The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c8.17

v1.c8.17

If we cannot hope to reach any assured results as regards the different strata in the Rigveda itself, it remains to be seen what date can be ascribed to the Rigveda as a whole. The Saṁhitā is absolutely lacking in reference to any historical event which we can date. It had indeed been sought time after time to demonstrate the contrary, but no such attempt has yet approached plausibility. Ludwig⁵ in an elaborate examination of the question decided that from the mention of two eclipses in the Rigveda could be deduced a date of the eleventh century B. C. for the hymns in which these phenomena were mentioned, but this suggestion has been totally disproved by Whitney.¹ An alleged reference to the capture of Babylon by Aryan tribes which might be brought into connexion with the advent of the Kassite dynasty at Babylon in the eighteenth century B. C. is a wild guess of Brunnhofer,² which it is quite impossible seriously to consider. Much more substantial are the arguments adduced by Prof. Jacobi ³ who sees traces of evidence that the Rigveda goes back as far as the third millennium B. C. He thinks that the Rigveda shows that the winter solstice took place in the month Phālguna, and on the ground of the precession of the equinoxes this must mean that the observation thus recorded was made in the third millennium B. C. This view, which rests on the interpretation of a very doubtful passage in the Rigveda,⁴ he supports ⁵ by the fact that in the Gṛhya Sūtras, or manuals of domestic ritual, of much later date, the ceremonial of the wedding includes an injunction to the wife to look at the star called Dhruva, ‘fixed’, and this can only have originated at the time when *a Draconis* was in the vicinity of the pole, there being no other star which could be called fixed at any period coincident with the probable age of the Rigveda: further he contends that the fact that Kṛttikās, the Pleiades, are placed at the head of the list of twenty-seven or twenty-eight Nakṣatras, ‘lunar mansions,’ in the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda Saṁhitās means that Kṛttikās marked the vernal equinox when the list was compiled, and this date fell in the third millennium B. C. The first of these arguments seems clearly to be based on a misunderstanding of the Rigvedic passage in question;⁶ the argument from the pole star assumes an accuracy in the demands of the primitive Indian wedding ritual which is wholly unnatural; and the assumption that the Kṛttikās coincided with the vernal equinox is most improbable, if we are to regard the Nakṣatras as an Indian invention, since the equinoxes play otherwise no part in early Indian ideas, and if, as is far more probable, the Nakṣatras were borrowed from some other nation, then the period when Kṛttikās were chosen as the head is without relevance to the date of Indian literature.⁷