Romesh Chunder Dutt's comprehensive History of India from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century B.C. is one of the seminal books about ancient India and the rise of civilization there. As he put it near the beginning, "THE history of Ancient India is a history of thirty centuries of human culture and progress. It divides itself into several distinct periods, each of which, for length of years, will compare with the entire history of many a modern people."