Gavām Ayana, the Vedic Era. by R. Shamasastry B.A., Librarian of The

GAVAM AYANA 473

despite Hillebrandt's 1 arguments to the contrary. Again, the argument from language is a dangerous one : we have no secure measure of the time taken for language to develop; the Latin of Cicero is only some three or four centuries later than that of the Duenos Inscription, and the close connection of Avestan and Sanskrit must be explained.2 Further, Professor de la Vallee Poussin seems (p. 87) to accept the finding of Iranian names in a thirteenth century Cuneiform tablet, where Aruna is suggested to be Varuna, but he lays no stress on this fact, and we have elsewhere questioned these attempts,3 on the general ground of the great uncertainty of the identifications. Professor de la Vallee Poussin promises a similar sketch of Brahmanism, the appearance of which will be awaited with interest.4 A. BERRIEDALE KEITH.

GAVAM AYANA, THE VEDIC ERA. By R. SHAMASASTRY, B.A., Librarian of the Mysore Government Oriental Library. Wesleyan Mission Press, Mysore. 1908. The main thesis of this interesting little book is thus stated on p. 3 :—•" From the first verse of the Rigveda to the last line of the latest Brahmana, the sole aim of the poets has . . . been the preservation of a sacrificial era, represented as the age of the bird-like Agni Prajapati or the sacrificial fire-god, that was kindled anew cycle after cycle, or as the sacrificial session of a cow or cows ... It is, in short, an era of bissextile intercalary days, regularly counted as one day's years, two days' years, three days'

1 Vedische Mythologie, i, 105 seq., repeated in Trans. Third Inter. Congr. Hist. Rel., ii, 15 seq. ; endorsed by Grierson, JRAS., 1908, pp. 604 seq. 2 Cf. Lindsay, Latin Language, p. 2. 3 JRAS., 1908, p. 884. 4 On p. 59, n. 1, the reference should be JRAS., 1907, pp. 929 seq.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 22 May 2018 at 08:59:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00038867 474 NOTICES OF BOOKS

years, thirty days' or a month's years, and so on—corresponding to as many Yugas or cycles of four years each." This theory implies two propositions. Firstly, Mr. Shamasastry maintains that at the end of every year the Vedic poets composed verses amounting to 360 syllables, corresponding to the number of days in the civil year, and thus they made the Veda by its total number of syllables record the number of days and years that had elapsed from the beginning of their era. Ultimately, the era thus registered by the Rigveda amounted to 1,200 " tropical" years, and that denoted by the Yajur-veda and Sama-veda together was of the same length. The second proposition is as follows: The civil year was adjusted to the " tropical" or " solar " year1 of 365J days by the addition of 21 days at the end of every fourth civil year ; and the " solar " year of 365J days was reckoned in cycles consisting of three years of 365 days each and one year of 366 days. The word go denotes an intercalary day, and hence was used to signify a period of four years, or Yuga. Thus a Gavam Ayana or " Cows' Walk " of two days denotes eight years, and so forth. " Accordingly, the two kinds of Cows' Walk, one of ten months and the other of twelve months, so vividly described in the Yajurveda and the Brahmanas, must necessarily mean two periods, the one of 1,200 years and the other of 1,440 years, corresponding to the 300 and 360 intercalary days, respectively " (p. 75); and " the sacrifices enumerated as constituting it are not . . . sacrifices performed on as many consecutive days as those of any particular ' Cows' Walk ' under observance, but they are periodic or epoch-making sacrifices performed by different persons at different intervals of time " (p. 87). These bold propositions at once raise issues of the greatest importance, and it is hardly possible to do justice to them in a brief notice like the present. But we may express our opinion that in his theory of the genesis of the 1 We are using Mr. Shamasastry's terms.

