(Witzel's) review should logically have consisted of two parts: 1. A rebuttal of chapter 9 of my book (my critique of WITZEL 1995a, 1995b)... This ch… - Shrikant G. Talageri

The identification of the BhRgus with Soma is deeper, older and more significant: it is clear that the Soma plant originated among the BhRgus of the northwest, and it is they who introduced the plant and its rituals to the Vedic Aryans and their priests.

What is important, at this point, is to make it very, very clear, at the outset itself, that this level of chronological information, simply classifying the Books into "earlier" (2-4, 6-7), and "later" (5, 1, 8-10), officially accepted by the western scholars themselves, is sufficient (without going into further chronological details) to irrefutably establish the two conclusions that we arrived at in our chapters on the Relative Chronology and Geography of the Rigveda...

Witzel claims to arrive at his conclusions on the basis of a combination of a geographical grid and a chronological grid, but, as we have seen, he does not prepare a chronological grid at all: else, he would never place MaNDala II before MaNDala VI (when the very eponymous RSi of MaNDala II is a descendant of a composer, Sunahotra BhAradvAja, in MaNDala VI) or MaNDala VIII before MaNDala III (when the very eponymous RSi of MaNDala VIII is a descendant of a composer, Ghora ANgiras, in MaNDala III).