The Rig Veda

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The Rig Veda  (1896) 
translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

The Rig Veda is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. The Rig Veda was likely composed between roughly 1700–1100 BCE, making it the oldest Veda, one of the oldest texts of any Indo-Iranian language, and one of the world's oldest religious texts. It was preserved over centuries by oral tradition alone and was probably not put in writing before the Early Middle Ages.

The Rig Veda is considered to be amongst the earliest religious texts still revered by a living tradition and is estimated to have been formed around 1500–1200 BCE. It consists of 1,017 hymns (1,028 including the apocryphal valakhilya hymns 8.49–8.59) composed in Vedic Sanskrit, arranged in 10 books known as mandalas. The mandalas 2-9 discuss cosmology, rites, and rituals, and praise deities, while the mandalas 1 and 10 discuss philosophy, virtues and metaphysical questions, and speculate on the origins of the universe and the nature of the divine.

The Rig Veda[edit]

Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century

 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

 
Translation:

This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

 
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