To paraphrase himself: “give Witzel one archaeological site, and he will produce a comprehensive dictionary, complete with etymological analysis, of … - Shrikant G. Talageri

To sum up, Oldenberg’s principles do not affect my analysis at all. His principles are undoubtedly important, but not in demarcating “original” hymns from “interpolated” ones: as we saw, hymn 6.45, which is a late “interpolated” hymn as per (Witzel’s interpretation of) Oldenberg’s principles, proves to be linguistically very archaic, and hymns 6.3,24,25,28, which are similarly “original” hymns, abound in late words. Oldenberg’s (or rather, Witzel’s) numer(olog)ical division therefore cuts across another division which could be established on the basis of linguistic analysis. And both these divisions become irrelevant when the data in these hymns is examined from a historico-geographical point of view, since all the hymns in any given Mandala are historically and geographically homogenous. .... Therefore, neither Oldenberg’s numerical principles, nor linguistic strata discernible in the hymns, can negate the fact that the RV we have today is, for all practical purposes, the “original” RV, and my historical analysis is an “invincible” analysis of the emphatically right Rigveda text.

Totally undaunted, Witzel repeats these points again in his review article in 2001! Is it really surprising if “Occasionally …. T. lapses into ‘a bored yawn’ (p. 344)”?

In my earlier book on the Rigveda, I examined the Rigvedic data in detail, and showed that the chronological order of the ten Books of the RV is: 6,3,7,4,2,5,8,9,10, with different parts of Book 1 covering the periods of all but the three earliest Books. I also showed in systematic detail that Family Books 6, 3 and 7 belong to the Early period, Family Books 4 and 2 to the Middle period, and the rest (Book 5 among the Family Books, and all the other, ie. non-family, Books, 8, 9 and 10, and most of Book 1) belong to the Late period