What can Pāṇini teach us about the Atharvavedic usages of the perfect tense?

The present work is based on the 107 occurrences of the indicative perfect occurring in Books 1 and 4 of the Śaunakīya Atharvaveda. These have been taken as a sample to advance a new hypothesis on what may be identified as the two most general features in the use of the perfect in these Vedic sources. Alongside the non-dynamic feature that has already been highlighted (even though with varying degrees of emphasis) in contemporary scholarship, we propose to add a nominalising feature. Both traits work in synergy; they are common to all our occurrences and could, if confirmed in other sources, help us overcome the extreme fragmentariness in the description of the uses of the perfect that characterises contemporary description of the perfect. This assumption is mainly based on some extremely interesting observations proposed by Louis Renou in 1925 and on some information provided by Pāṇini’s grammar in particular on a new intepretation of the term parokṣa used in A 3.2.115.