# The Rigveda and the land of seven rivers
**ऋग्वेद और सप्त सिंधु**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/rigveda-sapta-sindhu/
- Chapter: [Indus and Veda](https://indianepics.online/chapter/indus-vedic.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1500 BCE – 1200 BCE (± 200 years)
- Where: Ravi (Parushni) river near Lahore, Punjab (Pakistan) (31.6, 74.28)
- Tags: language, religion

## Summary

Hymns in Vedic Sanskrit are composed in the greater Punjab; the pin is the Ravi, where Rigveda 7.18 sets the battle of the ten kings.

वैदिक संस्कृत के सूक्त बृहत्तर पंजाब में रचे गए; पिन रावी (परुष्णी) पर है, जहाँ ऋग्वेद 7.18 दस राजाओं का युद्ध बताता है।

## Account

The Rigveda's ten books of hymns were composed over several centuries and passed down orally, with great precision, long before they were written. Its geography is the Sapta Sindhu, the Indus and the rivers of the Punjab. The river hymn, 10.75, names streams from the Ganga in the east to the Kubha (Kabul) and Gomati (Gomal) in the west, and Hymn 7.18 places King Sudas's victory over ten kings on the Parushni, the Ravi. The pin stands for that region, not a site.

The date is an estimate. Most scholars put the bulk of the hymns around 1500 to 1200 BCE, from the language's closeness to the Avestan of Iran, from the Indic god names in a Mitanni treaty of about 1380 BCE, and because iron first appears only in later Vedic texts. The hymns describe cattle-keeping clans and no cities, and no excavated site can be tied to them. Whether their Sarasvati is the Ghaggar-Hakra, and how Indo-Aryan speakers came to the Punjab, are among the most argued questions in Indian history.

## Sources

- Jamison, S. W. and Brereton, J. P. (trans.), The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (2014), introduction
- Witzel, M., 'Rgvedic history: poets, chieftains and polities', in Erdosy (ed.), The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia (1995)
- Griffith, R. T. H. (trans.), The Hymns of the Rigveda, vol. 2 (1897) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195722 (Books 7 to 10, including hymn 7.18 and the river hymn 10.75)

## Image

Rigveda MS2097. Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARigveda_MS2097.jpg

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