinances, they represent a system of combined despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law, but artfully conspiring to give mutual support with mutual checks.  But though they abound with minute and childish formalities, though they prescribe ceremonies often ridiculous, though the punishments they enact are partial and fanciful, for some crimes dreadfully cruel, for others reprehensibly slight, though the very morals they lay down, rigid enough on the whole, are in one or two instances, as in the case of light oaths and of pious perjury, dangerously relaxed, one must, nevertheless, admit that, subject to those grave limitations, a spirit of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable tenderness to all sentient creatures pervades the whole work, and the style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language of legislation and extorts a respectful awe.  Above all it is well to remember that the ordinances of Manu still constitute to-day the framework of Hindu society, and Brahman judges of the Indian High Courts, who administer our own very different codes, still cling to them in private life and quote them in political controversies as the repositories of inspired wisdom.

It is on this background of tangled religious beliefs and abstruse philosophic speculations and very precise and elaborate laws framed to safeguard the twofold authority of priests and kings, but of the latter always in subordination to the former, that we see men and cities and organised states assume for the first time historic substance towards the sixth century B.C.  From that date onwards we are on firmer ground.  For though even in much later times the Hindus never produced historians in the strict sense of the term,