Composition of the Rigveda
- Date
- c. 1500-1200 BCE
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- NW Indian Subcontinent (Punjab)
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
In the early Vedic period the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest religious texts in any Indo-European language, were composed in archaic Sanskrit.
Linguistic and philological evidence places the bulk of its roughly 1,028 hymns between about 1500 and 1200 BCE (a wider range of c. 1900-1100 BCE is sometimes given), in the northwestern subcontinent. The hymns, addressed to deities such as Indra, Agni, Varuna and Mitra, were preserved through an oral tradition of exceptional rigour and fidelity for centuries before being written down. The same gods appear in the Mitanni treaties of northern Syria (c. 1400 BCE), corroborating the dating. The Rigveda is the foundational source for early Vedic religion, society and the Indo-Aryan language, and a cornerstone of the later Hindu tradition, making it one of the most important cultural and religious documents of the ancient world.
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Empires active in c. 1500-1200 BCE
- New Kingdom of Egypt1550 BCE – 1077 BCE
- Hittite Empire1650 BCE – 1178 BCE
- Shang Dynasty1600 BCE – 1046 BCE
- Mitanni1500 BCE – 1300 BCE
- Elamite Kingdom2700 BCE – 539 BCE
Related religion & ideology events
- Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna periodc. 1348 BCE
- Enuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creationc. 1150 BCE
- Zoroaster and the rise of dualist religionc. 1200–900 BCE
- Construction of Solomon's Temple (First Temple) in Jerusalemc. 957 BCE
- Chavín de Huántar and the first pan-Andean religious cultc. 900 BCE
- Great Ziggurat of Ur and temple-centred religionc. 2100 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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