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How old is the Rig Veda? (Part I) By- Arun Gupta Arun Gupta was educated in Electronics Engineering at IIT-Madras and in Theoretical Physics at Caltech. He is now a software systems analyst. His intellectual wanderlust does not let him rest easy. He wishes he knew everything about everything. Click here to read other articles by Arun Gupta.

Almost everyone has heard of the Vedas, the scriptures that are at the foundation of Hinduism. The Vedas have been celebrated as being the oldest religious books of the oldest living religion. They have been reviled as the source of Hinduism's inequities, of its casteism, ritualism and superstition. They have been derided as being the musings of a primitive people, or condemned as the record of the destruction of an advanced culture by barbarians. They have been seen to portray a sophisticated culture and science, with even the ideas of Quantum Field Theory to be found in them. They are said to contain the seeds of a universal religion that alone can withstand the scrutiny and skepticism of scientists. Few know what the Vedas actually contain. Indians should be familiar with "Satyameva Jayate" -- "Truth alone triumphs" -- it is the national motto, after all. But how many know that the motto is Vedic in origin ?-- it is found in the Mundaka Upanishad of the Atharvaveda.

Yours truly has only a nodding acquaintance with the Vedic corpus. There is a belief that is current, that the essence of the Vedas is in the Upanishads, and the essence of the Upanishads is in the Bhagavad Gita, delivered by Sri Krishna to Arjuna on the Kurukshetra battlefield; and the Gita is sufficient for the Hindu in this modern age. But perhaps the many misperceptions about Hinduism arise from misunderstanding (even among Hindus) of these ancient books. Knowledge of the Vedas surely cannot hurt, and must be sought after.

Why are the Vedas such a mystery ? Well, we run into immediate trouble talking about them in modern language. The words "scriptures" , "books", "texts" are inappropriate words to use with the Vedas, for they all imply writing, but the Vedas were kept alive for most part by memorization and oral transmission. The written word is subject to interpolations and errors -- this is a Hindu belief that happens to be shared by many other cultures. An elaborate methodology to ensure that the text was transmitted syllable-perfect was devised and kept in operation for thousands of years. Only perhaps about a thousand years ago, with the waning of the ancient traditions, were the Vedas put in written form with the purpose of preserving them.

If even correctly referring to the Vedas in modern language is difficult, even more difficult is the understanding the ancient language of their composition. The language is an archaic form of Sanskrit, quite different from the classical Sanskrit of Panini and Kalidasa. Moreover, over the ages, the context and meaning of much of the text has been forgotten, even while the text itself has been preserved faithfully. For much of history, knowledge of these works was a monopoly of a relatively few, with severe interdictions on the sharing of it outside the highest castes; quite unlike the Puranas, Mahabharata and Ramayana; and this has added to our ignorance. And as you might have expected, the Vedas have been victims of the battles over history, and so finding an objective assessment of them today is difficult.

The Vedas are four in number -- the Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva. Each Veda itself is composed of parts, the Samhita (the mantras in verse), the Brahmana (rituals and liturgy in prose) and the Aranyakas and Upanishads ( the philosophical works). The layers of text reflect the chronology of composition, with the Samhita being the most ancient part and the Upanishads the most recent. It is agreed among scholars that the Rigveda Samhita (RV for brevity) is by far the oldest part of the Vedas. So it is to that we, as history buffs, shall turn our attention.

Tradition has it that the Vedas are eternal or ageless scriptures, "heard" by ancient seers and collected by them. Veda Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, is supposed to have arranged the Veda into the form that we know today. The traditional date for Veda Vyasa is around 3000 BC. The Vedas are thus ahistorical; modern Arya Samajis continue to hold the belief that the RV, being eternal, cannot hold anything so trivial as historical information.

From a more modern point of view, the date of the RV is less certain. Scholars do agree that the RV is probably the oldest source material for Indian and even Indo-European history, but do not have a firm date ( The languages Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc., show so many similarities in grammar and vocabulary, and show systematic shifts in pronunciations that it is clear that they all belong to a common family tree of languages, called the Indo-European languages. The RV is probably the most ancient sample of an Indo-European language that we have).

The RV contains 1028 suktas (hymns) with a total of 10552 mantras (verses) arranged in 10 Mandalas or books. This is extremely large compared to other ancient texts that have survived. For example, what survives of the Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrianism (the religion of the Parsis), is about one-tenth or so of the RV. The Avesta is written in a language very closely related to the RV, and has many features in common with the RV, that untangling the relationship between the Avesta and the RV is vital to the understanding of ancient Indian (and Iranian ) history.

The conventional dates for the RV in modern scholarship place the RV between 1700 BC and 1000 BC. An example of how these dates are constructed can be found on the Indology list. Some of the argument is reproduced here.

The model in which these dates are constructed is one in which the Aryans, speakers of Vedic Sanskrit or a precursor language, entered India sometime after 1700 BC, that is, after the end of the urban period of the Harappan culture. The Aryans entered India as invaders or as peaceful migrants. The Aryans brought along the horse and the horse-drawn chariot, which gave them a military advantage over the original inhabitants, if they were invaders; and items of high prestige if they were migrants. Either way the Aryans became the elite, and were able to impose their language and religion on the people. They may have invented the castes to perpetuate their hegemony. It was these people who composed the RV. The Mandalas of the RV can be arranged in an order (believed to be chronological ) with a shift in the names of rivers and places from the older Mandalas to the newer ones showing a movement of the Aryans from Afghanistan and Northwest India into Punjab and ultimately into the Gangetic plains.

The culture which we glimpse in the RV does not know of iron, and so the RV can be no later than the beginning of widespread use of iron in India (around 1000 BC to 900 BC). The RV can be no older than the first Aryan-style chariots, first recorded around the Ural mountains on the Asia-Europe border around 2000 BC. The RV is "horse-obsessed" and so can be no older than the earliest domesticated horses in India, which date is said to be later than 1700 BC.

The Harappan culture had no horses, insists Western scholarship. Various putative horse remains found around Harappan cities either have been carelessly excavated so that reliable dates cannot be determined, and are probably post-1700 BC or the bones are not those of the horse (Equus Caballus) but rather are of the wild Kutchi onager (Equus hemiones khur). Horses are not found on the famous Harappan seals and the few figurines found of horse-like animals are said to be representations of the onager. Some few words found in the cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets of the Middle East show a borrowing from a language that is said to be pre-Vedic Sanskrit. Since these writings can be reliably dated to around 1400 BC, the RV is said to be most likely later than that date.

Finally, the RV is believed, in this model, to have been composed in a relatively short period of time; perhaps a century rather than centuries elapsed between the composition of the earliest and latest hymns.

This is the consensus of Western scholarship on the Vedas, and is what you will find in most books and encyclopedias. The dates and the very model of history are hotly disputed with arguments of varying respectability. I shall outline these arguments in my next article.

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