Articles liés à The God Varuna in the Rig-Veda
Présentation de l'éditeur
The Rig-V eda in Relation to the Present A wakening in I ndia. The Rig-V eda has the honour of being the oldest book in Indian literature and one of the oldest books in the literature of the world. It is at least as old, i.e., the hymns of which it is composed, as the Homeric cycle of poems, and it may possibly be much older. Scholars agree that the 1028 hymns which constitute the Rig-V eda Sanhita or Collection were edited about B. C. 600. That date then represents the final limit as regards authorship. How many centuries were covered by the composition of the hymns is a matter of uncertainty. In fact, as yet the chronology of the Rig-V eda is a chaos of conflicting opinions. The orthodox opinion in India is that the Vedas are eternal. Critical scholars are divided into two camps, those favoring an early date and those favoring a late date. Professor Hopkins of Yale, perhaps the greatest authority in the world on the Epic literature of I ndia, and Professor Jackson of Columbia, well known as a Zoroastrian scholar, both agree in holding that the bulk of the Rig-V edic hymns were composed during the two centuries 800-600 B. C. As Professor Hopkins puts it, One thousand B. C. is not the lowest but the highest limit that we can reasonably set to the Rig-V eda, and 800 B. C. is probably nearer the mark, as far as the bulk of the Rig-V eda is concerned. According to this view the earliest Vedic literature is contemporaneous with the earliest Hebrew literature. Briefly stated, their grounds for such a late date are as follows: (1) The date of Zoroaster is now generally fixed at 660-583 B. C; and, since there is only a dialectic difference between the language of the Rig-V eda and that of the A vestar there can be no great interval in time between the two works, the date of Zoroaster of course determining the date of the oldest part of the A vesta. (2) The change i
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