Writings: HinduismThe Rigveda manuscripts at Pune1 of 10

Writings: Hinduism

The Rigveda manuscripts at Pune

Thirty manuscripts of the Rigveda, the Sanskrit hymns, are held at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India. India's UNESCO nomination gives 1464 CE for the oldest dated copy, without saying how. Historians place the hymns roughly in the second and first millennia BCE; Hindu schools such as Mimamsa and the Arya Samaj hold they were not composed.

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Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    No single date: the Mimamsa and Arya Samaj statements used here, which hold the Veda was not composed, give no year. Dancing with Siva, the catechism of a monistic Shaiva Siddhanta lineage, says the Vedas date back 6,000 to 8,000 years (about 6000 to 4000 BCE, computed here from 2026), and ISKCON Educational Services, a Vaishnava source, reports that tradition often dates them to about 3000 BCE.

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    about 1400 to 400 BCE for the Vedic literature as a whole, the Rigveda being the oldest part (Alf Hiltebeitel). Hiltebeitel writes that the four collections were probably complete by 1000 BCE, and Jan Heesterman writes that no definite dates can be assigned to the Veda or any of its parts

  3. This copy made

    1464 CE as the UNESCO nomination gives it (the oldest dated of the 30 manuscripts; the nomination does not say how it was dated)

  4. This copy found

    This site gives no single find date for the 30 copies, and no acquisition year for most of them, because it could not match the nomination's numbers to the 1916 catalogue's entries. The Government of Bombay's search for manuscripts began in 1868, and the 1916 catalogue heads the Kashmir birch-bark copy 1875-76, the years of George Buhler's tour of Kashmir; the catalogue says he secured it for the Government.

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

The Rigveda is a collection of 1,028 Sanskrit hymns, most of them in praise of gods such as Indra and Agni.12 Scholars usually consider it the oldest of the four Vedas and of all Hindu writings.32 Only one of its ancient versions, called recensions, survives, the one kept by the Shakala school.1 This entry covers 30 manuscripts of it at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune, India. Twenty-nine are paper copies in Devanagari script. One, from Kashmir, is on birch bark in Sharada, a script used in medieval Kashmir.1

How the copy was dated

The nomination that India filed with UNESCO names number 5/1882-83 as the oldest dated manuscript and gives 1464 CE. It does not say who dated it or how.1 A 1916 catalogue of the government collections, which the nomination lists among its references, shows one way such dates are given.1 Its age lines give a year in an Indian era, or the cataloguer's judgment that a copy looks old or recent.4

One paper copy of the eighth ashtaka, one of the text's eight parts, is listed as Samvat 1520, a year number in an Indian calendar era that the catalogue does not name. The Kashmir birch-bark copy, for which the nomination prints no date, is listed as year 51 of the local, Kashmiri era, with no century.14 This site could not tell which entry, if any, is the nomination's 1464 manuscript, and it converts neither year.

Michael Witzel, writing on a scholars' mailing list in 2000, said the earliest Rigveda manuscript he had seen or heard of was at Benares, dated around 1380, though it was under glass and he could not check it.5 For the methods, see how ancient texts are dated.

The text: its date and authorship

The date strip marks the Rigveda Samhita, the collection of hymns, not these copies. Hindu schools and historians describe its origin differently. The nomination, filed by India's National Mission for Manuscripts and BORI, also reports that, according to tradition, sages saw the hymns and did not compose them.1

Hindu schools and movements

The Mimamsa school, which defends the Veda's authority, holds, as Stephen Phillips and Anand Vaidya report it, that no one originally composed the Veda's words. The Veda is primordial, and great seers, called rishis, heard and memorized it.6 The Arya Samaj, a reform movement, holds, on one center's website, that the Vedas are older than humanity and were revealed to four rishis.78

Dancing with Siva is the catechism of a monistic Shaiva Siddhanta lineage, which teaches that the soul and God are in the end perfectly one.910 It holds that God revealed the Vedas through rishis and that they date back 6,000 to 8,000 years.1112 ISKCON Educational Services, a Vaishnava source (Vaishnavas worship Vishnu and his incarnations, especially Krishna and Rama),21314 reports that tradition often dates the Vedas to the start of the Kali Yuga, the present age, around 3000 BCE.215

Historians and the UNESCO nomination

Alf Hiltebeitel, in the Encyclopedia of Religion, dates the Vedic literature as a whole to about 1400 to 400 BCE and calls the Rigveda the oldest of the four collections. He describes that literature as originally oral, and holds that all four collections were probably complete by 1000 BCE.3 Jan Heesterman, in the same work, writes that no definite dates can be assigned to the Veda or any of its parts. He adds that some of its material, especially in the metrical texts, may go back to the twelfth century BCE or earlier.16

The nomination that India's National Mission for Manuscripts and BORI filed with UNESCO holds that the Rigveda was composed over centuries by several generations of poet-priests from different regions, largely of the Indian subcontinent. It puts its oldest portions at perhaps three millennia old.1

How it was found

From 1868, the Government of Bombay had George Buhler, F. Kielhorn, and later other scholars search for and gather manuscripts. All 30 Rigveda manuscripts come from that Government Collection, gathered from places that include Kashmir and Gujarat.14 The 1916 catalogue heads the Kashmir copy 1875-76, the years of Buhler's tour of Kashmir, and says he secured it for the Government.4 This site could not match the nomination's numbers to the catalogue's entries, so it gives no year of acquisition for the other copies.

