Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/185

 that the divisions of the first book of the Sāmaveda existed at least as early as the period when the second part of that Brāhmaṇa was composed. There is, moreover, some reason to believe that the Sāmaveda as a collection is older than at least the Taittirīya and the Vājasaneyi recensions of the Yajurveda. For the latter contain verses, used also as Sāman chants, in a form which shows the variations of the Sāmaveda in contrast with the Rigveda. This is all the more striking as the Vājasaneyi text has an undoubted tendency to adhere to the readings of the Rigveda. On the other hand, the view expressed by Professor Weber that numerous variants in verses of the Sāmaveda contain archaic forms as compared with the Rigveda, and were therefore borrowed at a time before the existing redaction of the Rigveda took place, has been shown to be untenable. The various readings of the Sāmaveda are really due in part to inferior tradition, and in part to arbitrary alterations made in order to adapt verses detached from their context to the ritual purpose to which they were applied.

Two schools of the Sāmaveda are known—the Kauthumas and the Rāṇāyanīyas, the former of whom are said still to exist in Gujarat, while the latter, at one time settled mainly in the Mahratta country, are said to survive in Eastern Hyderabad. Their recensions of the text appear to have differed but little from each other. That of the Rāṇāyanīyas has been published more than once. The earliest edition, brought out by a missionary named Stevenson in 1842, was entirely superseded by the valuable work of Benfey, which, containing a German translation and glossary besides the text, came out in 1848. The Sāmaveda was thus the first of the Vedas to be edited in its entirety. The text of this Veda, according to