[185] Muir, loc. cit. 1, 307 ff.
[186] Muir, loc. cit. 1, 157.
[187] Muir, loc. cit. 1, 151, 200.
CHAPTER V.
THE OLD AND THE NEW RELIGION.
In the land of the Ganges the Brahmans had gained a great victory and carried out a great reform. A new god had thrown the old gods into the background, and with the conception of this new god was connected a new view of the world, at once abstract and fantastic. From this in turn followed a new arrangement of the state, and of the orders, which were now of divine origin, as direct products of creation, and thus became irrevocably fixed. The monarchy itself was of humbler descent than the Brahmans, the first of the earth; to them the warlike nobles were made inferior, while the doctrines of hell and regeneration, which the Brahmans put in the place of the old ideas of life after death, must gradually have brought about the subjugation of the national mind and heart to the new religion.
When the Brahmans succeeded in establishing their claims in the land of the Ganges about the year 800 B.C. (as we ventured to assume), the old sacrificial songs and invocations, which they had imported with them from the land of the Indus, were no doubt to a great extent already written down. When the various families of minstrels and priests had first exchanged with each other their special treasures of ancient prayers; when the Brahmans, passing beyond the borders of the separate states, had become amalgamated into one order, and had thus consolidated the existing stock of traditional formulæ and ritual—it must have been felt necessary to preserve this valuable treasure in its greatest possible extent, and, considering the belief of the Aryas in the magical power of these forms, as securely as possible from any change. Whatever might be the assistance which the compact form of these invocations lent to the memory, the body of songs which had now passed from tradition and the possession of the separate families into the general possession of the orders, was too various and comprehensive,—minute and verbal accuracy was too important,—for the resources of even the most careful oral teaching, the strongest and most practised memory. But the process of writing them down was not accomplished at once. In the first case, no doubt, each family added to its own possessions the store of the family most closely connected with it.[188] Beginning from different points, after manifold delays, extensions, and enlargements from the invocations first composed in the land of the Ganges, which allow us to trace the change from the old views to the new system, the collection must at last have comprised all that was essential in the forms and prayers used at offerings and sacrifices.
We do not know how far back the use of writing extends with the Indians. According to the account of Nearchus, they wrote on cotton, beaten hard; other Greeks speak of the bark of trees, while native evidence teaches us that the leaves of the umbrella palm were used for the purpose. Modern enquirers are of opinion that the Indian alphabet is not an invention of the people, but borrowed from the Phenician.[189] As we have shown, the Phenicians reached the mouth of the Indus in the tenth century. But about this time, or perhaps before it, there existed a marine trade between the Indians and Sabæans, on the coasts of south Arabia. Granting the origin of the Indian alphabet from the Phenician, it is thus rendered more probable that it was taken from the south Arabian alphabet, which in its turn rose out of the Aramaic alphabet, than that it was borrowed directly from the Phenician. In the latter case we should have to presuppose a trade between Babylonia and India by means of the Persian Gulf (in Babylonia the Aramaic alphabet was in use beside the cuneiform in the eighth century B.C. at the latest) as a more probable means of communication than the voyages of the Phenicians to Elath, which had already been given up. But from whatever branch of the Semitic races the Indian letters may have been taken, the general use of them cannot be put much earlier than 800 B.C. The oldest inscriptions of the Indians which have come down to us, are those of Açoka, king of Magadha, and belong to the middle of the third century B.C. They exhibit a complete alphabetic use of writing, and the forms of the letters are not very different from those employed at a later time.[190]
Among the Indians the collection of their old songs and forms is known as the Veda, i. e. knowledge: it forms the knowledge of the priest. We possess these songs in three groups. The oldest, and no doubt the original group, the Rigveda, i. e. the knowledge of thanksgiving, comprises in ten books more than a thousand of the traditional poems and sacrificial songs. For the most part they are arranged according to a certain recurring order in the deities invoked; and, as we have seen, some poems are included which could never have been sung at sacrifices at all. Besides this collection there are two collections of the liturgic prayers which ought to accompany the performance of sacrifice. The Samaveda comprises the prayers sung at the offering of the soma; they are verses taken from the Rigveda, and the collection is a book of songs or hymns.[191] The Yajur-veda contains the formulæ and ritual which must be chanted at the dedication of the altar, the kindling of the fire, and every act of every sacrifice. Thus the Samaveda supplied the knowledge of the Udgatar, the prayers during the sacrifice of soma, the Yajur-veda supplied the knowledge of the Adhvaryu, who had to perform the material part of the sacrificial service, the ritual for the separate acts of the ceremony. Compared with these two books the Rigveda was the book of the Hotar, i. e. of the chief priest, who had to conduct the sacrifice, and invoke the gods to come down to it.[192] If in the parts of the hymns of praise and invitations, which are repeated from the Rigveda in the Samaveda, the style and tone is often more archaic than in the Rigveda, the explanation is that the prayer at the sacrifice was no doubt preserved with more liturgic accuracy, than the invitation to the god, which preceded the sacrifice. The Yajur-veda is preserved in a double form; of which one, the black Yajus, is shown to be the older by its want of systematic sequence; but even in this older form we find, as in the tenth book of the Rigveda,[193] pieces of later origin, the outcome of priestly meditation.