Text · Vedic hymn collection
Rigveda
/r̩ɡʋeːd̪ɐ/
Also known as Ṛgveda, Ṛgvedá, Rig Veda, Rgveda, Rigveda Samhita
The oldest Vedic Sanskrit text: 1,028 hymns in about 10,600 verses, arranged in ten books (mandalas) and composed in the north-west of the subcontinent, most likely between c. 1500 and 1000 BCE. It was carried for well over a millennium by oral recitation alone, fixed word by word in the padapatha, and its oldest surviving manuscripts date only to c. 1040 CE. Its hymns name the Indus, the Sarasvati and the Punjab rivers, and they are notably close to the Gathas of the old Avesta.
- Date
- -1500–-1000
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Thirty Rigveda manuscripts collected in the nineteenth century from Kashmir to the Central Provinces, now at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007; the oldest of them is dated 1464. Frits Staal counted about 300 words in it that are neither Indo-Aryan nor Indo-European, some of Munda and some of Dravidian origin.
The date is inferred only from the language and content of the hymns. Most scholars place the bulk at c. 1500–1000 BCE, a wider range of c. 1900–1200 BCE has also been given, and Jamison and Brereton (2014) expect the date to remain contested. Witzel puts the codification at c. 1200–1000 BCE in the early Kuru kingdom; Parpola around 1000 BCE.
Connections (5)
- Canonised by textSaraswati
The Rigveda names the Sarasvati some fifty times, in every book but the fourth, and praises her both as a river and as a goddess. The Nadistuti hymn (10.75) places it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, and RV 7.95 has it flowing to the samudra, sea or lake. Michael Witzel reads the middle and late books as describing a river that had already lost most of its water. Whether it was the Ghaggar-Hakra or the Helmand is still argued.
- Historical linkParushni / Iravati / Ravi
The Battle of the Ten Kings, told in Rigveda 7.18, was fought on the banks of the Parushni, the modern Ravi, where Sudas of the Bharatas, with his priest Vasishtha, defeated a confederation of ten tribes. Michael Witzel argues that the first collection of the hymns was made after this Bharata victory, as part of reconciling the clans later united in the Kuru kingdom under a Bharata king, so the river battle stands near the origin of the book itself.
- AnalogueThe Avesta
The Rigveda's hymns are notably similar to the Gathas of the old Avesta, and the two texts share strong linguistic and cultural traits from Proto-Indo-Iranian times. Even the Rigvedic phrase for the land of seven rivers, sapta sindhavah, has its Avestan cognate in hapta həndu. The Mitanni documents of northern Syria and Iraq (c. 1450–1350 BCE) invoke Varuna, Mitra and Indra, the Rigveda's gods, which is why scholars use them to bracket the date of its core.
- PrecursorUpanishads
The Rigveda is a layered text: the core Samhita of hymns was followed by Brahmanas, Aranyakas and finally Upanishads, the most recent addition to the Vedas. Every Upanishad is attached to one of the four Vedas, and the principal ones mostly sit in the concluding parts of the Brahmanas and Aranyakas. Where the hymns praise the gods and serve the sacrifice, the Upanishads make that ritual allegorical and ask what connects it, the cosmos and the self.
- PrecursorAshtadhyayi
By about 1000 BCE the Rigveda's hymns had been consolidated and were handed down orally. As everyday speech drifted, concern that the hymns pass on uncorrupted drove a long tradition of phonetics and grammar whose high point is the Ashtadhyayi, which eclipsed its predecessors. The Rigveda's own oral apparatus, the padapatha that splits the hymns into separate words, belongs to the same effort to fix sound and form, and Panini still accounts for older Vedic forms beside the Sanskrit of his day.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Rigveda"; "Rigvedic rivers". Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (2014).
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