Sir William Jones could not believe in the antiquity of the Bharata War because of his Christian faith which told him that Creation took place at 9-00 a. m, on 23rd October 4004 BC Similar were the impressions of other Britishers. They did not believe in the veracity of Indian history books. Their bias prohibited the Christians from accepting the antiquity of the Indian nation. Arthur A. McDonnell wrote, "Early India wrote no history because it never made any. The ancient Indians never went through a struggle for life like the Greeks, the Persians and the Romans. Secondly, the Brahmanas early embraced the doctrine that all action and existence are a positive evil and could therefore have felt but little inclination to chronicle historical events." All these Britishers looked from their own glasses. Their nation came into being after struggle for life and when they first got the rule of a single political power. Later, they propagated that India is a nation in making since the advent of the Britishers and their establishing a single political rule in this country.

Jones was not satisfied with the Indian sources. He tried to search the Greek and Roman accounts. These accounts supplied some information about India of the time of the Macedonian king Alexander. It mentioned seven names of three successive Indian kings. Attributing one name each for the three kings the names are Xandrammes, Sandrokottas and Sandrocyptus. Xandrammes of the previous dynasty was murdered by Sandrokottas whose son was Sandrocyptus. Jones picked up one of these three names, namely, Sandrokottas and found that it had a sort of phonetic similarity with the name Chandragupta of the Puranic accounts. According to the Greek accounts, Palibothra was the capital of Sandrokottas. Jones took Palibothra as a Greek pronunciation of Pataliputra, the Indian city and capital of Chandragupta. He, then, declared on 28-2-1793 that Sandrokottas of the Greek accounts is Chandragupta Maurya of the Puranas. Jones died on 27-4-1794, just a year after this declaration and possibly before his death, could not know that Puranas have another Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty.

Later scholars took this identity of Sandrokottas with Chandragupta Maurya as proved and carried on further research. James Princep, an employee of the East India Company, deciphered the Brahmi script and was able to read the inscriptions of Piyadassana. Turnour, another employee of the Company in Ceylon, found in the Ceylonese chronicles that Piyadassana was used as a surname of Asoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya. The inscription bearing the name of Asoka was not found till the time of Turnour. In 1838, Princep found five names of the Yona kings in Asoka's inscriptions and identified them as the five Greek kings near Greece belonging to third century BC who were contemporary to Asoka.

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