Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/219

 Kuru-Panchālas, in which, as we have seen, the Vedic ritual must have been developed, and the hymns of the Rigveda were probably collected in the existing Saṃhitā. From the Kaushītaki we learn that the study of language was specially cultivated in the north of India, and that students who returned from there were regarded as authorities on linguistic questions.

The chief human interest of these Brāhmaṇas lies in the numerous myths and legends which they contain. The longest and most remarkable of those found in the Aitareya is the story of Çunaḥçepa (Dog's-Tail), which forms the third chapter of Book VII. The childless King Hariçchandra vowed, if he should have a son, to sacrifice him to Varuṇa. But when his son Rohita was born, he kept putting off the fulfilment of his promise. At length, when the boy was grown up, his father, pressed by Varuṇa, prepared to perform the sacrifice. Rohita, however, escaped to the forest, where he wandered for six years, while his father was afflicted with dropsy by Varuṇa. At last he fell in with a starving Brahman, who consented to sell to him for a hundred cows his son Çunaḥçepa as a substitute. Varuṇa agreed, saying, "A Brahman is worth more than a Kshatriya." Çunaḥçepa was accordingly bound to the stake, and the sacrifice was about to proceed, when the victim prayed to various gods in succession. As he repeated one verse after the other, the fetters of Varuṇa began to fall off and the dropsical swelling of the king to diminish, till finally Çunaḥçepa was released and Hariçchandra was restored to health again.

The style of the prose in which the Aitareya is composed is crude, clumsy, abrupt, and elliptical. The following quotation from the stanzas interspersed in the