The collection moved from Elphinstone College in Bombay to Deccan College in Pune in 1878, and later to BORI.1 UNESCO placed the manuscripts on its Memory of the World Register in 2007.17 The sources used here do not say whether the digitization planned for 2006 to 2007 was done.1

What it shows, and what it does not

The manuscripts show that the hymns were being copied by the 15th century at the latest, taking the nomination's 1464 date as given. The nomination counts at least five complete copies.1 It prints no date for the Kashmir birch-bark copy, and the 1916 catalogue gives only year 51 of the Kashmiri era, so these sources do not show how old that copy is.14 The schools and historians cited here describe the hymns as first kept by memory, and the nomination says oral transmission kept the text with little change.1118161 Witzel holds, as one scholar, that recitation is still a better witness to the text than any surviving manuscript.5

They do not show the hymns' age. Counting from Hiltebeitel's 1400 to 400 BCE span for the Vedic literature, the oldest dated copy is about 1,860 to 2,860 years later. On the figures of Dancing with Siva and ISKCON Educational Services, the gap is about 4,500 to 7,500 years (computed here). For schools that hold the Veda was not composed, no gap can be counted.3 Witzel adds that no Rigveda manuscript survives or is mentioned before about 1000 CE.5 UNESCO says practitioners are taught recitation techniques from childhood to keep each word's sound unaltered, and its 2008 listing reported that only thirteen of over a thousand recitation branches had survived.19

Sources

  1. National Mission for Manuscripts (Government of India) and the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (nominators). Memory of the World Register, Ref N. 2006-58: Rigvedasamhita, Rigvedasamhita-Padapatha and Rigvedasamhitabhashya. UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, Part A, sections 1, 3.1, 3.2, 4, and 5; pp. 1 to 9. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  2. ISKCON Educational Services. Heart of Hinduism: Shruti: The Four Vedas. ISKCON Educational Services. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  3. Alf Hiltebeitel. Hinduism. Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  4. The Assistant to the Professor of Sanskrit, Deccan College, Poona (the compilers named in its compilation note are N. D. Banhatti, V. S. Ghate, S. K. Belvalkar, R. D. Ranade, and N. B. Utgikar). Descriptive Catalogue of the Government Collections of Manuscripts Deposited at the Deccan College, Poona, vol. I (Vedic Literature), part I (Samhitas and Brahmanas). Government of Bombay, 1916, Foreword pp. xvi to xvii; Rigveda entries 1 to 14, pp. 1 to 13. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  5. Michael Witzel. Dates of written Rgveda (post to the INDOLOGY mailing list). INDOLOGY list archive (list.indology.info), 2000, the whole post (March 2000). Accessed 2026-11-06.
  6. Stephen Phillips and Anand Vaidya. Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024, section 6, Testimony. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  7. Arya Samaj Ved Niketan, Troy, Michigan (the page names no author). Scriptures. aryasamaj.com, the page. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  8. ISKCON Educational Services. Heart of Hinduism: The Reform Movements. ISKCON Educational Services, section "The Arya Samaj". Accessed 2026-11-04.
  9. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: What Is the Source of This Catechism?. Himalayan Academy, 2003. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  10. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: Hinduism's Contemporary Catechism, sixth edition: Sloka 148, What Are the Views on God and Soul?. Himalayan Academy (web edition), 2003, Sloka 148, What Are the Views on God and Soul?. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  11. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: What Are Hindu Revealed Scriptures?. Himalayan Academy, 2003. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  12. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: What Is the Nature of the Veda Texts?. Himalayan Academy, 2003. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  13. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: Hinduism's Contemporary Catechism, sixth edition: Sloka 9, What Is the Devotional Vaishnava Sect?. Himalayan Academy (web edition), 2003, Sloka 9, What Is the Devotional Vaishnava Sect?. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  14. Vasudha Narayanan. Hinduism: Vaishnavism. Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices, hosted by Encyclopedia.com, opening paragraphs. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  15. John Bowker (editor). Yuga. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford University Press), via Encyclopedia.com. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  16. Jan C. Heesterman. Vedism and Brahmanism. Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  17. UNESCO. Memory of the World: Rigveda. UNESCO, 2007, register entry. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  18. ISKCON Educational Services. Heart of Hinduism: Scripture and Guru. ISKCON Educational Services. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  19. UNESCO. Tradition of Vedic chanting. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2008. Accessed 2026-10-29.