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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How Far Is a Yojana? The Rig Veda Measures the World in Yokings and Cattle
The Rig Veda has no inch, no cubit, no ruler. Its two words for distance mean 'a harnessing' and 'the ground a cow walks', and in the whole collection exactly one verse attaches a number to either of them. What a civilisation chooses not to measure turns out to be as revealing as what it does.
Eight Words for a Vanished Band: Musical Instruments in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda is the oldest music anyone still performs, and it is almost silent about instruments. Eight names survive in sixteen verses, three of them crammed into a single line that no two translators read the same way.
A Hymn to Gruel: What the Rigveda Actually Ate
The Rigveda contains one hymn addressed not to a god but to food itself, and it ends up praising porridge. Around it sits a food vocabulary with barley, ghee and honey everywhere, meat in three verses, and no word at all for rice, wheat or salt.
The Bowstring Whispers: The Rigveda's Hymn to Its Own Weapons
The last hymn of Mandala 6 addresses no god at all. It talks to a bow, a quiver, a whip, a leather arm-guard and a handful of arrows, one object at a time, and ends by saying the only real armour is a sentence.
Metallurgy in the Mantras: Gold, Bronze, and the Material World of the Rigvedic Poets
The Rigveda names metals, describes chariots, catalogues ornaments, and treats gold as the substance closest to the divine. Reading the metallurgical vocabulary alongside the archaeology of the late Bronze Age Punjab recovers the material world the poets actually inhabited: a world of copper-alloy tools, gold exchange, spoked-wheel vehicles, and no iron.