Max Weber's early twentieth-century study of the religions and civilization of India is a great pioneering adventure in the sociology of ancient India. Weber's insight and analysis?especially his application of the sociological perspective to the work of classical Indologists and the religious texts available to him?were to add much to the store of the social scientist. Later, historians and archaeologists were to confirm a surprising number of Weber's theories. The central concern of this and other of Weber's studies of countries we today describe as