The long-life hymns clustered in LX-LXIV (and elsewhere in the Atharvaveda) ask consistently for a hundred autumns. The phrase paśyema śaradaḥ śatam (may we see a hundred autumns) becomes one of the most-recited Vedic blessings in living Hindu practice, appearing in the Ṛg-Veda VII.66.16 and quoted at the end of countless daily prayers. The autumn (śarad) was the year-marker because the harvest came in autumn; a hundred autumns equalled a full human lifespan. The biblical ‘three score and ten’ of Psalm 90:10 expresses the same instinct in a different number, and modern American senior-citizen language about reaching ‘a hundred’ inherits a much older Indo-European hope.