In western usage, "Rigveda" usually refers to the Rigveda Samhita, while the Brahmanas are referred to as the "Rigveda Brahmanas" (etc.). Technically speaking, however, "the Rigveda" refers to the entire body of texts transmitted along with the Samhita portion.
It is oldest and biggest amongst all the four Vedas. All the features of Classical Sanskrit poetry can be traced to the Rigveda. In it we find the seeds of India’s religious and philosophical development.
Rigveda, the oldest of the sacred books of Hinduism, composed in an ancient form of Sanskrit about 1500 bce in what is now the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. It consists of a collection of 1,028 poems grouped into 10 ‘circles’ (mandalas). Learn more about the Rigveda in this article.
This edition contains the Devanagari text of the mantras as well as the Padapatha (with and without accents), the Latin transliteration of both the above, the English translation, various commentaries and a multi-layer annotation (annotated Rigveda).
The Rigveda, the oldest among the four Vedas, is the fountain source of the so-called Aryan culture in all its manifestations that spread beyond the Indian subcontinent to large parts of South and South East Asia, as well as parts of Central Asia.
The electronic text has been much revised (see our Introduction) and converted to Unicode/HTML in this online edition; re: the significance of color and smaller type size in particular, see the Popular Rigveda.
Welcome to the Rigveda Page. Here you can access Rigveda text in various formats including devanagari and Roman transliterated fonts, PDF, postscript, with and without vedic svaras (accents.) The text is based on Harvard Oriental Series volume 50 by van Nooten and Gary Holland.