Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.22

c14.22

With these preliminaries we can turn to the ancient religious books of Hinduism and their chronology. They are written in the Indo-European language Sanskrit and, as a whole, they fall into four or five main divisions, among which the poetical corpus known as the *Rigveda* stands alone in that all the other works presuppose its existence and in large part consist of commentaries based upon it. It must therefore be placed first in any attempted sequence, and nearly related to it must be a group of three other Vedic books, the *Sāmaveda* (instructions for the tunes to which the *Rigveda* hymns should be chanted), the *Yajurveda* (prose prayers and spells based on the *Rigveda* and sometimes merely paraphrasing it), and the *Atharvaveda* (verse incantations with occasional prose passages). Then there come the *Brāhmaṇas*, which, as their name implies, are works of priestly liturgical exegesis based on the Vedic books, and the *Upanishads*,* ‘secret teachings’ of metaphysics. In addition, there are the *Sūtras*, which are much condensed manuals of rites accompanying the Vedic prayers.