HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of that family. It is chronologically and in terms of linguistic development the “oldest” Indo-Aryan language and consequently often referred to as Old Indic (Altindisch) or Old Indo-Aryan; its descendants include a range of linguistic varieties classified under the rubric Middle Indic (or Prākrit, see Ch. 3), as well as the Modern Indic (New Indo-Aryan) languages spoken today, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali. It is not related genetically to the Dravidian languages of South India, such as Tamil and Telegu.

The oldest form of Sanskrit is so-called Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the four collections of liturgical texts known as the Vedas and of the early exegetical literature on these texts. The oldest Veda is the Ṛgveda (Rig-veda), a compilation of 1,028 hymns which took shape around 1500 BC in northwest India, though the composition and collection of hymns clearly occupied several centuries. In language, style, and phraseology the Ṛgveda resembles the earliest texts of its closest linguistic relative, the Gāthās attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, composed in Old Avestan (see Ch. 6).

Though the composition of Vedic texts can be dated with fair confidence to the period of c. 1500–500 BC, direct records of them are only found several millennia later. The “texts” were transmitted orally, with minimal alteration, and even after they were also committed to writing, the manuscripts were perishable and less reliable than the oral tradition.