The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c24.25

v1.c24.25

Whatever may be the historical value of these prologues, they certainly carry us back to the same period, the period of the Atharvaveda and the Brāhmaṇas, to which modern research has traced the existence of an Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature. To suppose that they are altogether concoctions of the Middle Ages is to place too great a strain on our credulity. They can scarcely have been reconstructed from the fragmentary evidence supplied by Vedas and Brāhmaṇas at a period when no one could have dreamed of treating Vedas and Brāhmaṇas as historical documents—a task reserved for the nineteenth century. We cannot escape from the only possible conclusion, that the Purāṇas have preserved, in however perverted and distorted a form, an independent tradition, which supplements the priestly tradition of the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas, and which goes back to the same period. This tradition, as we may gather from the prologues, was handed down from one generation of bards to another and was solemnly promulgated on the occasion of great sacrifices.