The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c8.66

v1.c8.66

As the Rigveda is of so recent a period, it is natural to ask whether the religion which it contains has not traces of influence by the cultures of the great nations of the East and above all of Babylonia. The answer to this question cannot be given with any certainty as in the affirmative: the only cogent proof of the borrowing of deities by one people from another, in cases where the borrowing is not formally recorded, is afforded by the appropriation of the name and the similarity of character of the gods: mere similarity is wholly insufficient, unless the conception formed of the particular divinity is of so special a kind that parallelism is not a reasonable explanation. In the case of the Rigveda and of the later Vedic texts no such instance of borrowing is hinted at, and no case is known in which the similarity of name even suggests that a god has been taken over from another people, so that at most we are left to rely on the argument from similarity of character. Strength would doubtless be given to such arguments if the language of the Rigveda could be proved to contain loan-words from Semitic sources, but the only two which have with any probability been alleged, the word *manā*,¹ apparently meaning ‘ornament’ and described as golden, which is often equated with the Babylonian² Mina, and the word *paraçu*, axe, are too isolated to prove anything at all. Aššur cannot reasonably be connected with Asura³ either as source or result and it is impossible to prove that the year of 360 days of the Rigveda is to be derived from the Babylonian year,⁴ and still less that the sacred number seven is adopted under Babylonian influence for an Aryan nine.⁵