collection[141].  We may hence say that the older Upanishads and Brahmanas must have been composed between 800 and 500 B.C. and the hymns of the Rig Veda hardly later than 1000 B.C.  Many authorities think the earlier hymns must date from 2000 rather than 1000 B.C. but the resemblance of the Rig Veda to the Zoroastrian Gathas (which are generally regarded as considerably later than 1000 B.C.) is plain, and it will be strange if the two collections prove to be separated by an interval of many centuries.  But the stage of social and religious culture indicated in the Vedic hymns may have begun long before they were composed, and rites and deities common to Indians and Iranians existed before the reforms of Zoroaster[142].

It may seem that everything is uncertain in this literature without dates or authors and that the growth of religion in India cannot be scientifically studied.  The difficulties are indeed considerable but they are materially reduced by the veneration in which the ancient scriptures were held, and by the retentiveness of memory and devotion to grammar, if not to history, which have characterized the Brahmans for at least twenty-five centuries.  The authenticity of certain Vedic texts is guaranteed not only by the quotations found in later works, but by treatises on phonetics, grammar and versification as well as by indices which give the number of words in every book, chapter and verse.  We may be sure that we possess not perhaps the exact words of the Vedic poets, but what were believed about 600 B.C. to be their exact words, and there is no reason to doubt that this is a substantially correct version of the hymns as recited several centuries earlier[143].

In drawing any deductions from the hymns of the Rig Veda it must be remembered that it is the manual of the Hotri priests[144].  This does not affect the age or character of the single pieces:  they may have been composed at very different dates and they are not arranged in the order in which the priest recites them.  But the liturgical character of the compilation does somewhat qualify its title to give a complete picture of religion.  One could not throw doubt on a ceremony of the Church, still less on a popular custom, because it was not mentioned in the missal, and we cannot assume that ideas or usages not mentioned in the Rig Veda did not exist at the time when it was composed.

We have no other Sanskrit writings contemporary with the older parts of the Rig Veda, but the roots of epic poetry stretch far back and ballads may be as old as hymns, though they neither sought nor obtained the official sanction of the priesthood.  Side by side with Vedic tradition, unrecorded Epic tradition built up the figures of Siva, Rama and Krishna which astonish us by their sudden appearance in later literature only because their earlier phases have not been preserved.