Veda Mr. Shamasastry is not quite convincing. It is clear that in Vedic times some method of reconciling the various years was known and partly employed. But it is not at all certain that the sacrificial grass-bundle {veda) signified an era of years, as did the sheaves employed by the Mexicans, with which he compares it, or that writing was unknown and accordingly verses of a certain number of syllables had to be learned by memory in order that men might know in what year of their era they were at a given time. The passages adduced by him from the Rig-veda give little support to the theory, as they are without exception vague or mystic, and can often be explained otherwise. In the Brahmanas the position is somewhat different. The passage quoted from the Aitareya Aranyaka (p. 16) proves that its author conceived that a hymn con- taining 36,000 syllables mystically denoted a period of 36,000 days of 24 hours each, or 100 civil years; and the Satapatha-brahmana, XIII, iv, 4, 15, quoted on the same page, has a similar import. But this is no evidence of an era in actual use. The passage of the Satapatha, X, iv, 2, 22-4, quoted on pp. 20-1, leads us to a somewhat similar conclusion. The idea of this text seems to be that of a Great Year or cosmic epoch of 1,200 years, signified firstly by the number of syllables in the Rig-veda alone, and secondly by those of the Yajur-veda and Sama-veda collectively. Here we are to some extent in agreement with Mr. Shamasastry, for it seems possible that on the basis of the number of 1,200 years or 432,000 syllables the later theory of the Yugas was constructed. But there is not yet sufficient evidence that this Great Year of the Satapatha ever existed except in the theories of the authors of the Brahmanas ; and this conclusion is corroborated by the admitted fact that the actual number of syllables in the Vedas does not tally with their theoretical number. In support of his thesis Mr. Shamasastry argues that the samvatsara called " Gavam Ayana " cannot be the ordinary

year of 360 or 361 days, for in that case about 421 sacrifices would have to be performed in 361 days, and no work of Vedic ritual prescribes more than one sacrifice a day (p. 31 f.). Nor are the days of the Gavam Ayana limited to 360 or 361; their minimum is 12, their maximum unlimited. Aivalayana (Srauta Sutra, VII, xiii, 31) states that the unit of the sacrificial session is 25 days, by which number the 360 days of the year are measured; and Gargya Narayana on this passage identifies the " year" with the Gavam Ayana. The Satapatha, again, makes the unit 30 days. Now, these days of the Gavam Ayana, whether 25 or 30 or 360, cannot have been consecutive, for sacrifices were offered only on days of full and new moon. " It follows, therefore, that these sessional sacrifices are rites performed one after another on full or new moon days at some definite interval in the past, and that when one round of all these different sacrifices was brought to a close the same series was begun again" (p. 34). An ingenious calculation of these intervals is offered on p. 86. Chapter iii seeks to prove that the Vedic word go signifies the intercalated day added to every fourth year to make up 366 days. Like much other Vedic exegesis, it fails to carry conviction in so far as it deals with the Rik and Atharva. But it adduces a passage from the Black Yajur-veda (IV, i, 10), which, taken in connection with the interesting ritual prescriptions given in the commentary on V, is interpreted by Mr. Shamasastry as symbolically denoting the 21 days forming the difference between 4 civil years of 360 days and 4 " tropical" years of 365\ days; and it seems to us probable that this was the significance attached to these mantras and their connected rites by the ritualists of the Yajur-vedic schools. That these mantras and others of the same kind were themselves originally designed to convey this meaning, is not so clear; but it is possible.

In chapter iv Mr. Shamasastry is led, from a con- sideration of ritualistic data, to the conclusion that " the sacrifice termed Ahina was a cyclic sacrifice performed at the close of every cycle of four years, and that the number of days during which it was performed was greater or less according as the day of the first new or full moon day occurring in the first year of any new cycle was nearer to or farther from the closing intercalary day of the previous cycle " (p. 63), and this leads to an interesting discussion on the terms for dice, which may be studied in connection with Professor Lliders' recent dissertation. In chapter v he studies the analogies of the Aztec and Chinese calendars, and from their use of the same units and animal symbols he concludes, rather boldly, that the animals mentioned in the Vedic rituals in connection with sacrifices are " hieroglyphics intended to represent ordinary and special days, weeks, months, years, and other necessary time- divisions " (p. 84), and " accordingly the set of eleven sacrificial animals . . . corresponding to the 352 or 363 days of the ' Cows' Walk' (see pp. 26-7), are evidently pictorial symbols intended to represent ' cows' or the bissextile intercalary days arranged into sets of eleven each" (p. 85). In his sixth chapter Mr. Shamasastry applies his theory to the interpretation of the Tandya-brahmana, XXV, xviii, 1, 5, and Satapatha, XIII, ii, 5, 1, X, iv, 4, 1-3 ; and it must be admitted that it furnishes a possible explanation of the numerical puzzles in the first two of these passages. We may agree that in the Brahmanas the name Prajapati designates sometimes time in general and sometimes the year as unit of time ; and the statement in the third passage, that Prajapati in his thousandth year purged himself of the evil of death, may possibly denote a theoretical inter- calation at the end of a cycle. Mr. Shamasastry here aptly quotes the term mala-masa still applied to the intercalated month. But we fail to see the cogency of his argument

