A History of Sanskrit Literature c8.6

c8.6

Though the *Atharva-veda* undoubtedly shows a belief in a place of future punishment, the utmost that can be inferred with regard to the *Rigveda* from the scanty evidence we possess, is the notion that unbelievers were consigned to an underground darkness after death. So little, indeed, do the Rishis say on this subject, and so vague is the little they do say, that Roth held the total annihilation of the wicked by death to be their belief. The early Indian notions about future punishment gradually developed, till, in the post-Vedic period, a complicated system of hells had been elaborated.