, is mother of Thor.
Professor Zimmer takes the same view. Grimm thinks that the Greeks and
Romans, by changing _f_ into _h_, represented Fergunni by Hercynia,
and, in fine, he traces the words _ber_g and _bur_g back to
Parganya.--A. W.]

[Footnote 255: Rig-Veda II. 28.]

[Footnote 256: Atharva-Veda IV. 16.]

[Footnote 257: Psalm cxxxix. 1, 2, "O Lord, thou hast searched me and
known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou
understandest my thought afar off."]

[Footnote 258: Psalm cxxxix. 9, "If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand
lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."]

[Footnote 259: Rig-veda III. 9, 9; X. 52, 6.]

LECTURE VII.

VEDA AND VEDANTA.

I do not wonder that I should have been asked by some of my hearers to
devote part of my last lecture to answering the question, how the
Vedic literature could have been composed and preserved, if writing
was unknown in India before 500 B.C., while the hymns of the Rig-Veda
are said to date from 1500 B.C. Classical scholars naturally ask what
is the date of our oldest MSS. of the Rig-Veda, and what is the
evidence on which so high an antiquity is assigned to its contents. I
shall try to answer this question as well as I can, and I shall begin
with a humble confession that the oldest MSS. of the Rig-Veda, known
to us at present, date not from 1500 B.C., but from about 1500 A.D.

We have therefore a gap of three thousand years, which it will require
a strong arch of argument to bridge over.

But that is not all.

You may know how, in the beginning of this century, when the age of
the Homeric poems was discussed, a German scholar, Frederick August
Wolf, asked two momentous questions:

1. At what time did the Greeks first become acquainted with
the alphabet and use it for inscriptions on public
monuments, coins, shields, and for contracts, both public
and private?[260]

2. At what time did the Greeks first think of using writing
for literary purposes, and what materials did they employ
for that purpose?

These two questions and the answers they elicited threw quite a new
light on the nebulous periods of Greek literature. A fact more firmly
established than any other in the ancient history of Greece is that
the Ionians learned the alphabet from the Phenicians. The Ionians
always called their letters Phenician letters,[261] and the