Gone to the dogs in ancient India.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

Gone to the Dogs in Ancient India. By WILLEM BOLLEE. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophich-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 2006, no. 2. Munich: VERLAG DER BAYDERISCHEN AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN, 2006. Pp. 135.

This delectable grab-bag of all things canine ranges even further than its title suggests--across millennia (from the Indus Valley civilization to modern ethnographic data), languages (as might be expected from the author, it is especially strong in Middle Indo-Aryan in addition to Sanskrit, but the Classical and modern languages of Europe are also represented), texts, and continents. Over many years of broad reading, the author has "collected accidentally" (p. 6) references to dogs in all manner of literature, which he has organized under various loose

headings, e.g., types and designations for dogs, body parts and their functions, nature and behavior, human-canine relationships, dogs in literature, dogs in art, etc. But the organization is scarcely the point: this is a work to dip into at random, and some of the pleasure comes from the unpredictable juxtaposition of the tidbits. A single brief paragraph, this one concerning the dog in similes (pp. 79-80), offers up citations from several Prakrit texts, a Sanskrit maxim compared to a modern English proverb, a snippet from the Mahabharata and one from the Atharva Veda, a quotation from Bilhana, another from a Pali text, another from Hala, the ancient Indian dicing match, the northern European Totentier, and one of Carl Jung's dreams! (And I have left out a few.)

Though it is always good simply to be reminded just how much fun our field is, this little book teaches, not so much explicitly as by example, a more serious lesson: that, though most Indologists probably think of the dog...