The Vedas

c. 1500–500 BCE

The four Vedas are the oldest scriptures of India and the oldest surviving literature in any Indo-European language: the Rigveda's 1,028 hymns to the gods of the sacrifice, the Samaveda's chants, the two Yajurvedas' sacrificial formulas, and the Atharvaveda's charms and cosmological hymns. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit in the second millennium BCE and transmitted orally for centuries, they are here in the complete public-domain translations of Ralph T. H. Griffith (1889–99) and, for the Black Yajurveda, Arthur Berriedale Keith (1914), with the Sanskrit of the Rigveda beside it.