religion of
ancient Rome to distinguish between Italian and Greek ingredients, to
say nothing of Etruscan and Phoenician influences. We know the
difficulty of finding out in the religion of the Greeks what is purely
home-grown, and what is taken over from Egypt, Phoenicia, it may be
from Scythia; or at all events, slightly colored by those foreign rays
of thought. Even in the religion of the Hebrews, Babylonian,
Phoenician, and at a later time Persian influences have been
discovered, and the more we advance toward modern times, the more
extensive becomes the mixture of thought, and the more difficult the
task of assigning to each nation the share which it contributed to the
common intellectual currency of the world. In India alone, and more
particularly in Vedic India, we see a plant entirely grown on native
soil, and entirely nurtured by native air. For this reason, because
the religion of the Veda was so completely guarded from all strange
infections, it is full of lessons which the student of religion could
learn nowhere else.

Now what have the critics of the Veda to say against this? They say
that the Vedic poems show clear traces of _Babylonian_ influences.

I must enter into some details, because, small as they seem, you can
see that they involve very wide consequences.

There is one verse in the Rig-Veda, VIII. 78, 2,[128] which has been
translated as follows: "Oh Indra, bring to us a brilliant jewel, a
cow, a horse, an ornament, together with a golden Mana."[129]

Now what is a golden Mana? The word does not occur again by itself,
either in the Veda or anywhere else, and it has been identified by
Vedic scholars with the Latin _mina_, the Greek [Greek: mna], the
Phoenician _manah_ ([Hebrew: Ma-ne]),[130] the well-known weight
which we actually possess now among the treasures brought from Babylon
and Nineveh to the British Museum.[131]

If this were so, it would be irrefragable evidence of at all events a
commercial intercourse between Babylon and India at a very early time,
though it would in no way prove a real influence of Semitic on Indian
thought. But is it so? If we translate sa_k_a mana hira_n_yaya by
"with a mina of gold," we must take mana hira_n_yaya as instrumental
cases. But sa_k_a never governs an instrumental case. This translation
therefore is impossible, and although the passage is difficult,
because mana does not occur again in the Rig-Veda, I should think we
might take mana hira_n_yaya fo