when applied to the ritual of the Agni-cayana, which seems to us to symbolize in the number of its bricks merely the number of the divisions of the civil year of 360 days, though this may also symbolically represent a cycle or Great Year. The evidence that such a cycle was ever used as a practical era, and that the length of the Vasor-dhara and oatarudrlya litanies denoted the lapse of 1604 and 1700 "tropical" years respectively from the beginning of this era, is, in our opinion, insufficient, though ingenious. On the hypothesis that the year of 365j days was known to be about twelve minutes too long and to have led ultimately to a precession of the solstices, until in the early twelfth century B.C. the summer solstice stood several degrees in the constellation of Aslesa, and that on the basis of these conditions the cyclic system described in the Vedanga Jyotisa was established, Mr. Shamasastry is led to the conclusion that "as this astronomical treatise presupposes the whole of the Vedic literature ... it follows that that literature had already taken a permanent shape prior to the twelfth century B.C. In other words, the number of 460 or 465 cycles of four years each, recorded up to the end of the Brahmahas, were an accomplished fact before the cycle of sidereal years of the Vedanga Jyotisha was promulgated. Accordingly, allowing an interval of about 60 or 40 years between the Vedanga Jyotisha of the twelfth century B.C. and the close of the Brahmanic literature with its 460 or 465 cyclic days, we arrive at 3101 B.C. as the com- mencement of the Vedic era. Strange to say, it is the same as the Kali era, now of 5,008 years" (pp. 130-1). While we feel some doubt as to his calculations of the " 460 or 465 cyclic days", and are unconvinced by his derivation of the Kali era, we agree with Mr. Shamasastry that the grounds hitherto advanced for denying the antiquity of the Jyotisa are insufficient, as some of its doctrines appear in the Srauta-siitras of Bodhayana and

Sankhayana, and it implies a position of the solstitial colure which apparently goes back to the twelfth century B.C. We must now close our notice of Mr. Shamasastry's book. Whilst we cannot entirely follow him in his main theses, we must be grateful to him for the learning and ingenuity with which he has treated his theme and the new light which he has thrown upon several dark places ; and we hope that the enlightened patronage of the Maharaja's Government will enable him to continue his studies in this interesting and important field of literature. L. D. BAENETT.

CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM SEMITICARUM ab Academia Inscrip- tionum et Litterarum Humaniorum conditum atque digestum. PARS QUARTA, INSCRIPTIONES HIMYARITICAS ET SAB^EAS CONTINENS. TOMUS I. Fasciculi I-IV. Paris, 1889-1908. The recent publication of fasc. iv marks the conclusion of this formidable volume, and it is disappointing to observe from the Epilogue that it is apparently not intended to continue the work, for there are still many hundreds of important inscriptions not included in it. Fasc. i contained 69 inscriptions with detailed commentaries and translations; fasc. ii, 36; fasc. iii, 202; and fasc. iv, 55: total, 362. Many of these comprise several scattered inscriptions hardly intelligible when taken separately, yet when ingeniously dovetailed together like the portions of a puzzle, make a harmonious, perspicuous whole. To add to the difficulty, the greater number of them are more or less mutilated, and some extremely fragmentary; but wherever possible the missing words have been supplied by comparison with other inscriptions where similar phrases occur, and the way in which this most difficult work of