Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/558



⌊The seventh book is made up mostly of hymns of one verse or of two verses. No other one of the books i.-xviii. contains such hymns. Book vii. is thus distinguished from all the others of the three grand divisions (to wit, books i.-vii., books viii.-xii., and books xiii.-xviii.) of the Atharvan collection, and constitutes the close of the first of those divisions. If we consider the facts set forth in the paragraphs introductory to the foregoing books (see pages 1, 37, 84, 142, 220, 281, and especially 142), it appears that this division is made up of those seven books in which the number—normal or prevalent—of verses to a hymn runs from one to eight. Or, in tabular form, division one consists of

In the Berlin edition, the book contains one hundred and eighteen hymns: of these, fifty-six are of 1 verse each, and twenty-six are of 2 verses each; while of the remaining thirty-six

The 11-versed hymn is 73; the 9-versed is 50; the 8-versed are 26, 56, 97; the 7-versed are 53, 60, 109; the 6-versed are 20, 76, 81, 82. The whole book has been translated by Victor Henry, Le livre VII de l'Atharva-Véda traduit et commenté, Paris, 1892.⌋

The Old Anukramaṇī seems to take 20 verses as the norm of the anuvāka. The Paris codex, P., in this book numbers the verses through each anuvāka without separating the hymns. The commentator divides the anuvākas into hymns (from two to four in each anuvāka), which "hymns," however, are nothing more than mechanical decads of verses with an overplus or shortage in the last "decad" when the