________________
JUNE, 1877.]
ON THE KRISHNAJANMASHTAMI.
161
same year also Francis Johnson, the author of the most extensive Persian dictionary, expired He occupied during 31 years the chair of Sansksit, Telugu, and Bengali at Haileybury, where he had been installed at the age of 24, and remained till 1855, when he was succeeded by Mr. Monier Williams, now Professor of Sanskpit at Oxford He was endowed with a prodigious memory and great talents for languages. His two editions of the Hitopadeśa, with text, translation, and vocabu. lary, his select pieces from the Mahabharata, bis editions of the Meghaduta and of the Gulistan, are valued by students of Sansksit or Persian.-On the 4th January 1876 M. Jules Mohl, President of
the Asiatic Society of Paris, editor and translator of the Shahnamah, died.-On the 25th July 1876 Robert Childers expired, at the age of 38.-On the 10th August of the same year Edward William Lane died, at the age of 75 years. He is well known as the author of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, and the translator of the Thousand and One Nights with extremely valuable notes; but his chief work-over which he died -was his Arabic and English Lexicon, a treasure of vast erudition, of which five volumes are al ready published, and the sixth is in the press, while the seventh and eighth will be edited from the manuscripts left by the author.-E.R.
ON THE KRISHŅAJANMASHTAMT, OR KRISHNA'S BIRTH-FESTIVAL
BY PROP. A. WEBER, BERLIN. Read in the Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 17th June 1867.
(Translated from the German by E. Rehatsek.) Since I communicated to the meeting of phi- rather those the period of whose compositions can lologists at Erlangen (1851) "some data relat- in any way be fixed, and only afterwards I deal ing to Krishna's birth-festival,"t a very rich with the works not allowing of being ascribed to mine of new materials on this subject has be- a fixed author. For though the works belong.
come accessible to me, to arrange and utilize ing to this latter class are just those quoted in which the time has perhaps arrived.
the texts to be first treated of, they are still, at In the first place these sources are themselves present, with the exception of the passages to be indicated, and the manner in which the actually quoted from them, devoid of definite subject is treated in them is to be discussed chronological value. Their higher antiquity in ($ 1), whereby particular aspects of it will be general is no voucher that in single instances at once specially illustrated, so that only a brief considerable additions or other alterations have retrospect will afterwards suffice. To the elu
not crept into the texts, especially in those idation of the ritual of the festival itself ($ 2) sections which cannot yet be pointed out in an investigation concerning the origin of the their acknowledged texts, and appear merely festival (& 3), or rather of Krishna-worship in as pieces detached from them, though with a general, as well as on the pictorial representa
claim to belong to them. tions connected therewith, will then be added Accordingly the oldest chronologically fixed
text making mention of the festival is the Vrata$1. The Sources.
khanda of Hemâ dri,t written perhaps at In order to obtain a chronological standpoint, the end of the thirteenth centary, and representI adduce, in the first instance, in their proper ing the various festival-days of the Brahmanic order, the texts referable to fixed authors, or
ritual according to the order of the lunar
. As the printing of the paper could only be begun (Aufrecht, Catalogus, P. 381). Our Hem&dri, son after a considerable time, it became possible to utilize, or of Charudeva, styles himself minister (sarvarikarather to interweave, several cominunications or publications ranaprabhu.erkarameda) of king Mahadeva, by of later date,--thus, e.g. the number of the Athenaeum of whose command he composed the Chaturvargachinta10th Aug. 1867, mentioned in the beginning of $ 3, and mani, the first part of which is the Vratakhanda. I deter. others.
mine his age from the circumstance of his being quoted See Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenl. Gesell. Bd.
several times by Madhave in the Kalanirnaya.(R. VI. pp. 93-97, and my Catalogue of tha Berlin Sanskrit
ghunandans also mentions him in the beginning of his M98. pp. 337-340.
Tithitattva before the latter.) One of our MSS. of the second
section of the Chaturvargachintamani, the Danakhanda, I Conf. Wilson, Mackenzie Coll. vol. I. p. 32, Barnouf, is dated sarvat 1435, A.D. 1379. (Conf. the first leaf of the RNA. Pur. tom. 1. pp. cir..ci.; my Catat. of the Berlin facsimile added to the Cat. of the Berl. Sansk. M88.) Sansk. M88. pp. 332-343; Aufrecht, Catalogus, p. 376. Besides the Chintamani, king Mahadeva caused also the There are several Hem&dris. The patron of Vopadeve Kamadhenu and the Kalpadruma to be prepared (sce v. 12 bearing this name was minister to king Ramachandra of the Introd. to the Vratakhanda and to the Danakhanda). of Dovagiri. But a commentator on Vopadeva at the By this both the works of Vopadeve bearing these names court of king R&maraja was also called Hem Adrican scarcely be meant, as the other data do not agree.
