Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.25

c14.25

Beyond that date we have to depend on a sort of philosophical dead-reckoning, invented by Max Müller and still generally accepted, by which the Brāhmanas are assigned to the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., the later Vedas to the ninth and tenth, and the older elements of the Rigveda to the eleventh or twelfth centuries. These dates Müller later insisted were minimum dates only, and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement (influenced no doubt by the discovery of the Mitannian document of about 1380 with the names of Rigveda gods) to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 B.C., but without any absolutely conclusive evidence.