A preliminary study in the metre of the paippalādasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda

Since the end of the nineteenth century, several monographs and important articles have been devoted to the study of the metre of the R̥gveda (R̥V), but until now little attention has been paid to the metre of the two Atharvaveda Saṃhitās, the Śaunakīyasaṃhitā (ŚS) and the Paippalādasaṃhitā (PS). This dissertation contains a preliminary study of the metre of the Paippalādasaṃhitā (PS) of the Atharvaveda. My research takes as a model the only recent publication on Atharvavedic metre, Kubisch’s study on the metrical and prosodic structures of kāṇḍas 1-7 of the Śaunakīyasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda (Kubisch 2007). This is the first work that provides an analytic study founded on precise statistics of stanzas and verses types. In the Introduction, I sketch the history of the studies in the field of Vedic metre and present the aim and method of my work, which intends to be the “Paippalāda counterpart” of the research made by Kubisch on ŚS 1-7. I justify the choice to analyze the eight kāṇḍas of the PS that are already published in critical editions provided with a translation and a commentary; then I explain the method used for my research. At the end of the Introduction I describe and discuss the verse types that are found in the portions of the PS treated in my dissertation – namely pentad verses, dimeter verses and trimeter verses. An overview of the symbols closes the Introduction. The first chapter of the dissertation presents the metrical restored text of kāṇḍas 2, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 20.1-30 (1940 stanzas and 6244 pādas in total). I prepare a metrical analysis of all the material, describing the prosodic structure, i.e. the sequence of syllables, of each pāda by means of metrical symbols. I assigne to each pāda a designation that contains symbolically encoded information about the number of syllables, the prosodic structure of the text and phenomena such as restoration or omission of syllables. The second chapter deals with the analysis of pāda and mantra types. I elaborate several sets of statistics and discuss the data obtained for each pāda and stanza types, comparing them with the results of Kubisch’s analysis. Two Appendices follow the second chapter. In the first Appendix, I present some issues concerning the internal metrical structure of the PS poetic material. First, I discuss the problem of interpolations in the text of the PS, trying to categorize the different kinds of secondary insertions, then I consider two problems regarding the prosody of the text: traces of laryngeals in the metre of the PS and the distribution of the word pāvaká- in the PS. In the second Appendix, I discuss some other methodological problems, i.e. the legitimacy of applying Van Nooten and Holland’s system to the analysis of Atharvavedic metre, and Knobl’s hypothesis that many alleged irregularities of Vedic metre could be indeed interpreted as a reflection of the poet’s artistic intentions.