Ancient Indian Historical Tradition c31.136

c31.136

The Vedic age thus closed roundly at about 1000 B. C.¹ Anteriorly it stretched back for centuries, as the chronological list on pages 191-2 read with pages 144-9 shows. There was a vast difference in time between the earliest hymns and the latest in the Rigveda. Hymns handed down orally during those centuries could hardly have escaped being gradually modified in their diction as the language gradually changed, and when they were at last collected into the canon, their diction would be rather that of the age when the collection was formed than that of the times when they were composed.² Hence it is not surprising, if the hymns betray no marked differences of language commensurate with the long Vedic period. They were sacred, but their text would not have attained to fixity and verbal veneration until the canon was completed and closed. Yet even then phonetic changes went on, and the saṃhitā text did not take its final shape till after the completion of the Brāhmaṇas, or about 600 B. C.³