79 



Topical Digest of the Rig- Veda. 



By HJALMAR EDGREN. 

 Part I. Material or Visible Objects. 



The magnificent progress achieved within the last thirty- 

 years in the exegesis of the Rig-Veda, and the attendant 

 analysis of the life and culture of the Vedic people, is very 

 largely due to the systematic sifting of the linguistic material 

 of this ancient and yet in part obscure book. Boehtlink- 

 Roth's great Sanskrit thesaurus and Grassmann's excellent 

 vocabulary of the Rig- Veda furnished the material for the 

 work ; and Delbrlick, Lindner, Lanman, Arnold, Haskell, 

 and others have thrown a flood of light upon its grammatical, 

 syntactical, and prosodial structure. 



There is yet lacking a full topical classification of the Rig- 

 Vedic words. Something indeed is done in this direction in 

 Zi(^iier's excellent Altindisches Leben, but only enough to 

 illustrate the author's exposition of ancient Hindu life, or to 

 establish more exhaustively certain phases of that life and 

 attendant conditions. But his word-lists, comprising slightly 

 over eight hundred words (out of just about ten thousand), 

 though serving well his purpose, are, of course, far from 

 meeting the demands or serving the purposes of a complete 

 topical digest of the Rig-Vedic words. 



While investigating for other purposes some questions of 

 Vedic antiquities, I was led to make a full collection of the 

 Rig-Vedic words designating material or visible objects. It 

 is the result of this work that is offered here. And it is fur- 

 ther my intention to complete later the work thus begun by 

 adding to this topical arrangement of the concrete words a 

 similar digest of all the remaining: material. 



