The historical Vedic religion refers to the religious ideas and practices among Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of ancient India after about 1500 BCE. These ideas and practices are found in the Vedic texts, and they were one of the major influences that shaped contemporary Hinduism. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, in the Hindu tradition and particularly in India, the Vedic religion is considered to be a part of Hinduism.
Subhash Kak is an Indian American computer scientist and a Hindutva historical revisionist. Kak has been criticised for propagating fringe and revisionist views.
Vedic Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, more specifically one branch of the Indo-Iranian group. It is the ancient language of the Vedas of Hinduism, texts compiled over the period of the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preserved, predating the advent of Brahmi script by several centuries. Vedic Sanskrit is an archaic language, whose consensus translation has been challenging.
Proto-Indo-European mythology is the body of myths and stories associated with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. Although these stories are not directly attested, they have been reconstructed by scholars of comparative mythology based on the similarities in the belief systems of various Indo-European peoples.
The Kurgan hypothesis or steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe, Eurasia and parts of Asia. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курга́н), meaning tumulus or burial mound.
The Indo-Aryan peoples or the Indic peoples are a diverse Indo-European-speaking ethnolinguistic group of speakers of Indo-Aryan languages. There are over one billion native speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, most of them native to the Indian subcontinent and presently found all across South Asia, where they form the majority.
The Vedas are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless".
James Patrick Mallory is an Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist. Mallory is an emeritus professor at Queen's University, Belfast, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies and Emania: Bulletin of the Navan Research Group (Belfast).
Indo-Aryan migration models discuss scenarios around the theory of an origin from outside the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ascribed ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of North India. Proponents of Indo-Aryan origin outside of the Indian subcontinent generally consider migrations into the region and Anatolia from Central Asia to have started around 1500 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent. The Iranian languages were brought into Iran by the Iranians, who were closely related to the Indo-Aryans.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis is a book by Shrikant G. Talageri. It was published by Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi (India) in 2000. It is a contribution to the "Aryan invasion debate". The book gives Talageri's examination and interpretation of the Rig Veda. In the eighth chapter Talageri discusses the interpretations of the Rig Veda Vedantic thinkers such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, B. R. Ambedkar, Vivekananda, Dayananda Sarasvati and Aurobindo. In the ninth chapter he gives a critique of Michael Witzel's interpretation of the structure and the history depicted by the Rig Veda. Witzel responded in a later review while the debate was reviewed by Koenraad Elst in his book "Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate".
The Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra is a Late Vedic text dealing with the solemn rituals of the Taittiriya Shakha school of the Black Yajurveda that was composed in eastern Uttar Pradesh during the late Brahmana period. It was first published in 1904-23 by The Asiatic Society, as edited by Willem Caland and translated by C.G. Kashikar, in part in his "Srautakosa", and as a whole later on.
Karl Hoffmann was a German linguist who specialized in Indo-European and Indo-Iranian studies. He is most recognized for his achievements in his studies of Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian languages.
Some theonyms, proper names and other terminology of the Mitanni are considered to form an Indo-Aryan superstrate, suggesting that an Indo-Aryan elite imposed itself over the Hurrian population in the course of the Indo-Aryan expansion.
Vedic has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include: phonologically, the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals; morphologically, the formation of gerunds; and syntactically, the use of a quotative marker (iti). Philologists attribute such features, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia and within the Indian subcontinent, including the Dravidian languages.
The Indigenous Aryans theory, also known as the Out of India theory (OIT), proposes that the Indo-European languages, or at least the Indo-Aryan languages, originated within the Indian subcontinent, as an alternative to the established migration model which proposes the Pontic steppe as the area of origin of the Indo-European languages. The indigenist view sees the Indo-Aryan languages as having a deep history in the Indian subcontinent, and being the carriers of the Indus Valley Civilization. This view proposes an older date than is generally accepted for the Vedic period, which is generally considered to follow the decline of Harappan culture.
The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric urheimat of the Indo-European languages – the region where their reconstructed common ancestor, the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), was originally spoken. From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and went on to form the proto-communities of the different branches of the language family.
The Vedic period, or Vedic age, is the period in the history of the northern Indian subcontinent between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. It gets its name from the Vedas, which are liturgical texts containing details of life during this period that have been interpreted to be historical and constitute the primary sources for understanding the period. These documents, alongside the corresponding archaeological record, allow for the evolution of the Vedic culture to be traced and inferred.
The Rigveda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns along with associated commentaries on liturgy, ritual and mystical exegesis. It is one of the four sacred canonical texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas.
