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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The Beast With a Hand: The Rig Veda's Missing Tiger and the Animals Its Poets Could Not Name
Search the whole Rig Veda for the word tiger and you get nothing. Search for lion and you get fifteen verses. The elephant appears twice, and only as 'the wild beast with a hand.' The pattern is an accidental archive of what its poets had actually seen.
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.