Rig Veda
The oldest of the four Vedas and the oldest surviving Sanskrit text in the entire Indian tradition, a collection of religious hymns of composite and anonymous authorship — though tradition attributes each hymn to a specific seer or family of seers (rishi) — orally transmitted with extraordinary phonetic precision for over three thousand years before being transcribed, and probably composed between 1500 and 1200 BC by the ancient Indo-Aryan peoples settling in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. Made up of ten books (mandalas) containing over a thousand hymns and some ten thousand verses, its language, Vedic Sanskrit, is one of the oldest surviving records of any Indo-European language, making it a first-rate linguistic source alongside its religious value. The hymns are fundamentally invocations and praises addressed to a broad pantheon of gods (devas) associated with natural and cosmic forces — Indra, god of storm and war, the most frequently invoked; Agni, the sacred fire and mediator between gods and men; Soma, both a deity and a central entheogenic ritual drink in the cult; Varuna, guardian of cosmic order (rita) — and were used in the context of Vedic sacrifices, complex fire rituals intended to maintain balance between the divine and human worlds. Beyond its ritual function, some hymns achieve remarkable philosophical depth, such as the celebrated Hymn of Creation (Nasadiya Sukta, book X), which raises, with a sophistication and scepticism surprising for its time, the question of the ultimate origin of the universe, concluding that even the gods may not know the answer. The Rig Veda constitutes the textual foundation upon which all subsequent Vedic civilisation, and ultimately Hinduism itself, was built, and is regarded by Hindus as direct revelation (shruti) transmitted to the primordial seers.