Since more than 2000 years the poem of Rama has remained alive in India, and it continues to live in all strata and classes of folk. High and low, pr… - Moriz Winternitz

As Winternitz ( 1962) points out, "it is at the fixing on these purely arbitrary dates that the untenable part of Max Muller's calculations begins" (255).

Winternitz (1907), too, hastened to note that "Max Muller himself did not really wish to say more than that such an interval at least must be assumed. . . . He always considered his date of 1200- 1000 B.C. only as a terminus ad quern" (293).

Almost a century ago, Winternitz ( 1962) was refreshingly forthright about the lack of agreement regarding even the approximate date of the Veda: "It is a fact, and a fact which it is truly painful to admit, that the opinions of the best scholars differ, not to the extent of centuries, but to the extent of thousands of years, with regard to the age of the Rg Veda. Some lay down the year 1000 B.C. as the earliest limit for the Rg Vedic hymns, while others consider them to have originated between 3000 and 2500 B.C." (253).