Rigveda

The oldest of the four Vedas, a collection of 1,028 hymns divided into ten books (mandalas), composed by named lineages of seers, among them Vishvamitra, Vasishtha, and Bharadvaja, whose family books (mandalas 2 through 7) form the oldest core, with mandalas 1, 8, 9, and 10 recognized as somewhat later additions and compilations. The hymns were composed orally over several centuries and preserved by mnemonic techniques of extraordinary rigor, including recitation methods that permute word order to guard against corruption, so that the text recited today is close to what a reciter could have produced millennia before it was ever written down.

The hymns are addressed chiefly to Indra, a storm and war god who dominates the collection numerically, alongside Agni, the fire that carries offerings to the gods, Varuna, guardian of cosmic and moral order (rta), and Soma, a ritual drink deified in its own right. Most hymns are liturgical, composed to accompany the Soma sacrifice and to praise, propitiate, or bargain with specific deities for wealth, cattle, and victory in battle. A smaller but disproportionately influential set of hymns turns to cosmological speculation, most famously the Nasadiya Sukta (10.129), which asks how creation began and suggests that not even the gods, who came after creation, can be certain of the answer, and the Purusha Sukta, which describes the cosmos as the product of a primordial being's sacrificial dismemberment.

The Rigveda's date rests on internal and comparative evidence rather than archaeology or inscription: its vocabulary for geography, horses, and chariots, together with close linguistic kinship to the Old Avestan hymns of Zoroastrian Iran, places its composition in the Punjab region (the Sapta Sindhu, or land of seven rivers) roughly between 1500 and 1200 BC, a dating scholars hold with more confidence for the relative sequence of its books than for exact calendar years. No comparably early Indian text or artifact independently confirms this window, which is why the date is conventionally given as a broad range rather than a fixed point.

As the base text from which large portions of the Samaveda and Yajurveda are drawn, and as the fountainhead the entire Vedic religious system traces itself back to, the Rigveda occupies a singular place in the tradition's self-understanding as shruti, revealed rather than authored scripture. Its cosmological and speculative hymns, composed centuries before the Upanishads, set the philosophical questions, about the origin of being, the reliability of the gods' own knowledge, and the relationship between word and world, that later Vedic thought would spend a thousand years working through.