If we could present to ourselves this Epos of the Indians in the form which it may have assumed two or three centuries after the close of the great migrations and struggles, _i.e._ about the eleventh century B.C., it would still be a valuable source of historical knowledge. We could not indeed have taken the occurrences described in it as historical facts, without criticism, but we should have possessed a tradition of which the outline would have been approximately correct, and a description of manners historically true for the period when the poems arose and were thrown into shape--though untrue for the period depicted in the poem--after deducting what was due to the idealism of the poet. Unfortunately, repeated revisions and alterations have almost effaced the original lines; each new stage of civilisation attained by the Indians has eagerly sought to infuse its ideas and conceptions into the national tradition; older and later elements lie side by side often without any attempt at reconciliation, sometimes in direct opposition. The original warlike character of the poetry is forced into the background by the priestly point of view of a later age. In the poems in their present form there is none of that freshness of feeling and impression which is so vividly expressed in the prayers of the priests of the Bharatas, and the songs of the Tritsus; there is no immediate recollection at work. The effort to comprise all the stories and legends of the nation into a whole, to bring forward in these poems, as in a pattern and mirror of virtue, every lesson of religion and morals, and unite them into one great body of doctrine, has swelled the Indian Epos into a heavy and enormous mass, an encyclopædia, in which it is not possible without great labour to discover the connecting links of the narrative in the endless chaos of interpolations and episodes, the varying accounts of one and the same event. The Epos has thus become a tangle in which we cannot discover the original threads. It received its present form in the last centuries B.C.[135]