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The ''Rigveda '' ( compound of '''' "praise, verse" and '''' "knowledge") is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit Hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas . The Rigveda was likely composed between roughly 1500–1300 BCE, making it the oldest texts of any Indo-Iranian Language , one of the world's oldest Religious Texts , and the oldest of a religious tradition with unbroken continuity. TEXT The Rigveda consists of 1,017 hymns or 1,028 (including the and RV 9 , likely comprising hymns of mixed age, account for 15% and 9%, respectively. RV 1 and RV 10 , finally, are both the youngest and the longest books, accounting for 37% of the text. Preservation The ''Rigveda'' is preserved by two major Shakha s ("branches", i. e. schools or recensions), ' and '. Considering its great age, the text is spectacularly well preserved and uncorrupted, the two recensions being practically identical, so that scholarly editions can mostly do without a critical apparatus. Associated to '''' is the Aitareya-Brahmana . The '''' includes the Khilani and has the Kausitaki-Brahmana associated to it. This compilation or redaction included the arrangement in books as well as Orthoepic changes, such as regularization of Sandhi . It took place centuries after the composition of the earliest hymns, about co-eval to the redaction of the other Veda s, in the ''samhita prose'' period of Vedic Sanskrit, corresponding roughly to the 11th to 9th centuries BC. From the time of its redaction, the text has been handed down in two versions: The ''Samhitapatha'' has all Sanskrit rules of Sandhi applied and is the text used for recitation. The Padapatha has each word isolated in its pausa form and is used for memorization. The Padapatha is, as it were, a commentary to the ''Samhitapatha'', but the two seem to be about co-eval. The original text as reconstructed on metrical grounds (viz. "original" in the sense that it aims to recover the hymns as composed by the Rishi s) lies somewhere between the two, but closer to the Samhitapatha. Organization The most common numbering scheme is by book, hymn and verse (and '' Pada '' ( Foot ) ''a'', ''b'', ''c'' ..., if required). E. g. the first ''pada'' is
and the final ''pada'' is
Hermann Grassmann has though numbered the hymns 1 through to 1028, putting the ''valakhilya'' at the end. The entire 1028 hymns of the ''Rigveda'', in the 1877 edition of Aufrecht, contain a total 39,831 padas. The Shatapatha Brahmana gives the number of syllables to be 432,000. The metrical text of van Nooten and Holland (1994) has a total of 395,563 syllables though (or an average of 9.93 syllables per pada), as counting the number of syllables is not straightforward because of issues with sandhi. Most verses are Jagati (padas of 12 syllables), Trishtubh (padas of 11 syllables), Viraj (padas of 10 syllables) or Gayatri or Anushtubh (padas of 8 syllables). Recent linguistic (as well as content-related) reconstruction suggests that books 2-7 may be older than the remaining books, with books 1 and 10 being the most recent. Contents The chief gods of the ''Rigveda'' are Agni , the sacrificial fire, Indra , a heroic god who is praised for having slain his enemy Vrtra , and Soma , the sacred potion, or the plant it is made from. Other prominent gods are Mitra , Varuna and Ushas (the dawn) and the Ashvins . Also invoked are Savitar , Vishnu , Rudra , Pushan , Brihaspati , Brahmanaspati , Dyaus Pita (the sky), Prithivi (the earth), Surya (the sun), Vayu (the wind), Apas (the waters), Parjanya (the rain), Vac (the word), the Maruts , the Adityas , the Rbhus , the Vishvadevas (the all-gods), many Rivers (notably the Sapta Sindhu , and the Sarasvati River ), as well as various further minor gods, persons, concepts, phenomena and items. It also contains fragmentary references to possible historical events, notably the struggle between the early Vedic people (known as Vedic Aryan s, a subgroup of the Indo-Aryans ) and their enemies, the Dasa . , early 19th century]]
::''To what is One, sages give many a title / they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.'' (Griffith) :is often quoted as an example of emerging Monotheism , compare the discussion of 10.129 below.
