Textkritische Bemerkungen zur Kathaka-Samhita.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

By Martin Mittwede. Alt- und Neu-Indische Studien 37. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1989. Pp. 160. DM 38.

The Maitrayani Samhita (MS) and the Kathaka Samhita (KS) are the most unjustly ignored texts of the Vedic corpus. Though both are readily available in the editions of L. von Schroeder (MS I 1881, II 1883, III 1885, IV 1886; KS I 1900, II 1909, III 1910), which were reprinted in the early 1970s, and though KS is provided with the relative luxury of a word index (by R. Simon 1912), these recensions of the Black Yajur Veda (BYV) have long been overshadowed by their more successful sister text, the Taittiriya Samhita (TS), whose sakha became the dominant one of the BYV in the later period. The TS was the first of the three to be edited (A. Weber, 1871-72), but I suspect that its preeminence over MS and KS in modern scholarship shamefully owes something to the fact that it is the only one with a complete translation (A. B. Keith, 1914).

The three texts, of course, are parallel in many ways, treating much of the same ritual material and providing similar exegetical justifications, sometimes comparable word-for-word. But the MS and KS, which resemble each other, frequently diverge from the TS, and these two texts appear to be older than the TS in their linguistic form and provide fuller versions of archaic mythological material. The three texts together constitute the oldest continuous prose in Indo-Iranian--and indeed, outside of Anatolian, the oldest continuous prose in any Indo-European language. Their value for the study of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European syntax is consequently immense and has begun to be exploited in recent years, as an appreciation has developed of their syntactic and stylistic differences from later Brahmana prose (e.g., the Satapatha Brahmana), which has often heretofore provided most of the Vedic data for historical syntactic study.

But their value is not only to the linguist. Their bearing on the study of Vedic mythology, the development of Vedic ritual, the origins of Dharmasastra, the Vedic Weltbild, and so on, cannot be overestimated. One of the desiderata of Vedic studies today is to make the riches of these texts available to everyone with an interest in early India.

The compiler of the volume under review has done more to accomplish this than any other current scholar. This book, with its companion, Textkritische Bemerkungen zur Maitrayani Samhita (1986, no. 31 of the same series, also by Mittwede), collects...