114 BULLETIN 148, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



2. The Brahmanas are prose treatises attached to each of the four 

 Vedas and explanatory of them. In addition to giving detailed ex- 

 planation of the ritual, they lay down religious precepts and dogmas. 

 Vedas and Brahmanas form the revealed scriptures (sruti) of the 

 Hindus, the Vedas supplying their divinely inspired psalms, and the 

 Brahmanas the divinely inspired theology, or body of doctrine. 



3. The Upanishads contain philosophic teaching appended to the 

 Vedic texts and the Brahmanas and forming part of the body of reveal- 

 ed scriptures. They teach the way of salvation by knowledge of the 

 essential unity of the human soul with the supreme soul. The earliest 

 Upanishads are dated from before the sixth century B. C. 



4. The Puranas: A collection of 18 books of the popular religious 

 literature of India. The history of the gods, cosmogony, theology, 

 legends of heroes, theories of salvation, and social practice are treated 

 in popular form. They are the Veda of popular Hinduism of the 

 present day. 



98. The Atharva-Veda. — Facsimile of the original manuscript, now 

 in the university library of Tubingen, Germany, about 400 years old. 

 The original is written in Sanskrit in the so-called Sarada script (the 

 more common script of Sanskrit is the Devanagari) on leaves of bark 

 of the birch tree, known as Bitula hhojpatra (in Sanskrit, Bhurja- 

 patra), which grows in the Himalaya mountains up to the height of 

 1),000 feet and which was used in Kashmir as writing material up to 

 about 250 years ago. The manuscript consists of 275 leaves written 

 on both sides, making 550 pages, the page measuring 25 centimeters 

 in height by 20 centimeters in width. The facsimile was reproduced by 

 chromo-photography under the editorship of Profs. Maurice Bloom- 

 field, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and Richard Garbe, of 

 the University of Tubingen, Germany. Kashmir, North India. (Cat. 

 No. 170.881, U.S.N.M.) Gift of Johns Hopkins University. 



99. The Mahahharata. — Manuscript written on palm leaves. The 

 Mahabharata (the "great Bharata," that is, the story of the war of 

 the Bharatas) is the name of one of the two great epics of ancient India, 

 the other being the Ramayana. It contains 100,000 couplets (sloJcas) 

 divided into 18 books (parvans), and is about eight times as large as 

 the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Its author and date have not been 

 determined with absolute certainty. The leading subject of the epic 

 is the narrative of the great war between the Kurus (Kauravas or 

 Baratas) and the Panchalas and Pandus (Pandavas), ending with the 

 overthrow of the former. But scarcely one-fourth of the poem is 

 taken up by this main theme. The rest consists of episodes in the 

 shape of folklore, legend, and myth, or didactic and dogmatic matter 

 which at diflerent periods have been interpolated and amalgamated 

 with the primary portion. Through these constant accretions the 

 Mahabharata became a sort of compendium of philosophical, social, and 



