19 Facts About Rigveda

Rigveda or Rig Veda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (suktas).

The sounds and texts of the Rigveda have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE.

The Rigveda Samhita is the core text and is a collection of 10 books with 1, 028 hymns in about 10, 600 verses (called, eponymous of the name Rigveda).

Rigveda's core is accepted to date to the late Bronze Age, making it one of the few examples with an unbroken tradition.

Rigveda offers no direct evidence of social or political systems in the Vedic era, whether ordinary or elite.

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Some of the names of gods and goddesses found in the Rigveda are found amongst other belief systems based on Proto-Indo-European religion, while most of the words used share common roots with words from other Indo-European languages.

However, about 300 words in the Rigveda are neither Indo-Aryan nor Indo-European, states the Sanskrit and Vedic literature scholar Frits Staal.

Codification of the Rigveda took place late in the Rigvedic or rather in the early post-Rigvedic period at ca.

The Rigveda was codified by compiling the hymns, including the arrangement of the individual hymns in ten books, coeval with the composition of the younger Veda Samhitas.

The 30 manuscripts of Rigveda preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.

The Basakala version of Rigveda includes eight of these valakhilya hymns among its regular hymns, making a total of 1025 hymns in the main text for this sakha.

Rigveda is the largest of the four Vedas, and many of its verses appear in the other Vedas.

Books 8 and 9 of the Rigveda are by far the largest source of verses for Sama Veda.

Book 10 contributes the largest number of the 1350 verses of Rigveda found in Atharvaveda, or about one fifth of the 5987 verses in the Atharvaveda text.

Technically speaking, however, "the Rigveda" refers to the entire body of texts transmitted along with the Samhita portion.

The text of the Rigveda suggests it was "composed by poets, human individuals whose names were household words" in the Vedic age, states Staal.

The fourth way to interpret the Rigveda emerged in the ancient times, wherein the gods mentioned were viewed as symbolism for legendary individuals or narratives.

The Rigveda has been referred to in the "Indigenous Aryans" and Out of India theory.

Rigveda is considered particularly difficult to translate, owing to its length, poetic nature, the language itself, and the absence of any close contemporary texts for comparison.