Talk:Rigveda

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[edit] Image:The Rig Veda.jpg

the image doesn't show "The Rig Veda", it shows just a printed page with two verses plus Sayana's commentary. There is no reason to show that rather than the actual text, and then on Purusha sukta or something; the same goes for the creation hymn, we can hardly begin showing the full text of individual hymns here. dab (ᛏ) 07:04, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tilak

"The Orion" by Tilak is a much more important book on Vedic topics. To speak of "The Arctic Home" by Tilak is to remain fixated on Newton's Alchemy and forget his physics. MarcAurel 04:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

that's not the point, the statement you deleted was in the context of extremely far-fetched claims. Tilak is notable for claiming the Aryans came from the North Pole. If he said other, more reasonable things, by all means discuss them, but don't delete other material. dab (ᛏ) 11:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Difference in texts

Why are the texts linked to in the article different? I mean, sacred-text's and intratext's ones.

Examples:

sacred-text's edition of Book 6 has 75 hymns, and intratext's has 84. And so on.

Hymn 54 of Book 6 is different: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rvsan/rv06054.htm vs. http://www.intratext.com/IXT/SAN0010/_PE9.HTM

I have also sent an email to intratext asking this question. --Imz 01:06, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

their hymn count is completely garbled. I assume they used some broken automatization to break up the text. It is correct up to 2.16. 2.17 breaks off at verse 5, and "2.18" is really 2.17 6-9a. The link is worthless, and I'll remove it now. dab (ᛏ) 08:21, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How Old is Rigveda?

How old is Rigveda is horribly mistaken. Most of the estimates by modern historians are based on contemplation. True logical conclusion can be seen in the below mentioned URL.

Following are the quotes from http://www.mantra.com/newsplus/aitmyth.html#A09 "Rig Veda verses belie the old chronology (VI.51.14-15 mentions the winter solstice occurs when the sun rises in Revati nakshatra, only possible at 6,000bce, long before the alleged invasion.) Carbon dating confirms horses in Gujarat at 2,400bce, contradicting old model claim Aryans must have brought them. NASA satellite photos prove Sarasvati River basin is real, not a myth. Fire altars excavated at Kali Bangan in Rajasthan support existence of Rig Veda culture at 2,700 bce. Kunal, a new site in Haryana, shows use of writing and silver craft in pre-Harappan India, 6-7,000bce."

Please also see the chapter on "Myth of the Aryan invasion of India by David Frawley" at http://www.mantra.com/newsplus/aitmyth.html#A15

Regards, Prashant (s/w Engg in MNC)

[edit] Oldest text of Indo-Iranian languages

Just got curious if it's not also the oldest text in any Indo-European language? If not, which one is? deeptrivia (talk) 04:23, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

The Gathas (sermons of Zarathrustra) are likely older. The reason being that the Gathas contain a much wider, much older I-Ir lexicon than the Rk, which already has numerous borrowings from Dravidian (not a great deal though). Kuiper wrote a few articles about this which I will cite when I can pull them out from my boxes. The Gathas are virtually "pure" Indo-Iranian, by contrast, though arguably, this could be due to deliberate redaction in the highly nationalistic Sassanian period when few surviving texts of the Avesta were compiled. The oldest firmly dated IE text is the Mitanni scroll which contains the names of a few I-Ir deities; I believe that is 1236 BCE, but I can't find the reference right now.--Almijisti 07:48, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I was way off; the earliest datable I-Ir words I am aware of appear as the names Suriias and Marutta as the names of foreign gods in a Kassite document dated to ~1760 BCE. I believe this is the earliest example of any IE, not just I-Ir, but I cannot say definitively. The famous Mitanni treaty, between the Mitannian pretender, Matiwazza and the Hittite monarch, Shupiluliumas (my favorite ancient name) is dated to ~1360 BCE (I had a couple correct digits) and has mi-it-ra, u-ru-ua-na, in-dar, and na-sa-at-ti-ia; i.e., Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya. Had to pull out my old thesis to find this.--Almijisti 06:15, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dating Claims

I removed some nonsense (such as "new evidence turning up all the time", and by edit conflict also reverted the addition of a list of ancient texts. This is offtopic here, go to Ancient literature (where we are linking to from this article at the appropriate location). dab (ᛏ) 20:21, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

I could agree that the place for the detail you removed does not need to be here, and I updated Ancient literature. However, the dating claims are still not documented, and the paragraphs point is hardly nuetral. The unspoken assumptions appear to be:

