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 Rig Veda Ends With a Meeting
After more than a thousand hymns to gods, storms and rivers, the Rigveda closes with four verses asking a group of people to agree. A few hymns earlier it preserves a charm for crushing the same gathering. Between them lies the oldest evidence for how Vedic people made decisions.
The Battle of the Ten Kings: Reading the Rigveda's Only War Report
On the banks of the Paruṣṇī, a Bharata king named Sudās broke a dam and drowned a coalition of ten tribes. The dāśarājña is the closest the Rigveda comes to history, and reading it tests the limits of what a hymn can tell us.
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.