Ancient Indian Historical Tradition c11.42

c11.42

In examining the genealogies it is of little profit and is likely to be misleading to deal with the accounts in the several Puranas separately. The only trustworthy course is first to collate the texts that generally agree and ascertain as far as possible what original text they indicate, and then construct the genealogy therefrom. By this method individual corruptions and errors can be corrected, losses and omissions remedied, and interpolations and alterations detected with reasonable confidence; and thus a text may be framed which approaches as nearly as is possible to the common original on which all those texts were based. At times divergences occur which are greater than can be so resolved, and we find competing texts, yet they are not on the whole so frequent or serious as to cause material difficulty; and small discrepancies do not really affect the general fabric of the genealogy.