The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6.20

c6.20

This great period of time has of late become definite in a rather important sense. Within recent years there were discovered at Tel-el-Amarna, in Upper Egypt, numerous cuneiform tablets containing letters from tributary kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitani, Phœnicia, and Canaan, addressed to certain Egyptian Pharaohs, their liege lords. These tablets have thrown much new light upon the history of Western Asia. There is among them a letter written by a king of Mitani in Syria, Dushratta by name. In this letter figure among others the names of his brother Artashuvara and his grandfather Artatama. These names are obviously Iranian (Persian), or “Iranoid”; with the tablets themselves they date back to at least 1600 B.C.¹ The names Artashuvara and Artatama open out with the syllables *arta-*, familiar to Western students of history as part of the numberless Persian names like Artaxerxes, Artaphernes, etc. This stem *arta* is identical with *arta-* of the Western Iranian, Achemenidan inscriptions, with *asha* of the Avesta, and with *ṛta* of the Veda. The word means “cosmic order,” or “order of the universe.” We shall find it later on, figuring as one of the most important religious conceptions of the Rig-Veda. We have here at any rate a definite lower date for the idea; it is likely to have existed a long time before 1600 B.C. From the point of view of the history of religious ideas we may, in fact we must, begin the history of Hindu religion at least with the history of this conception. Broad as the ocean, and as uninterrupted in its sweep there lies before us a period of thousands of years of the religious thought and practice of the most religious people in the history of the world.