Most of the Rigveda’s mighty hymns took shape somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, though a few scholars nudge the early edge closer to 1700 BCE. Picture bands of Indo-Aryan speakers roaming the rolling plains and river valleys of what is now northwest India and eastern Pakistan, chanting verses around campfires and along the banks of great waterways. That “Sapta Sindhu” region—literally the Land of Seven Rivers, including the Indus and the now-dried Sarasvati—served as the cradle for this hymn collection.

Oral tradition ruled the day: families of priests passed melodies and metre from generation to generation without pen or parchment, a feat that still makes linguistic historians’ jaws drop. It was only centuries later, around the middle of the first millennium BCE, that scribes committed these verses to birch bark and palm leaves.

Recent climate research (2023 monsoon-pattern studies, for instance) hints at shifting river courses and changing rainfall across the Bronze Age northwest, a backdrop that rippled through the Rigvedic imagination—gods of storm, dawn and rivers popping up again and again. Excavations at sites linked to the Ochre-Coloured Pottery culture have unearthed fire altars and pottery shards dating to the Rigvedic era, casting fresh light on how these hymns were woven into daily ritual.

Long before history books pinned down the Ganges as India’s spiritual heartland, those first Vedic bards were already composing hymns that continue to resonate today.