The Rigveda belongs to a very early stratum of sacred poetry, composed over several centuries between approximately 1500 and 1200 BCE. Scholars sometimes extend this range slightly, but there is broad agreement that its hymns arose in this early Vedic age. Rather than being the work of a single author or a single moment in time, it represents a layered composition, gradually crystallized through the devotion and insight of many seers. These rishis, belonging to priestly families, shaped a living oral tradition into the collection that later generations would recognize as the Rigveda.

Geographically, the hymns point again and again to the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. This landscape is often described as the Sapta Sindhu, the “land of seven rivers,” centered on the Indus and its tributaries. In more familiar terms, this corresponds to the broad area that includes present-day Punjab and surrounding regions, extending into what is now parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The rivers, plains, and seasonal rhythms of this region form the backdrop against which the Vedic vision of cosmos, sacrifice, and divine order unfolds.

The setting of the Rigveda is thus both temporal and spatial: an early age of Indo-Aryan settlement, and a specific riverine world in the northwest of the subcontinent. Within that world, the hymns were preserved and transmitted with extraordinary care through oral recitation, long before they were ever written down. This careful preservation allowed a particular historical moment and place to become a timeless spiritual landscape, where the voices of ancient seers still speak of the sacred woven into earth, sky, and flowing waters.