Most scholars situate the composition of the Rigveda between the twelfth and ninth centuries BC. One of the arguments supporting this chronology is the absence of iron in the text: while several metals are mentioned, iron is conspicuously missing, suggesting that the hymns predate the widespread use of iron and may belong to a late Bronze Age milieu. Archaeological evidence indicates that iron production began in the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent—the core geographical horizon of the Rigveda—between the twelfth and tenth centuries BC, reinforcing this inference.
At the same time, it is plausible that the process of composing and transmitting the Rigveda began earlier than the twelfth century BC. Some scholars have proposed a broader window extending from the fourteenth to the tenth centuries BC, or more generally to the latter half of the second millennium BC. Moreover, the elaborate world reflected in the Rigveda—its pantheon of deities, ritual practices, mythic imagination, cosmological speculation, and highly developed linguistic and poetic conventions—cannot be seen as having emerged suddenly. These cultural and intellectual traditions must have evolved over several centuries before being crystallised in the hymns and may trace their origins back to the third millennium BC.
On more speculative grounds, particularly astronomical interpretations that assume an advanced capacity among ancient Indian observers to track the movements of the sun, some scholars have argued for a much earlier date. As noted by Arthur Anthony Macdonell in A Vedic Reader for Students (1917), such calculations have led a few researchers to place the oldest layers of the Rigveda as early as the sixth millennium BC, though this remains a minority and highly debated position.
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