Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.28

c14.28

The *Rigveda* is a curious document. In length, it is approximately equal to the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* together, and consists of over a thousand poems, or ‘hymns’. These vary from more or less epic chants, hymns of praise, and prayers to the gods, to magic spells and fragments of popular songs, all of very varying standard - ‘sometimes true, genuine, and even sublime, but frequently childish, vulgar and obscure’, as Max Müller remarked. The language is elaborate and self-consciously literary, and the metrical composition, based on syllabic verse-forms, is often extremely complicated. In a word, however barbarous and archaic may be the life and thought reflected in the *Rigveda*, it is a laborious and sophisticated anthology, put together with conscious artifice by professional hymnologists at a relatively late stage of the culture of those people who in it are called the Aryans (*Ārya*) and who figure as conquerors in a newly-won land.