A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s7.31

v1.c8.s7.31

If we ask in which period we are to locate these centuries of the development of the Brāhmaṇa literature, there can be as little question of any definite dates as there is in determining the period of the Saṃhitās. The only certainty is, that the Saṃhitā of the Ṛgveda was already concluded and that the hymn-poetry already belonged to a far-distant past, when prayers and sacrifices were first made the subject of a special "science." (It is probably certain, too, that the great majority of magic incantations, spells and formulae of the Atharvaveda and of the Yajurveda, as well as the melodies of the Sāmaveda, are much older than the speculations of the Brāhmaṇas.) On the other hand it is likely that the final compilation of the Saṃhitās of the Atharvaveda and of the liturgical Saṃhitās was about contemporaneous with the beginnings of the Brāhmaṇa literature, so that the latest portions of these Saṃhitās might be of the same date as the earliest portions of the Brāhmaṇas. (At least the geographical and cultural conditions indicate this, as they are represented to us on the one hand in the Saṃhitās of the Atharvaveda and Yajurveda, and on the other hand in the Brāhmaṇas, in comparison with those of the Ṛgveda. We have seen how, in the period of the Atharvaveda-Saṃhitā, the Aryan tribes of the Indus land, the home of the Ṛgveda, had already spread themselves further east into the region of the Ganges and the Jamnā. The region which is indicated by the Saṃhitās of the Yajurveda as well as by all the Brāhmaṇas, is the land of the *Kurus and Pañcālas*, those two tribes whose mighty battles form the nucleus of the great Indian epic, the Mahābhārata. *Kurukṣetra*, "the land of the Kurus," in particular, is regarded as a holy land, in which, as it is frequently put, the gods themselves celebrated their sacrificial feasts. This land Kurukṣetra lay between the two small rivers Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī in the plain to the west of the Ganges and Jamnā: and the neighbouring region of the Pañcālas stretched from the north-west to the south-east between the Ganges and Jamnā. This part of India, the Doab between Ganges and Jamnā from the neighbourhood of Delhi to as far as Mathurā, is still in a later period, regarded as the actual "Brahman land" (Brahmāvarta), whose customs according to the brahmanical law-books should be adopted for the whole of India. This region is not only the land of the origin of the Saṃhitās of the Yajurveda and of the Brāhmaṇas, but also the home of the whole of brahmanical culture, which first spread from here over the whole of India.