Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/141

Rh more odd verses at the end of a hymn counting as an added decad. The numbers in the final group thus run from five to fourteen: cf. pages 388, end, and 472, ¶5. Book xvii. divides precisely into 3 decads: p. 805. The average length of the decad-sūktas is exactly ten verses in book x. (35 decads and 350 verses: p. 562), and almost exactly ten in book xviii. (28 decads and 283 verses: p. 814). In the summations, these decads are usually called sūktas and never by any other name (as daçatayas), while the true hymns are called artha-sūktas.

⌊Although known to the comm. and to some mss. in book vii. (p. 388), the decad-division really begins with book viii.; and it runs on through book xviii. (not into xix.: p. 898, line 6), and continuously except for the breaks occasioned by the paryāya-hymns (p. 471, end) and paryāya-hooks (xv. and xvi.: pages 770, 793). In book vii., this grouping is carried out so mechanically as to cut in two some nine of the short sense-hymns of the Berlin edition. The nine are enumerated at p. 389, line 8; but in the case of five of them (45, 54, 68, 72, 76), the fault lies with the Berlin edition, which has wrongly combined the parts thus separated.⌋

⌊In the summations, as just noted, the decads are usually called sūktas; and they and the paryāya-sūktas are added together, like apples and pears, to form totals of "hymns of both kinds" (p. 561, line 8). The summations of the decad-sūktas and paryāya-sūktas for books viii.-xviii. are duly given below in the special introduction to each book concerned, and these should be consulted; but for convenience they may here be summarized.

'''Artha-sūktas or 'sense-hymns. ' '''—⌊This technical term might be rendered, more awkwardly, but perhaps more suitably, by 'subject-matter hymns.' It is these that are usually meant when we speak of "hymns" without any determinative. The comm. very properly notes that hymns xix. 47 and 48 form a single artha-sūkta, and that the next two form another. The determinative artha- is prefixed in particular to distinguish the sense-hymns from the paryāya-hymns (p. 611, ¶5), and there is little occasion for using it of the short hymns of the first grand division.⌋ The verses of the artha-sūkta are sometimes numbered through each separate component decad or sūkta, and sometimes through the whole artha-sūkta, the two methods being variously mingled. In books xii.-xiv. and xvii. and xviii., as already noted, the artha-sūktas and anuvākas are coincident, the mss. specifying their identity.

⌊'''Paryāya-sūktas or 'period-hymns. ' '—In the second and third grand divisions are certain extended prose-compositions called⌋ paryāya-sūktas''.