Consequently the hymns in which these passages occur should be assigned to the period of the later Vedic literature. Other passages that similarly sh… - Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya

Continuity of hieratic or bardic tradition preserves many old forms and in religious texts antique forms are generally preferred. ... The chief ground for taking the Rgveda-Samhita as the earliest Vedic. text is the archaic character of its language as compared with much of the remaining Vedic literature. Another ground for this conclusion is the fact that a large number of verses which are in their proper contexts in the Hymns of the Rgveda are found utilised in the mantra collections of the other Vedas, from which one may infer that they were borrowed from the Rgveda-Samhita. Both these grounds make the comparative antiquity of-large portions of the Rgveda-Samhita almost certain. But they do not entitle us to assume that the whole of the Rgveda- Samhita is older than the other Vedic texts .... Scholars have always recognised that this Samhita has older and later portions....

It is not true that mandalas I (or large portions of it), VIII and particularly X of the Rgveda-Samhita are the only later additions. There are enough indications to show that additions were made even in "the family books", the original nucleus of the Samhita. If we make a careful study of the arrangement of these "family books", ... the fol- lowing scheme seems to have been followed by the original redactors: - 1. the family groups were arranged according to the decreasing number of the hymns in each of these books; 2. within each family group the Agni hymns came first, then the Indra hymns and then the Visvadeva hymns (if there were any) and after them hymns to the other deities in due order; and . 3. within each devatii sub-group, the hymns were ar- ranged according to the diminishing number of stanzas contained in them.

... Consequently we can safely infer that wherever the general scheme has been disturbed we have reasonable grounds for suspecting interpolations .... To give an ins- tance, the original Indra collection of the III Mandala was . hymns 30-50, the first hymn (30) containing 22 verses, and the last (50) only 5; the three supplementary Indra hymns (51-53), having respectively 12, 8 and 24 verses, seem to have been added in two instalments, hymn 53 (24 verses) having been added some time after hymns 51 (12 verses) and 52 (8 verses) had been appended to the original Indra collection. There are many more such additions, in some cases of entire groups of hymns. Now these later additions are not necessarily all later compositions. They may have been added later, because they were discovered later. But some of them certainly can be compositions of later times. Then there are six verses in the accepted text of the Rgveda-Samhita, 1.99.1, VII.59.12, X.121,1O, X.190.1-3, whose Pada-Piitha is wanting. The only inference that we can make from this fact is that these verses did not form part of the Rgveda-Samhiui when Sakalya compiled its Pada-Piuha. Consequently they have been added even so late as after the time of Sakalya. In this case too it is not possible to say that they were all composed after Sakalya, particularly when VII.50.12 and X.121.10 are found in the various Yajurveda-Samhitas. But we can presume this for X.190.1-3, which bear on their very face the impression of lateness. We do not find these three cosmogonic verses, showing knowledge of the Kalpa theory, till the very late Taittiriya Aranyaka (X.1.13), a text which shows know- ledge of Smrtis (1.2.1) ....