1) the RigVeda is the oldest literature

2) the RigVeda is the source of all religious thought

3) "recent finds" related to the RigVeda equal adequate evidence

I am happy to see the RigVeda represented as the oldest of all literatures, if that is what it is. I humbly (not sarcasticaly) ask for objective peer reviewed evidence before being told that is the case. If there are those whose religious or nationalistic sensibilities are offended by this, consider another approach: if the RigVeda really is the "truth", does it matter if it is the oldest, the source, or adequately supported archaeologically? If so, we need the objective citations. If not, we need verifiable claims to form an objective opinion. Thank you for the attention to this. mamgeorge 20:45, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

not at all -- the "recent finds" stuff was a recent addition by an anon, and I removed it. If we say somewhere that the RV is the "source of all religious thought", I didn't spot it, and the statement should of course be removed. I don't see where we are claiming that the RV is "oldest literature". Oldest Indo-Iranian, for sure, and oldest with unbroken oral tradition, but not "oldest", golbally, by a long shot. I don't see where you read something like this into the article. As explained in the "dating" section, the 1500-1200 range is the general rough consensus in philology; I'll see if the date goes back to Oldenberg and insert a proper reference. Since the composition of the hymns certainly spans several centuries, and the redaction is several centuries later still, the date is not particularly controversial. You could say that the RV as we know it evolved over a millennium, say 1800-800 BC, with the earliest nucleus in the early part of this range, and the final redaction in its final phase. dab (ᛏ) 20:49, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Again, thanks for the checks; I appreciate you dedication. I have some questions, if you can bear them; they seem appropriate to the topic. I do not have a quick way of verifying these details; do you?:

1) Limiting the scope to Indo-Iranian may be correct. I was thinking Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugarit etc. would apply to those boundaries though; do you have a link that clears that up?

2) A redaction is editing for publication. Are you saying the Vedas were published in the 800 BC? Do we really know how old it is? How are we determining this?

3) How old are the oldest existing copies? Where are the oldest documents kept? How are they classified? Have they been dated? Have any Bibliographical analysis been applied to them? What is their percentage or error?

4) Oldest oral tradition... I have no reason to doubt that. On the other hand, how do we know what people believed prior to when it was written (which is why I asked...to begin with)?

Just got your latest comment: "look, this is totally undisputed. You won't find a single scholar saying otherwise". Many history based websites show much younger dates; I will not cite them because I can not evaluate their claims objectively. Can you? Without a citation, I have only another opinion about what the opinion is.

Thank you, mamgeorge 21:41, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

I have also been curious about the dating of the Vedas. They are supposed to have been transmitted orally with no diglossia for millennia and I find it hard to swallow. A [paper] (pdf, page 5) by Prof. Witzel, which among other things defends the dating of the earliest parts of the Rg Veda to 1500BCE, makes a case based on the fact that iron and fortified cities are 'not' mentioned in it, so it must precede the Iron Age in the Punjab.

Anyways, from what I've seen, dating the earliest parts of the Rg to 1500BCE does seem to have mainstream scholarly support, and that is all that matters. - Kingsley2.com 08:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

that's interesting. I've had to defend this article against pious attempts to insert Neolithic if not Paleolithic dates, and suddenly find myself forced to defend the dates as being not too early. Scholarship is certainly unanimous in dating the text to the 2nd millennium. Of course it may well contain ideas that go back as far as you like (such as PIE Dyaus Pita, who may well date to the 5th millennium), but as a text there is just no way it predates 2000 BC. Now while the youngest parts may rather confidently and uncontroversially be placed in the 12th century (give or take a century), it is undisputed that the earliest parts predate this by several centuries. Just, how many centuries? I am confident that most scholars would date the bulk of the text to after 1500. But the 'bulk' is not the earliest hymn. Oberlies settles for 1700. While few people would insist that the earliest parts must date to this early, I am sure most people would willingly grant the possibility. Therefore let us stick with Oberlies' 1100-1700: Oberlies did not try to forward a hypothesis with this, he rather reviewed scholarship and found that this is more or less the consensus.

regarding "writing" and "publication", I suggest you read the entire article for background. I added some stuff regarding writing in ancient India. The point is that writing is irrelevant when discussing the Rigveda. I suppose it would have been written down from the 8th century or so. The oldest scraps of manuscripts will be a couple of centuries old. The Vedic methods of highly organized, professional oral tradition really rendered the introduction of writing a side issue. dab (ᛏ) 14:33, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Linguistically speaking the Gathas are arguably at least as old, perhaps much older than the RV, according to research by Boyce, Haug, Kellens, etc.--all reputable Iranicists. It is, of course, even more difficult to attempt dating of any of the Avesta, owing to the centuries of privations following Alexander's victory over the Achaemenids and the deliberately artificial compilations attempted under the Sassanids. That said, it is far from settled in the I-Ir scholastic world that the RV is older than the Gathas or vice versa. It's difficult to say, really, because it is likely that the dialect of the RV isn't even the same as later Vedic Skt and may be closer to that of the Gathas than the rest of the Samhitas. One mustn't overlook the fact that the Gathas are almost devoid of non-I-Ir words, while the RV has numerous Dravidian and Munda borrowings (see Kuiper 1991; Aalto 1971). This is ambiguous, admittedly, but it could point to an earlier redaction than the RV; that is, maybe Zarathustra's audience had not yet fully split into Iranian and Indic worlds (perhaps significantly, the sermons themselves depict a society that was on the verge of a terrific collapse).

