r a dual, and translate, "Give us also
two golden armlets." To suppose that the Vedic poets should have
borrowed this one word and this one measure from the Babylonians,
would be against all the rules of historical criticism. The word mana
never occurs again in the whole of Sanskrit literature, no other
Babylonian weight occurs again in the whole of Sanskrit literature,
and it is not likely that a poet who asks for a cow and a horse, would
ask in the same breath for a foreign weight of gold, that is, for
about sixty sovereigns.

But this is not the only loan that India has been supposed to have
negotiated in Babylon. The twenty-seven Nakshatras, or the
twenty-seven constellations, which were chosen in India as a kind of
lunar Zodiac, were supposed to have come from Babylon. Now the
Babylonian Zodiac was solar, and, in spite of repeated researches, no
trace of a lunar Zodiac has been found, where so many things have been
found, in the cuneiform inscriptions. But supposing even that a lunar
Zodiac had been discovered in Babylon, no one acquainted with Vedic
literature and with the ancient Vedic ceremonial would easily allow
himself to be persuaded that the Hindus had borrowed that simple
division of the sky from the Babylonians. It is well known that most
of the Vedic sacrifices depend on the moon, far more than on the
sun.[132] As the Psalmist says, "He appointed the moon for seasons;
the sun knoweth his going down," we read in the Rig-Veda X. 85, 18, in
a verse addressed to sun and moon, "They walk by their own power, one
after the other (or from east to west), as playing children they go
round the sacrifice. The one looks upon all the worlds, the other is
born again and again, determining the seasons."

"He becomes new and new, when he is born; as the herald of
the days, he goes before the dawns. By his approach he
determines their share for the gods, the moon increases a
long life."

The moon, then, determines the seasons, the _ri_tus, the moon fixes
the share, that is, the sacrificial oblation for all the gods. The
seasons and the sacrifices were in fact so intimately connected
together in the thoughts of the ancient Hindus, that one of the
commonest names for priest was _ri_tv-i_g_, literally, the
season-sacrificer.

Besides the rites which have to be performed every day, such as the
five Mahaya_gn_as, and the Agnihotra in the morning and the evening,
the important sacrifices in Vedic times wer