4 The Rigveda material that can contribute to its interpretation, and the characteristic features from these two types of texts, mingled uniquely in the Rgveda, help account for its distinctive quality.
On the one hand, it stands at the end of a long tradition of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian praise poetry, most nearly mirrored in the Old Avestan Gathas attributed to Zarathustra.
On the other, it stands as the earliest of the ritual texts collectively known as the Vedas and forms a part of the interlocking ritual system set forth in the Vedas.
There are four Vedas; the Rgveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda. The first three are the provinces of individual priests, who function together to perform the solemn rituals of the Vedic liturgical system, later, in the middle Vedic period, known as srauta rituals. Each of those three Vedas also represents a different type of ritual speech.
Thus, the Rgveda belongs to the Hotar priest, who recites or chants the poetry; the Samaveda to the Udgatar priest, who sings the poetry to set tunes called sdmans. The vast majority of the verbal material in the Samaveda is borrowed from the Rgveda.
The Yajurveda is the realm of the Adhvaryu priest; his verbal product is the yajus, a short verbal formula that generally accompanies the physical actions that are the main task of the Adhvaryu. Each of these three priests is accompanied by other priests who share their principal functions. So in the later soma ritual, for example, the number of priests can be sixteen or seventeen.
The Atharvaveda stands outside of this ritual system and consists primarily of hymns and spells of a more “popular” nature, often magical or healing. Despite its lack of connection to the solemn ritual, the Atharvaveda is especially important for Rgvedic studies because it is linguistically the closest text to the Rgveda and is thus the second oldest text in Sanskrit. The two texts also share a number of passages and hymns, although the Atharvaveda often varies the wording or order of verses.
The Rgvedic hymns found also in the Atharvaveda are often drawn from the younger layers of the Rgveda. We will treat the structure of the text in more detail below; here we will provide only the most general outline. The text consists of 1028 hymns divided into ten books or mandalas (lit. “circles”), of varying lengths.
The arrangement of the hymns within each mandala and the arrangement of the mandalas themselves attest strongly to the deliberate quality of the collection and organization of the hymns, as we will demonstrate below.
Mandalas II- VII are known as the “Family Books,” each attributed to a different bardic family.
Mandala VIII contains smaller collections attributed to particular poets or poetic families, and has a somewhat aberrant character.
Mandala IX contains all and only the hymns dedicated to Soma Pavamana, “self-purifying soma,” the deified ritual drink at a particular moment in its ritual preparation.
Mandalas I and X were added to the collection later, though they both contain much that is contemporaneous with the linguistic and religious level of the core parts of the Rgveda, as well as some more recent and “popular” material.
Both I and X contain exactly 191 hymns, a synchronicity that was clearly not by chance.
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B. DATE AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OL THE RGVEDA
As was mentioned above, the Rgveda is part of the long tradition of Indo-European praise poetry, composed and performed orally and deploying inherited set verbal formulae, on which the poets also ring changes. Thus, whatever date(s) we assign to the actual composition of the particular hymns found in the text, the temporal horizon of the Rgveda stretches a good deal further back, in that the poetic techniques and even some of its precise verbal realizations go back many centuries, even millennia. The dating of the Rgveda has been and is likely to remain a matter of contention and reconsideration because as yet little has been uncovered in the material record or in the hymns themselves that allows us to date the period of the Rgvedic hymns. One attempt at dating begins with an absence. Since the Rgveda does not mention iron but does mention other kinds of metal, it is likely a pre-iron Age, Bronze Age text. The dates at which iron appears in the archaeological record in South Asia differ in different parts of the subcontinent. For the northwest, which comprises the geographic horizon of the Rgveda, iron began to be manufactured around