Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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Cartographers of the Vedas: Two Centuries of Scholarship on the Rigvedic River Names
From Christian Lassen in 1847 to satellite imagery in the 2010s. A history of the scholarly project to identify the rivers named in the Nadistuti (Rigveda 10.75) and to map them onto the modern landscape of north-west South Asia.
The Nadistuti at Close Range: A Verse-by-Verse Reading of Rigveda 10.75
Rigveda 10.75 contains one of the oldest geographical inventories in South Asia, embedded in a hymn of praise to the Sindhu. A close reading of the text: its composer, its two river-lists, the metrical structure, and what makes the hymn methodologically valuable to historians of geography.
What the Rigveda Says About Nature: Rivers, Fire, Dawn, and the Cosmic Order of Ṛta
The Rigveda is the oldest surviving record of how a literate culture saw the natural world. A close reading of its rivers, its fire-sciences, its dawn observations, and the principle of ṛta that holds them together.
Vedic Geography: Where the Rig Veda Was Actually Composed
The Rig Veda is a deeply geographical text. Its hymns name rivers, mountains, plains and cardinal directions with a consistency that lets us pin its composition to a specific region — the Saptasindhu, the 'Land of the Seven Rivers' in what is today Punjab, Haryana, and eastern Pakistan.
The Lost Sarasvati: Satellite Imagery, Geology and the Rig Veda's Sacred River
The Sarasvati is praised in roughly 50 Rig Vedic hymns as a mighty perennial river flowing from mountain to sea. By the Brāhmaṇas she had vanished. Satellite imagery, sediment cores and isotope geochemistry now let us reconstruct what happened.