The Vedas are composed in India

The Vedas, from the Sanskrit for 'knowledge', are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism and among the oldest religious texts still in use anywhere. They are four great collections of hymns, chants, ritual formulas and spells in an archaic form of Sanskrit, made by the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of northern India over roughly a thousand years, from about 1500 to 500 BCE. The oldest, the Rigveda, holds 1,028 hymns in ten books. Its poets praise a crowd of gods: Agni, the sacrificial fire that carries offerings to heaven; Indra, the warrior king of the gods; Varuna, guardian of cosmic and moral order; the goddess Dawn; and Soma, the plant whose pressed juice was drunk and offered at the sacrifice. Hindus call the whole body of Vedic texts shruti, 'what was heard': revealed to ancient seers, not written by human authors.

No inscription or excavated object dates the hymns; the dates come from the language and from the texts' own world. Most scholars place the oldest hymns between about 1500 and 1200 BCE, in the Punjab, the 'land of seven rivers', where families of priest-poets composed the core books, two to seven, each tied to one family. Indo-Aryan names of kings and gods and words for horse training already appear in the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, the oldest datable trace of the language. Three more collections followed: the Samaveda, Rigvedic verses set to melodies; the Yajurveda, the formulas spoken by the priest who handled the fire; and the Atharvaveda, spells and charms whose hymns are the first to mention iron, around 1200 BCE. In the same centuries the Kurus, a new union of tribes in the plain of Kurukshetra north of today's Delhi, became the centre of Vedic life, and their kings, the Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel argues, brought poets and priests together to fix the hymns as a canon and to reform the great rites.

Later layers explained and then questioned the ritual. The Brahmanas, prose works of about 900 to 700 BCE, spell out what each act of the sacrifice means; the Shatapatha Brahmana prescribes a fire altar of five layers of bricks in the shape of a bird. The Aranyakas and the Upanishads, the last part of the Veda, turn inward. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the sage Yajnavalkya out-argues the learned Brahmins at the court of King Janaka of Videha; in the Chandogya, Uddalaka Aruni teaches his son that the hidden essence of everything is the self: 'you are that'. The idea that the atman, the inner self, is one with brahman, the ultimate reality, became the basis of Hindu philosophy, and the spread of beliefs in karma, rebirth and release from rebirth in the sixth century BCE marks the end of the Vedic age. Teachers such as the Buddha then offered paths to release that needed no Vedic sacrifice at all.

For most of their history the Vedas were not read but memorised. Boys learnt them from a teacher syllable by syllable, with their pitch accents, and in several patterns: as continuous text, word by word, and with the words repeated in overlapping pairs, so that nothing could slip; Witzel compares the result to tape recordings, passed on 'usually without the change of a single word'. They were written down late. The scholar al-Biruni reported in the eleventh century that a Kashmiri Brahmin, Vasukra, had been the first to do it, and most surviving manuscripts are only a few centuries old: the oldest dated one of the thirty Rigveda manuscripts at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register since 2007, was copied in 1464. UNESCO also lists the tradition of Vedic chanting itself (proclaimed 2003, inscribed 2008), and in 1975 Nambudiri Brahmins in Kerala performed the twelve-day Agnicayana, with its altar of a thousand bricks shaped like a bird, before a Harvard film crew.

Europe met the Vedas in the nineteenth century. The German-born Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller edited the Rigveda with the fourteenth-century commentary of Sayana, using manuscripts that included one now at Pune; the first of his six volumes appeared in 1849 under the patronage of the East India Company, the last in 1874. The hymns became a founding text of comparative philology and of the comparative study of religion, Müller's own fields. In India they never stopped being used: the Hindu initiation rite, the upanayana, and the offering of oblations into a sacred fire, the homa, are direct survivals of Vedic ritual, and the Upanishads, through the later schools of Vedanta, have shaped Indian thought ever since.