The text is layered consisting of the Samhita , Brahmanas , Aranyakas and Upanishads. In the eight books โ Books 2 throughุชุณุนุฉ โ that were composed the earliest, the hymns predominantly discuss cosmology and praise deities. The Rigveda is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Its early layers one of the oldest extant texts in Indo-European languages.
The Philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region Punjab of the Indian subcontinent, most likely between ุญ. Some of its verses continue to be recited during Hindu rites of passage celebrations such as weddings and prayers, making it probably the world's oldest religious text in continued use.
The "family books" 2โ7 are so-called because they have hymns by members of the same clan in each book; but other clans are also represented in the Rigveda.
The Aitareya-brahmana and the evidently have for their groundwork the same stock of traditional exegetic matter. They differ, however, considerably as regards both the arrangement of this matter and their stylistic handling of it, with the exception of the numerous legends common to both, in which the discrepancy is comparatively slight. There is also a certain amount of material peculiar to each of them. According to Jamison and Brereton, in their translation of the Rigveda , the dating of this text "has been and is likely to remain a matter of contention and reconsideration".
The dating proposals so far are all inferred from the style and the content within the hymns themselves. Philological estimates tend to date the bulk of the text to the second half of the second millennium. Being composed in an early Indo-Aryan language, the hymns must post-date the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly BC. A reasonable date close to that of the composition of the core of the Rigveda is that of the Mitanni documents of northern Syria and Iraq c.
