The oldest of the four Vedas and among the oldest scriptures still in religious use, the oldest layer of Hindu sacred literature: a collection of 1,028 hymns in archaic Sanskrit, addressed to the gods of the Vedic pantheon and chanted as the liturgy of the fire sacrifice. Composed in the second millennium BCE by Indo-Aryan-speaking poets, it was preserved orally with extraordinary precision for centuries before writing, and for millennia after as a living recitation. It is the fountainhead of Hinduism and a window into a vanished world of cattle-herders and charioteers, without the temples or the great later gods of Hinduism.
Long before anyone wrote it down, people kept the Rigveda alive by remembering it with extraordinary care. For many centuries before it was written, priests passed more than a thousand hymns from mouth to mouth, guarding every syllable and every pitch with drilling methods that had them recite the words forwards, backwards, and in woven patterns so no sound could drift. The result is an oral text carried more faithfully than many written ones. It is among the oldest scriptures still in religious use, and one of its own hymns, gazing at the moment the universe began, dares to wonder whether even the highest god knows how it happened.