The Dating of the Ancient Hindu Texts

The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and many other ancient Hindu texts cannot be dated by using conventional historical methods. In his 1899 book The six systems of Indian philosophy, Max Muller writes, “Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 B.C.E. or 15,000 B.C.E., they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world. They tell us something of the early growth of the human mind of which we find no trace anywhere else.”