The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c9.50

v1.c9.50

It is, as in the preceding period, a question of the greatest interest to determine whether Indian religion in this period was subjected to any outside influence, and in this case the evidence for such influence, though it does not become of great importance, is nevertheless less impalpable than in the period of the Rigveda. The most important item of proof of Semitic influence is contained in the existence of the system of the Nakṣatras, ‘lunar mansions’, which appear in the Yajurveda Saṃhitās and the Atharvaveda as the stations in which the moon spends the successive nights of the periodic month. The foreign origin of the Nakṣatras¹ is suggested by the fact that they appear curiously isolated in Indian literature: the Rigveda² appears not to know them at all, nor to contain any hint that such a system was being developed, while they occur in China and in Arabia under conditions which render derivation from India or *vice versa* out of the question. That the system was derived from Babylon seems natural, but the requisite and conclusive proof of its existence there has not been brought despite the probability that it existed.³ The same conclusion in favour of primitive Babylonian influence is suggested by the legend of the flood which is recounted for the first time in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁴ in connexion with the sage Manu, who rescued a fish, in return was warned by it of the danger of the flood, and in due course was towed by the fish safely over the flood to a mountain peak on which his ship grounded. It is not inconceivable that the story is of independent Indian origin, but this appears to be rather unlikely,¹ and in that case Babylon seems the obvious source, though the story may have come from some other part of the Semitic area. Indeed it has been urged² that Indian writing was introduced *via* Mesopotamia about the eighth century B. C. and was based on the Phoenician script, having as its prototype writing of the character of that found on the Moabite stone,³ but this conjecture is still too uncertain to be used as a conclusive support of Semitic influences at this time. The attempt⁴ to find Sumerian influence in *loha* ‘copper’ or ‘bronze’ is clearly inconclusive,⁵ though it has been suggested⁶ that the use of both copper and, later, iron came to India from Mesopotamia.⁷ It may be added that there is no trustworthy evidence of Egyptian influence on Indian thought in the Vedic period despite the contentions of Prof. G. Elliot Smith in his *Migrations of Early Culture*, *Influence of Ancient Egyptian Civilization in the East and in America*, and subsequent works, who would have us believe that this is the explanation of the development of Indian ideas in the sixth century B. C., ignoring the evidence of the slow emergence of the ideas of the Upaniṣads and Buddhism from Indian conceptions. Similarly it is unwise to demand Aryan influence on Egypt as an explanation of the rise for a brief period of the cult of Aten, however tempting it may be to connect this with the apparent worship of Šuriaš, the sun, among the Kassites, for the Egyptian phenomenon can be explained without any such hypothesis.