The Rig Veda Blog
Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
No articles match your search. Clear →
Eleven Names Before the Knife: The Āprī Hymns and the Fixed Grammar of Vedic Sacrifice
Ten short, formulaic Rigvedic hymns recited before every solemn animal sacrifice name the same eleven ritual entities in almost the same order, except for one deliberate swap that marks out priestly family lines. That single variable is the most interesting fact in the corpus.
Sanskrit and the Birth of Linguistics: How Vedic Scholarship Founded the Scientific Study of Language
Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 5th century BCE) is a complete generative grammar of Sanskrit, 2400 years before Chomsky. It was developed, with Yāska's Nirukta and the Prātiśākhyas, to preserve the Rig Veda. How Vedic scholarship invented linguistics — and how that science reached the modern West.