Quote
"While The Mitanni documents, the Old Persian documents and the Asokan edicts, coming from inscriptions as they do, are frozen in time, that is not the case with the Rgveda or the Avestan texts. These have been subject to a long oral tradition before they were codified, and the texts available to us represent a state of affairs at the end of this long oral transmission, rather than at the starting point of their creation.... the time gap between the composers of the hymns and the collectors, editors and collators was quite large. This gap must have been quite enough to lead to a kind of homogenisation."
M
Madhav M. Deshpande
