Introduction to Vedic Period

Vedic  period is the period in Indian  subcontinent between end of Indus valley civilization and the beginning of Buddhism and Jainism. This period  falls around between 15th century BC to 5th century BC. This period corresponds to bronze-iron age of northern India. Rigveda is the main textual evidence of this period, which was composed around between 15th to 12th century BC by Aryans. Archeological evidences of this period are not much and we shall discuss about it later.

Yagna: religious act Vedic period

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The knowledge about this period comes from Rigvedic texts and few archaeological evidences. The Rigveda mainly consists of prayer to gods and Indra was the chief among them. Other deities were Agni, Soma, Ishwara, Ashwin, Varun, Marut etc. We shall discuss later about Rigvedic deities.

As we know that there are two hypotheses about origin of Aryans, ‘migration into India’ hypothesis and ‘indigenous Aryans’ hypothesis. According to Rigveda, the  settlement of Aryans was in the Punjab and Haryana regions of Indian subcontinent. They migrated towards Gangetic plain around 15th century BC after drying up of their sacred river Saraswati.

In Rigvedic texts, there mentioned many kings,  their kingdoms and some types of conflicts among them (as Dashraj Yuddha- battle of the ten kings), but their genealogy is not mentioned clearly. We know  that Ramayana and Mahabharata were composed after 5th century BC, the time period of both the epics is definitely the Vedic age. Because of few archaeological evidences, even Archaeological Survey of India doubts about the historicity of our epics. We shall try to solve this conundrum of historicity of Vedic texts later on the basis of textual, archaeological and  other available scientific evidences.