A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.28

c10.28

This Saṃhitā is divided into twenty books, containing 730 hymns and about 6000 stanzas. Some 1200 of the latter are derived from the *Rigveda*, chiefly from the tenth, first, and eighth books, a few also from each of the other books. Of the 143 hymns of Book XX., all but twelve are taken bodily from the established text of the *Rigveda* without any change. The matter borrowed from the *Rigveda* in the other books shows considerable varieties of reading, but these, as in the other Saṃhitās, are of inferior value compared with the text of the *Rigveda*. As is the case in the *Yajurveda*, a considerable part of the *Atharva* (about one-sixth) consists of prose. Upwards of fifty hymns, comprising the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth, besides some thirty hymns scattered in the other books, are entirely unmetrical. Parts or single stanzas of over a hundred other hymns are of a similar character.