The Rig Veda, core of the Hindu scriptural canon, is a collection of over a thousand hymns; above all it is a glorious song of praise to the gods, the cosmic powers at work in nature and in man.The presentation of the twelve hymns in this book makes available a portion of one of the major scriptures of humanity in contemporary idioms (English, French, German, and Spanish) that reflect the quality, substance, and form of the original.
The Rig Veda, core of the Hindu scriptural canon, is a collection of over a thousand hymns; above all it is a glorious song of praise to the gods, the cosmic powers at work in nature and in man. The presentation of the twelve hymns in this book makes available a portion of one of the major scriptures of humanity in contemporary idioms (English, French, german, and Spanish) that reflect the quality, substance, and form of the original.
Excerpt from Rig-Veda Sanhita A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns, Constituting the Second Ashtaka, or Book, of the Rig-Veda; The Oldest Authority for the Religious and Social Institutions of the Hindus, Translated From the Original Sanskrit The publication Of the text of the second division Of the Eig Veda, by Professor Muller, affords safe authority for the continuance of the translation, which is therefore now Offered to the public, under the same liberal patronage of the Court Of Directors of the east-india Company under which the pre ceding volume appeared, and Without which it would probably have been withheld from the press: little interest in the work having been manifested in this country, however indispensable the Vedas may be to an accurate knowledge of the religious Opinions of the ancient world, and of the primaeval institu tions of the Hindus. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
In the dim twilight preceding the dawn of Indian literature the historical imagination can perceive the forms of Aryan warriors, the first Western conquerors of Hindustan, issuing from those passes in the north-west through which the tide of invasion has in successive ages rolled to sweep over the plains of India. The earliest poetry of this invading race, whose language and culture ultimately overspread the whole continent, was composed while its tribes still occupied the territories on both sides of the Indus now known as Eastern Kabulistan and the Panjab. That ancient poetry has come down to us in the form of a collection of hymns called the Rigveda. The cause which gathered the poems it contains into a single book was scientific and historical. The number of hymns comprised in the Rigveda, in the only recension which has been preserved, that of the Çakala school, is 1017, or, if the eleven supplementary hymns (called Valakhilya) which are inserted in the middle of the eighth book are added, 1028. These hymns are grouped in ten books, called mandalas, or "cycles," which vary in length, except that the tenth contains the same number of hymns as the first. In bulk the hymns of the Rigveda equal, it has been calculated, the surviving poems of Homer.
Although the number of hymns composed in honour of the most popular member of the Vedic pantheon is nearly one- fourth of the total, a monograph on this important collection of religious poetry has up to now never been published. It has been the author's endeavour to ascertain and examine all relevant facts concerning their structure, the contents and composition of essential constituent parts of the hymns. Further, this study tries to understand how the poets presented their subject-matter and elaborated their themes; to illustrate by numerous (translated) quotations the character of their elements (praise, prayer, and references to sacrifices); to investigate how far these are kept separate; to examine numerous stylistic and phraseological particulars, and the various peculiarities of their versification as well as the syntactic aspects of this poetry.