::''He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, / Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.'' ( Griffith ) :The Nasadiya suktam exhibits a level of philosophical speculation atypical of the Rig-Veda, which for the most part is occupied with ritualistic invocation. Translations The ''Rigveda'' was translated into English by Ralph T.H. Griffith in 1896 . Partial English translations by Maurice Bloomfield and William Dwight Whitney exist. Griffith's translation is good, considering its age, but it is no replacement for Geldner's 1951 translation (in German), the only independent scholarly translation so far. The later translations by Elizarenkova depends heavily on Geldner, but Elizarenkova's translation (in Russian) is valuable in taking into account scholarly literature up to 1990. HINDU TRADITION According to Indian tradition, the Rigvedic hymns were collected by Paila under the guidance of Vyasa , who formed the Rigveda Samhita as we know it. According to the Shatapatha Brahmana , the number of syllables in the ''Rigveda'' is 432,000, equalling the number of muhurtas (1 day = 30 muhurtas) in forty years. This statement stresses the underlying philosophy of the Vedic books that there is a connection (bandhu) between the astronomical, the Physiological , and the spiritual. The authors of the Brahmanas literature described and interpreted the Rigvedic ritual. Yaska was an early commentator of the ''Rigveda''. In the 14th Century , Sayana wrote an exhaustive commentary on it. Other ''s'' (commentaries) that have been preserved up to present times are those by Madhava , Skandasvamin and Venkatamadhava . DATING AND HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION The Rigveda's core is accepted to date to the late " Book Of The Dead " are known from archaeological excavations and linguistic reconstructions only. Up til 2003, the Rig Veda was dated to around 1200–900 BC. However, newer, more recent finds have led most scholars to now beleive they were written around 1500–1300 BC, and more evidence is turning up all the time. The text in the following centuries underwent Orthoepic revision and in its preserved form ( Samhitapatha , Padapatha )It is unclear which of the several Shakalyas composed the RV Padapatha. See Jha, Vashishtha Narayan. 1992. A Linguistic Analysis of the Rgveda-Padapatha. Sri Satguru Publications. Delhi would have been fixed in the early 1st millennium BC. After their composition, the texts were preserved and codified by a vast body of Vedic Priesthood as the central philosophy of the Iron Age Vedic Civilization . The ''Rigveda'' is far more archaic than any other Indo-Aryan text preserved. For this reason, it has been in the center of attention of western scholarship from the times of Max Müller . The ''Rigveda'' records an early stage of Vedic Religion , still closely tied to the pre- Zoroastrian Persian religion. It is thought that Zoroastrianism and Vedic Hinduism evolved from an earlier common religious Indo-Iranian culture. Scholars usually date the ''Rigveda'' to the is a plant found in the mountains, and it has to be purchased, imported by merchants). D.B. Kasar identifies the Sahyadri mountains in Maharashtra with rivers Vedganga, Pravara, Vashisthi, Neera, Sindphana as a possible location, though this claim is not widely accepted. Nevertheless, the hymns were certainly composed over a long period, with the oldest elements possibly reaching back into Indo-Iranian times, or the early 2nd millennium BC. Thus there is some debate over whether the boasts of the destruction of stone forts by the Vedic Aryans and particularly by Indra refer to cities of the Indus Valley Civilization or whether they hark back to clashes between the early Indo-Aryans with the BMAC (Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex) culture centuries earlier, in what is now northern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan (separated from the upper Indus by the Hindu Kush mountain range, and some 400 km distant). In any case, while it is highly likely that the bulk of the ''Rigveda'' was composed in the Punjab, even if based on earlier poetic traditions, there is no mention of either Tiger s or Rice in the ''Rigveda'' (as opposed to the later Vedas), suggesting that Vedic culture only penetrated into the plains of India after its completion. There is however mention of ApUpa, PuroLAS and Odana in the Rig Veda, terms that, at least in later texts, refer to rice dishes, see Talageri (2000) Similarly, there is no mention of Iron . The Iron Age in northern India begins in the 12th Century BC with the '' Black And Red Ware '' (BRW) culture. This is a widely accepted timeframe for the beginning codification of the ''Rigveda'' (i.e. the arrangement of the individual hymns in books, and the fixing of the samhitapatha (by applying Sandhi ) and the padapatha (by dissolving Sandhi) out of the earlier metrical text), and the composition of the younger Vedas. This time probably coincides with the early Kuru kingdom, shifting the center of Vedic culture east from the Punjab into what is now Uttar Pradesh . Some of the names of gods and goddesses found in the ''Rigveda'' are found amongst other belief systems based on Zeus , Latin Jupiter (from deus-pater), and Germanic Tyr ; while Mitra is cognate with Persian ''Mithra''; also, Ushas with Greek Eos and Latin Aurora ; and, less certainly, Varuna with Greek Uranos . Finally, Agni is cognate with Latin ''ignis'' and Russian ''ogon'', both meaning "fire". Some, mostly Indian, writers have used alleged Astronomical references in the ''Rigveda'' to date it to as early as the 4th Millennium BC . The astronomical evidence of the Rigveda remains controversial. e.g. Michael Witzel, ''The Pleiades and the Bears viewed from inside the Vedic texts'', EVJS Vol. 5 (1999), issue 2 (December) {Link without Title} ; 1; Bryant, Edwin and Laurie L. Patton (2005) The Indo-Aryan Controversy, Routledge/Curzon. Kazanas (2000) in a polemic against the " Aryan Invasion Theory " suggests a date as early as 3100 BC, based on an identification of the early Rigvedic Sarasvati River as the Ghaggar-Hakra and on Glottochronological arguments (while mainstream historical linguistics assumes a date as late as 3000 BC for the age of late Proto-Indo-European itself). MORE RECENT INDIAN VIEWS The Hindu perception of the ''Rigveda'' has moved away from the original ritualistic content to a more symbolic or mystical interpretation. For example, instances of , who started the Arya Samaj and Sri Aurobindo have emphasized a spiritual (adhyatimic) interpretation of the book. The Sarasvati river, lauded in RV 7.95 as the greatest river flowing from the mountain to the sea is sometimes equated with the Ghaggar-Hakra river, which went dry perhaps before 2600 BC or certainly before 1900 BC . Others argue that the Sarasvati was originally the Helmand in Afghanistan . These questions are tied to the debate about the Indo-Aryan Migration (termed " Aryan Invasion Theory ") vs. the claim that Vedic culture together with Vedic Sanskrit originated in the Indus Valley Civilisation , a topic of great significance in Hindu Nationalism , addressed for example by Amal Kiran and Shrikant G. Talageri . Subhash Kak has claimed that there is an astronomical code in the organization of the hymns. Bal Gangadhar Tilak , based on astronomical alignments in the Rig-Veda, provided an interesting analysis of the early Vedic society in his "The Orion" 1893 ). REFERENCES EDITIONS
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Commentary
Western philology
Hindu Historical, Archaeoastronomy etc.
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