Dating and Authorship
Dating and Authorship
This chapter investigates the vexed problem of the dating of the Ṛgveda, which is complicated by the oral nature of the text: because it was composed within an oral tradition, which valued the use and reuse of traditional verbal formulations, it is hard to pinpoint the date when a particular poetic work was crystallized; and because it was transmitted only orally for several millennia, there are no datable manuscripts or inscriptions that can fix the earliest date of composition. The chapter also treats the question of authorship: on the basis of poem-internal evidence as well as on the later index to the Ṛgveda, we can conclude that the thousand or so hymns were composed by a large number of named individual poets, who belong to named poetic lineages or families over several generations.
Keywords: oral composition, poetic formulae, poetic lineage, Family Books, migration, Bronze Age, Anukramaṇī
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
