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( Vedic period)
The Vedic Period (or Vedic Age) is the period in the history of India during which the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism, were being composed. Scholars place the Vedic period in the second and first millennia BCE continuing up to the 6th century BCE based on literary evidence. The associated culture, sometimes referred to as Vedic civilization, was centered in the northern and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent. Its early phase saw the formation of various kingdoms of ancient India. In its late phase (from ca. 600 BCE), it saw the rise of the Mahajanapadas, and was succeeded by the Maurya Empire (from ca. 320 BCE), the golden age, classical age of Sanskrit literature, and the Middle kingdoms of India. The reconstruction of the history of Vedic India is based on text-internal details. Linguistically, the Vedic texts could be classified in five chronological strata 1. Rigvedic The Rigveda is by far the most archaic of the Vedic texts preserved, and it retains many common Indo-Iranian elements, both in language and in content, that are not present in any other Vedic texts. Its creation must have taken place over several centuries, and apart from that of the youngest books (first part of 1 and all of 10), would have been complete by 1000(?) BCE. Archaeologically, this period may correspond with the Gandhara Grave Culture, the Cemetery H culture of the Punjab and the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture (OCP) further east. There is no widely accepted archaeological or linguistic evidence of direct cultural continuity from the Indus Valley civilization.
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