A History of Sanskrit Literature c3.102

c3.102

On the question of the origin of Sanskrit no conclusive evidence has been recently adduced. Professor Hertel's conviction of the late date of the *Ṛgveda* and of Zoroaster is not likely to secure general acceptance, despite its ingenuity,⁵ nor is a recent and not less ingenious effort⁶ to show that the Aryans lived for a time together under strong Mitanni influences and only turned definitely east, to break up into Indians and Iranians, after the Mitanni *débâcle* in the middle of the fourteenth century B. C. The deductions drawn from certain terms, and from the similarity of Çiva to the Himmels-und Wettergott of Asia Minor, whose name in Mitanni was Tešup, and of Pārvatī to the Great Mother of Asia Minor, Hepa in Mitanni, and from the syllabic Brāhmī script, are all suggestive, but without probative force. Very interesting and worthy of serious consideration in the field of comparative philology are the arguments recently adduced by Professor Max Walleser¹ to refute the at present accepted theory regarding the merger in Sanskrit of the three vowels *a e o* into *a*, and to show that Sanskrit preserved as late as the seventh century A. D. the labio-velar consonants. One point is of special interest, as it confirms a view in which I differ from Professor Liebich,² the question of the priority of the *Taittirīya Prātiçākhya* to Pāṇini; it is made most probable that the distinction between *ā* and *a* as connected with the openness of the former and the closed character of the latter vowel was not noted by the *Ṛk* or *Taittirīya Prātiçākhyas* but by the *Atharva Prātiçākhya*, the *Vājasaneyi Prātiçākhya*, and Pāṇini. Liebich's argument against the priority of the *Taittirīya Prātiçākhya* to Pāṇini rests merely on the identity of certain Sūtras in both texts and the use of *pragraha* for *pragṛhya*. The latter appears to give no possible indication of relative position in time; it may be a local variant, which accords with other evidence as to the provenance of the text; the former fact is most naturally explained by the certainty that Pāṇini's work embodies much earlier material, which was made use of also by the Prātiçākhya, unless Pāṇini simply is the debtor to the Prātiçākhya.