At any rate, there are portions of RV x that may even predate ii-ix, particularly the akhyana hymns, which perhaps were remnants of a very ancient epic or cosmogony. I believe that establishing a terminus a quo for the RV is next to impossible; for one thing, only one of the five known rescensions exists. As for the other samhitas, the Samaveda has several hymns that do not appear in the Sakalya recension and may be remnants of the other rescensions or, perhaps, apocrypha. The Sakalya rescension was not compiled into final form until the 6th or 5th centuries (this date is, at least relatively well accepted even according to indigenous tradition, ascribing the work to the sage Vyasa). Even the "serious" literature on the subject of RV dating is about 10% evidence and 90% conjecture; nearly all of it that derives from a lingustic analysis is devoid of any real understanding of the archaeology and most archaeologists have only cursory knowledge of the texts (Rau was a notable exception). Muller originally thought 1200 BCE then he revised this downward to 1500 later in his life; Haug was convinced that it was at least 2400 BCE (Haug was perhaps the greatest of the early Indo-Iranicists), and Kaegi thought it was even earlier. The idea some have that 19th Century Europeans had any consensus on or need for a late chronology for the Vedic literature is simply false. I have elsewhere pointed out the circular reasoning that goes on in most of Vedic dating articles. The situation is not comparable to any other field of ancient studies, owing to the singular importance of I-Ir research to the entire field of historical linguistics and IE linguistics in particular. It's unlikely to resolve in my lifetime. On top of all the traditional academic slowness, Vedic dating has in recent years become one of the most politicized topics in all of humanities research.--Almijisti 07:21, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Almijisti, Avesta mentions Hapta-Hendu as the fifteenth home of Aryans and Rangha as the sixteenth and the last. That means that the Avestans first came to India and went later to Rangha (because of heat and fever) before Avesta was complied. So definitely the RigVeda is older. I do agree that Avesta remembered some stories better (example, deluge with snow), while Vedics remembered other stories better. Aupmanyav 15:23, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The controversial 'Out of India' theory

Please refer to the following paragraph, 'Kazanas (2000) in a polemic .. diametral opposition to views in mainstream historical linguistics, and supports the controversial Out of India theory,.. ' Let me point out that 'from within India' theory is even more controversial. Aupmanyav 15:14, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

huh? "Out of India" and "from within India" are the same thing. (ᛎ) qɐp 08:46, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Formatting/Font test (sorry, can be deleted in some minutes)

The Rigveda (Sanskrit: ऋग्वेद ṛgveda

you should use {{lang}}: ऋग्वेद dab (ᛏ) 10:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

thx for the hint. just exploring different handling here and in de:. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Pjacobi#Vorlage:IAST

[edit] Introduction

The introduction "Rigveda, a tatpurush compound of etc...." appears vague. Its as though a knowledgeable audience is being addressed. What, whose, when, where etc. are addressed quite later in the introduction. Are such kind of introductions in fashion or what ? I propose to change it to a more conventional one like the one for Avesta.IAF
- how is it vague? Do you mean, overly specific? This is the brief bracket explaining the Sanskrit term, too short for a separate "etymology" section, and too central to be banished to a footnote imho. I see nothing wrong with it. As always, if people don't know what a tatpurusha is, and would like to find out, they can click on the link. dab (ᛏ) 13:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It's vague for a first-time reader who may think its quite uninteresting or may wonder what is it. That tatpurush is a mouse-click away is not as far-away as the patience that is tested by introducing literary prowess right in the beginning. Besides, the order of merit usually is what, when, whose, etc. Its finer meaning can come in between this list or sometime later. This trend is seen in the pages like Ashok and Sanskrit also. I would like the opinions of others on not only this page, but other such pages also because we must make them readable for the quick-surfer, and for the average Joe. IAF

OK just keep it simple like HAL Tejas, instead of a "tatpurush compound of...". That its a tatpurush can be mentioned later. Indian Air Force (IAF)

[edit] Reorganization of the bibliography of editions

It is good that we are updating the editions. For editions that I cannot verify directly I am referring to Wendy Doniger's reiew which appears in her book cited in the article. I notice that some of the dates and titling she gives differ from those in the article. If any of the dates or edition details differ from what others may know, could you please add additional citations rather than removing what I give to Doniger? If we add multiple variants we can reconcile any differences over the next week. Buddhipriya 19:02, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Location

The first hymns of Rgveda were composed in Southern Afghanistan according to Dr Rajesh Kochar (The Vedic People, Orient Longman, 2000). His arguments based on relationship of Vedic Sanskrit with Avestan language, location of Ephedra plants (Soma), names of the rivers etc were very logical. As Indo-Aryans gradually movesd east towards Punjab bulk of Vedas were composed in that region.Kumarrao 14:27, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

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