Katha Aranyaka: Critical Edition with a Translation into German and an Introduction

Katha Aranyaka: Critical Edition with a Translation into German and an Introduction. By Michael Witzel. Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 65. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 220.

This new edition in the Harvard Oriental Series makes more accessible to the scholarly public the text and translation into German of the Katha Äranyaka, Michael Witzel' s "Inauguraldissertation" of 1972 first published in 1974. This publication has been available only in a limited number of libraries, and the current edition assures it the wider circulation it deserves.

As Witzel (p. vii) acknowledges, "no changes have been made in the text" of its original version, which was based on the single surviving manuscript of the text currently located in the University of Tübingen Library. Further, no new manuscript of the text has been discovered since the publication of the original...