The Rishis of the Sama Veda

The Samaveda is the Veda of chants (saman, melody), the third of the four Vedas and the liturgical book of the Udgatar priests who sang at the Soma sacrifice. It is not a collection of new compositions so much as a rearrangement: all but a small number of its verses are taken from the Rig Veda, chiefly from the Soma and Agni and Indra hymns, and reordered in the sequence in which they were sung. Tradition ascribes the verses to the same inspired seers, the rishis, as the Rig Veda; they are anonymous to us, and the text is traditionally dated to about 1200–1000 BCE, though the dating is uncertain.

The English text is Ralph T. H. Griffith's verse translation, published with a popular commentary in 1895; the commentary is not reproduced here. Griffith's work is in two parts. The First Part gives the verses in the order of the Archika, in books and chapters of decades (groups of about ten verses), and each decade is given here as one poem under its deity. The Second Part gives the verses in the order of the chants, in hymns of about three verses, and each hymn is titled by book, chapter and number with its first line. Griffith's verse numbers are kept. Many verses are Rig Veda verses in the same wording, which is the nature of the text; a few numbers and words are garbled in the digitised source and are left as printed.