The Vedas

Four collections of sacred speech, and how they were made and handed down.

Veda (वेद) comes from vid, "to know". The word names a body of hymns and ritual texts composed in early Sanskrit, and it is the source the lineages on the next page look back to. There are four Vedas. Each one has the same four layers: the Saṃhitā (the collection of verses), the Brāhmaṇa (prose on the rites), the Āraṇyaka (forest texts) and the Upaniṣad (philosophy).

ऋग्वेद

Ṛgveda

Veda of verses (ṛc)

Hymns composed c. 1500–1200 BCE · collected c. 1200–1000 BCE

  • 10 books (maṇḍalas), 1,028 hymns, about 10,600 verses
  • Mostly hymns to Agni, Indra, Soma, the Aśvins, Uṣas and Varuṇa
  • Books 2 to 7 belong to named priestly families; books 1, 8, 9 and 10 are later and mixed

The oldest Veda and the oldest surviving text in any Indo-European language. Its hymns were composed by poet families (Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, Vasiṣṭha and others) for sacrifices. The Gāyatrī mantra is Ṛgveda 3.62.10. Book 10 contains the Puruṣa Sūkta and the Nāsadīya hymn, which already ask where the world came from.

सामवेद

Sāmaveda

Veda of melodies (sāman)

Compiled c. 1200–1000 BCE

  • 1,875 verses, nearly all taken from the Ṛgveda (mostly books 8 and 9)
  • Two parts: the verse collection and the song books
  • Sung by the Udgātṛ priests at the Soma sacrifice

The Sāmaveda sets Ṛgveda verses to melody. The text gives the words with notation for the tune, and one verse can be stretched over many notes. Indian classical music traces its theory of notes and scales back to these chants. Three recensions survive: Kauthuma, Jaiminīya and Rāṇāyanīya.

यजुर्वेद

Yajurveda

Veda of sacrificial formulas (yajus)

Compiled c. 1200–800 BCE

  • Śukla ("white"): the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā, 40 chapters, verses kept apart from explanation
  • Kṛṣṇa ("black"): Taittirīya, Maitrāyaṇī, Kaṭha and Kapiṣṭhala, verses mixed with prose commentary
  • Used by the Adhvaryu priest, who performs the rite

The Yajurveda is the working manual of the sacrifice: what to say at each action. Prose formulas stand beside verses. The Śrī Rudram and Camakam, which Vedavani teaches, belong to the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda (Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.5 and 4.7). The Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Īśā Upaniṣads come from the Śukla branch.

अथर्ववेद

Atharvaveda

Veda of the Atharvans and Aṅgirases

Core compiled c. 1200–1000 BCE · finished by c. 900 BCE

  • 20 books, about 730 hymns and 6,000 verses
  • Two recensions: Śaunaka and Paippalāda
  • Contains the Mundaka, Māṇḍūkya and Praśna Upaniṣads

The Atharvaveda holds charms for healing, protection, harmony at home and kingship, along with philosophical hymns on time, the self and the cosmos. It was admitted late to the canon. Older sources speak of "the threefold knowledge" (trayī vidyā), meaning the first three Vedas only. Its practical spells give an unusual view of everyday life, and of early Indian medicine.

A rough chronology

Time runs down the page. Each column is one Veda, and the last column holds the manuals that kept them intact. Each row is a period, and every text sits in the row of its own date. Every Veda grows the same way: the verses first, then prose on the rites, then the Upaniṣads, which were composed over about six hundred years. All dates are estimates, good to within a century or two. Tap any box to read about it, and tap ∑ for how it is dated.

Next layer of the same Veda Verses reused from the Ṛgveda Related, origin debated Preserved, handed on or explained

How the Vedas were kept

For well over a thousand years the Vedas were not written down. Families of priests learned them by ear from a teacher, word for word and with the exact pitch accent. The text was checked by reciting it in several patterns: the plain Saṃhitā order, then word by word (pada), then in braided forms (krama, jaṭā, ghana) in which every word is chanted forwards and backwards with its neighbours. A slip in any pattern shows up in the others. This is why the Ṛgveda we have is nearly identical across regions. UNESCO listed Vedic chanting as a masterpiece of oral heritage in 2003.

Because the teaching passed from voice to voice, each Veda divided into śākhās, schools tied to one family of teachers. Tradition says the sage Vyāsa arranged the single mass of verses into four and gave each to a disciple: Paila the Ṛgveda, Jaimini the Sāmaveda, Vaiśaṃpāyana the Yajurveda and Sumantu the Atharvaveda. Historians read this as a memory of the editing that did happen between about 1200 and 900 BCE, under the Kuru kings.

How the dates are worked out

No Vedic text names a year, and no manuscript survives from anywhere near the time. Every date on this page is an estimate. It rests on a few fixed points and on the order of the texts between them.

  • c. 1450–1350 BCE: the Mitanni records. In a treaty on clay tablets, a king of the Mitanni in northern Syria swears by Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas. These records are the only written trace of the Ṛgveda's kind of language from its own age.
  • c. 1200–1000 BCE: iron. The Ṛgveda knows one metal, ayas, copper or bronze. The Atharvaveda adds "black metal", which is iron. Iron was first worked in the north-west in these centuries, so the Ṛgveda's hymns are placed before them and the Atharvaveda in or just after them.
  • c. 1200–900 BCE: the Kuru kingdom. The later collections are set further east than the Ṛgveda, around modern Delhi and Haryana, where the Kuru kings ruled. The gathering and arranging of the hymns is linked to their court.
  • c. 400 BCE: the Buddha. The oldest Upaniṣads show no sign of Buddhism, and early Buddhist texts answer ideas found in them. Most scholars now put the Buddha's death near 400 BCE, so the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya are placed a century or two before that.
  • c. 350 BCE: Pāṇini. His grammar describes the Sanskrit spoken in his day and marks Vedic forms as belonging to the old hymns.
  • c. 150 BCE: Patañjali. His commentary on Pāṇini knows the whole of Vedic literature, so all of it existed by then.

Between these points the texts are put in order by their language. Michael Witzel separates five stages: the Ṛgveda, the other verse collections, the prose of the Yajurveda, the prose of the Brāhmaṇas, and the Sūtras. A text is placed by the stage of its language and by which other texts it quotes. For the Upaniṣads this page follows Patrick Olivelle, who sorts them into early prose, verse and late prose.

The margins are wide. Olivelle warns that any date closer than a few centuries is "as stable as a house of cards". Read each range on this page as a best estimate, with a century or more of doubt at either end.

What scholars still debate

Some scholars allow the Ṛgveda a wider range, starting as early as 1900 or 1700 BCE. Others argue from astronomy. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says the Pleiades rise exactly in the east, which was true around 2950 BCE, and the calendar of the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa fits the sky of about 1400 to 1200 BCE. Most scholars think these texts repeat older observations and were composed later. At the other end, Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the early Upaniṣads reached their present form later than the dates given here.

The traditional view in India holds that the Vedas are far older and were not composed by humans at all (apauruṣeya). Where the Vedic people came from, and how their language reached South Asia, is also an open question with strong arguments on more than one side.

The tree on the next page picks up where this one stops. It follows the teachers who carried the Upaniṣadic teaching forward, from Gauḍapāda and Śaṅkara to people teaching today.