Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book XIII
Book XIII.
⌊Hymns to the Ruddy Sun or Rohita.⌋
⌊We come now to the third grand division of the text, books xiii.-xviii. In the first division (books i.-vii.) we had the short hymns of miscellaneous subjects, and in the second (books viii.-xii.) we had the long hymns of miscellaneous subjects. In the third, the principle governing the arrangement and division of the material is in the main clearly that of unity of subject (compare the General Introduction and the Table of Contents): thus book xiii. consists of hymns to the Ruddy Sun or Rohita; xiv. consists of wedding verses; xv. is the book about the Vrātya; and xviii. consists of hymns for the dead. Accordingly, it is perhaps worthy of note that the Old Anukramaṇī does not describe the length of any hymn in book xiii. by reference to a certain length assumed as a norm. The whole book has been translated by Victor Henry, Les hymnes Rohitas. Livre XIII de l'Atharva-véda traduit et commenté, Paris, 1891. Henry's work was made the subject of a detailed review by Bloomfield in the American Journal of Philology (xii. 429-443) for 1891. Then, at Paris in 1892, appeared Le mythe de Rohita, traduction raisonnée du 13e livre de l'Atharva-véda, by Paul Regnaud. As appears below, Ludwig's translation covers the first three of the four hymns of the book; Deussen's, the first and third; and Bloomfield's, the first. For books xii.-xvi. inclusive, the bhāṣya is wanting.⌋
⌊Paryāya-hymns: for details respecting them, see pages 471-2. The fourth or last hymn of this book is a paryāya-sūkta with 6 paryāyas. For the discrepancy of numeration as between the two editions, see page 611.⌋
⌊The anuvāka-division of the book is into four anuvāka of one hymn each, and is thus (like the anuvāka-division of book xii.) coincident with the hymn-division. A conspectus for book xiii. follows:
| Anuvākas | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Hymns | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Verses | 60 | 46 | 26 | 56¶ |
| Decad-division | 6 tens | 4 tens + 6 | 2 tens + 6 | 6 P |
Here ¶ means "paragraph of a paryāya" (such as is numbered as a "verse" in the Berlin edition) and P means "paryāya." Of the "decads," anuvākas 1, 2, and 3 contain respectively 6, 5, and 3 (in all, 14 "decads"); while anuvāka 4 has 6 paryāyas. The sum is 14 "decad"-sūktas and 6 paryāya-sūktas or 20 sūktas (cf. p. 737).⌋