Virkus, Fred, Politische Strukturen im Guptareich (300–550 n.Chr.)

Abstract

About thirty years have passed, since Parameshwari Lal Gupta (1914–2001) published his then fundamental and today still very valuable survey of the sources, historiography, political and cultural history of the Gupta period in two volumes (1974, 1979). The approach of the present book is similar in so far as the author of the book under review tries in a commendable effort to keep very close to the sources. For, after a short general introduction the two subsequent chapters are devoted to a review of the sources on the Gupta Empire and to the economic and social conditions of the time respectively. Here, the author rightly stresses the necessity for any investigation on this period to go back to and to concentrate on the sources themselves (“. . . zwingt . . . zu einer stark quellenzentrierten Betrachtungsweise” p. 9). This insight is as simple as it is correct, but seems to be sadly absent in much that is written not only on Gupta history. For, quite a few opinions have been put forward on the Gupta empire, which is correctly or not, considered as the golden age of Indian culture1, and many theories have been proposed, but the sources occasionally seem to slowly disappear behind the mental horizon of quite a few authors being obscured by the brilliance of shiny theories2. This impression is particular strong when reading one of the introductory chapters, chapter four on the “Structure of the Gupta Empire” (p. 54–87), where many opinions expressed by previous scholars are listed,