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 Rigveda's Accidental Census: What Its Personal Names Give Away
The Rigveda's hymns were carefully shaped. The personal names inside them were not. Read the poets, patrons and outsiders by name and a different society appears: one with foreign donors, joke names, blind bards and women who exist only as grammatical operations on a husband.
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.
How to Kill a Dragon: Vṛtra and a Sentence Older Than Sanskrit
Three Vedic words, áhann áhim, encode a sentence that survives in Hittite, Greek, and Norse. The Vṛtra myth is not just Indra's story; it is the oldest plot the Indo-Europeans carried with them.
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.