History proper, as we have it, is a matter of written records. But mankind has started his history long before it developed the system of writing. Man has left behind him traces of his existence: pottery, tools and weapons, which lie buried in the womb of the earth. These buried remains unearthed point out the records of thestages of his progress. With their help, archaeology has “extended history's view backward in time a hunderedfold. Archaeology is truly described as "a handmaid of history.” When in other countries archaeology is mainly, if not solely, concerned with pre-history, in India its contribution to the study of ancient and medieval periods excels anything else in importance and interest. It not only supplies a sure corrective to legends and myths but endows the legendary past with a historical basis where there is any. The great Maurya Emperor Asoka might have still remained a mythical monster of cruelty, reclaimed for humanity by the evangelical zeal of the Buddhist monks, but for Prinsep's ingenious reading of the unknown script of the rock and the pillar inscriptions.