The Rishis of the Rig Veda

The Rig Veda is the oldest collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, and one of the oldest surviving religious texts in any Indo-European language. It is arranged in ten books, or mandalas, of hymns addressed chiefly to Agni, Indra, the Maruts, Ushas the Dawn and other gods. Tradition ascribes the hymns to rishis, the inspired seers, and assigns whole books to particular families of them: Book 2, for instance, to the Gritsamada family and Book 3 to Vishvamitra and his line. This attribution is traditional only. The individual poets are anonymous to us, and the hymns were composed and handed down orally over centuries, traditionally dated to about 1500–1000 BCE.

The English text is Ralph T. H. Griffith's verse translation, first published in 1889–92 and revised in 1896. Griffith, a Victorian Sanskritist and schoolmaster, kept the numbered verses of the original as stanzas and gave them an idiom of “thou”, “hath” and capitalised Gods that belongs to his own age rather than the Vedic one. This archive gives all ten books, as transcribed on Wikisource; 1.179 and the few other verses Griffith left in Latin are omitted. Each hymn is titled by its book and number with its first line, because that transcription gives Griffith’s deity headings for only two hymns (1.1 and 1.32).