page_title: Rigveda
section_title: Dating and historical context
hierarchical_section_title: Rigveda / Dating and historical context
context_page_description: The Rigveda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is one of the four sacred canonical texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas.
  The Rigveda is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Its early layers are one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The sounds and texts of Rigveda have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE. The philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent, most likely between c. 1500 and 1200 BCE, although a wider approximation of c. 1700–1100 BCE has also been given.
  The text is layered consisting of the Samhita, Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads. The Rigveda Samhita is the core text, and is a collection of 10 books with 1,028 hymns in about 10,600 verses. In the eight books – Books 2 through 9 – that were composed the earliest, the hymns predominantly discuss cosmology and praise deities.
caption: A map of tribes and rivers mentioned in the Rigveda.
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