no
surviving literary monument could carry us so far as the Veda. Hence
its supreme importance for Aryan philology--for the philology of the
most important languages of historical mankind. Other languages,
whether Babylonian or Accadian, whether Hottentot or Maori, may be,
for all we know, much more ancient or much more primitive; but, as
scientific explorers, we can only speak of what we know, and we must
renounce all conjectures that go beyond facts.

In all these researches no one took a livelier interest and encouraged
me more than Bunsen. When some of my translations of the Vedic hymns
seemed fairly satisfactory, I used to take them to him, and he was
always delighted at seeing a little more of that ancient Aryan torso,
though at the time he was more specially interested in Egyptian
chronology and archaeology. Often when I was alone with him did we
discuss the chronological and psychological dates of Egyptian and
Aryan antiquity. Kind-hearted as he was, Bunsen could get very
excited, nay, quite violent in arguing, and though these fits soon
passed off, yet it made discussions between His Excellency the
Prussian Minister and a young German scholar somewhat difficult. At
that time much less was known of the earliest Egyptian chronology than
is now. But I was never much impressed by mere dates. If a king was
supposed to have lived 5,000 years before our era, "What is that to
us?" I used to say, "He sits on his throne _in vacuo_, and there is
nothing to fix him by, nothing contemporary which alone gives interest
to history. In India we have no dates; but whatever dates and names of
kings and accounts of battles the Egyptian inscriptions may give us,
as a book there is nothing so old in Egypt as the Veda in India.
Besides, we have in the Veda thoughts; and in the chronology of
thought the Veda seems to me older than even the Book of the Dead."

As to the actual date of the Veda, I readily granted that
chronologically it was not so old as the pyramids, but supposing it
had been, would that in any way have increased its value for our
studies? If we were to place it at 5000 B. C., I doubt whether anybody
could refute such a date, while if we go back beyond the Veda, and
come to measure the time required for the formation of Sanskrit and of
the Proto-Aryan language I doubt very much whether even 5,000 years
would suffice for that. There is an unfathomable depth in language,
layer following after layer, long before we arri