Die Personennamen in der Rgveda-Samhita: Sicheres und Zweifelhaftes (review)

The Rigveda (RV) is a special corpus, to be sure—at once both of great antiquity (the conventional date of composition is 1200 bc and parts are far older than that) and of great importance religiously (to Hinduism) and linguistically (to Indo-European historical linguistics), its every word has been the object of study and scholarly scrutiny over centuries. Mayrhofer’s excellent book is an important contribution to this tradition of Vedic lexical studies.

The title to this work says it all: M collects and discusses all of the certain and doubtful cases of personal names in the RV. This study continues M’s lifelong investigation of the lexicon of Sanskrit, and especially Vedic Sanskrit (note his Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1953 –1978) and his updating and reworking of that as Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1978 –2001)), as he tackles here some of the most difficult lexical items in the RV.

There are three main parts to the book. Part 1 lists 600 items, covering all of the secure or conjectured names in the RV. Part 2 lists 543 items, covering all of the names of Vedic rishis (‘seer poets’) mentioned in the anukramaṇī (ancient notes on each hymn of the RV with information on rishis, meter, etc.), some of which overlap with those in Part 1. Part 3 has M’s summary evaluation of the material, giving his assessment as to which forms are indeed names, which derive from ordinary nouns, which are of foreign origin, and so on.

In each lemma in Parts 1 and 2, following the alphabetical order of the devanāgarī writing system, M lists a presumed name, its place of occurrence in the RV, and references to it in the literature, adding his own keen judgment where he feels some confidence about the form in question. Each entry is meticulously documented with copious citations to previous literature and cross-references between Part 1 and Part 2.

What makes this task of cataloguing so difficult is that the very identification of names is often problematic (note that there is nothing parallel to capital letters in devanāgarī, for instance). Some forms that have been called personal names probably are not (e.g. kuṣávā- is better taken as a river name). Moreover, many of the putative names listed by M are hapax legomena, of unique occurrence, and thus often not obviously analyzable or interpretable. Even with forms that occur more than once, the meaning and segmentation are often uncertain and etymologizing these forms in general involves far more guesswork than is usual in such investigations. Indeed, the problematic nature of the material is reflected in M’s frequent use of such designations as fraglich ‘questionable’, schwerlich ‘difficult’, nicht klar ‘not clear’, and the like.

Still, some forms are clear and are explainable as transferred epithets (e.g. áśna-, a demon’s name, from the adjective for ‘hungry’) or exocentric derivatives (e.g. áśvamedha-, a king’s name, literally ‘one associated with the aśvamedhá- (the horse-sacrifice)’); some are certain Indo-European inheritances (e.g. arjuna-, cognate with Latin argentum ‘silver’, among other forms) while others are obviously of foreign origin (e.g. ilībiśa-, where the -l-, the -b-, and the polysyllabicity are suggestive of non-Sanskritic provenance).

I noticed no typos in this most interesting book, but pp. 145–52 were upside-down and backwards in my copy.