[Footnote 259: Rig-veda III. 9, 9; X. 52, 6.] LECTURE VII. VEDA AND VEDANTA. I do not wonder that I should have been asked by some of my hearers to devote part of my last lecture to answering the question, how the Vedic literature could have been composed and preserved, if writing was unknown in India before 500 B.C., while the hymns of the Rig-Veda are said to date from 1500 B.C. Classical scholars naturally ask what is the date of our oldest MSS. of the Rig-Veda, and what is the evidence on which so high an antiquity is assigned to its contents. I shall try to answer this question as well as I can, and I shall begin with a humble confession that the oldest MSS. of the Rig-Veda, known to us at present, date not from 1500 B.C., but from about 1500 A.D. We have therefore a gap of three thousand years, which it will require a strong arch of argument to bridge over. But that is not all. You may know how, in the beginning of this century, when the age of the Homeric poems was discussed, a German scholar, Frederick August Wolf, asked two momentous questions: 1. At what time did the Greeks first become acquainted with the alphabet and use it for inscriptions on public monuments, coins, shields, and for contracts, both public and private?[260] 2. At what time did the Greeks first think of using writing for literary purposes, and what materials did they employ for that purpose? These two questions and the answers they elicited threw quite a new light on the nebulous periods of Greek literature. A fact more firmly established than any other in the ancient history of Greece is that the Ionians learned the alphabet from the Phenicians. The Ionians always called their letters Phenician letters,[261] and the very name of Alphabet was a Phenician word. We can well understand that the Phenicians should have taught the Ionians in Asia Minor a knowledge of the alphabet, partly for commercial purposes, _i.e._ for making contracts, partly for enabling them to use those useful little sheets, called _Periplus_, or _Circumnavigations_, which at that time were as precious to sailors as maps were to the adventurous seamen of the middle ages. But from that to a written literature, in our sense of the word, there is still a wide step. It is well known that the Germans, particularly in the North, had their Runes for inscriptions on tombs, goblets, public monuments, but not for literary purposes.[262] Even if a few Ionians at Miletus and other centres of political and commercial life acquired the art of writing, where could they find writing materials? and still more important, where could they find readers? The Ionians, when they began to write, had to be satisfied with a hide or pieces of leather, which they called _diphthera_, and until that was brought to the perfection of vellum or parchment, the occupation of an author cannot have been very agreeable.[263]