Amsha

One Rigvedic hymn opens by naming the Adityas in a run: Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuna, Daksha, Amsha. It is the closest thing the collection has to a membership list, and it is the reason the Adityas are conventionally said to be six in the Rigveda even though other passages give seven or eight. Amsha is the last name in it and by a wide margin the least developed.

His name is amsa, a share or a part, essentially a synonym of bhaga. Two gods of the allotted portion inside one small group looks like duplication to a modern reader, and it may simply be that the poets liked the pairing and used both words because both were available. It may also preserve a distinction the tradition later lost. Nothing in the surviving hymns settles it, because outside the group invocations Amsha barely appears at all. He has no myth, no attribute, no cult and no epithet of his own.

That is not a defect in the record. The Adityas are a class of sovereignty gods whose individual profiles were always uneven, and a name that is little more than a name is evidence about how the class worked: what mattered was the group, its collective character as kings, guardians of order and releasers from guilt, and the number of members was never the point. The atlas holds Amsha for the same reason the tradition did, as a name in the list, and does not manufacture a personality for him.

The Puranic lists of twelve Adityas are not identical, and Amsha sits precisely on the fault line. In the list preserved in the Vishnu Purana, where one Aditya presides over each month of the year, the ninth is given in Wilson's translation as Ansu, and the same list has Parjanya, the rain god, in a place that other sources give to somebody else. The Bhagavata Purana's list of twelve has no Amshu and no Parjanya at all, and puts Savitr and Vidhatri in their places instead. Ten of the twelve names are common to both; four are not.

The identity question follows from that. Sanskrit amsa, a share, and amsu, a filament, a ray of light or the stalk of the soma plant, are different words. A Puranic list that has become explicitly solar, with one Aditya to a month, has an obvious reason to prefer a name meaning ray. Whether the compilers of that list were spelling the old Rigvedic name loosely, or deliberately substituting a solar name for it, or recording a genuinely separate figure, is a question the surviving texts do not answer.

The atlas records the two spellings on one entry and marks the identification as open rather than choosing. The entry carries an open question naming what would settle it, which is a comparison of the readings across the Puranic manuscript traditions rather than any new discovery.