The Rigveda: the transmission of the text through three millennia

Your questions answered

In response to our posts on the Rigveda, several readers have asked the following question:

Has the Rigveda REALLY come down to us unchanged through the millennia?

The quick answer to the question is yes — we can say with reasonable confidence that the text of the Rigveda we have has remained unchanged for at least three thousand years.

It is more or less certain that the Rigveda contains within it material of great antiquity reaching far back into Indo-European prehistory. It is also now generally accepted that the compilation of the Rigveda probably began around 1700 BCE and was closed around 1000 BCE. Remarkably, and uniquely amongst ancient texts, the Rigveda has come down to us “entirely complete, without variants, and…almost entirely without corruptions” (Jamison and Brereton, 2020, p.23). The Rigveda we have today is as it was compiled and arranged three millennia ago.

But how did this come about? Let us see if we can understand the factors that made this possible.