The Vedic Period

The Vedic Period, generally dated from roughly 1500 to 500 BCE, is the era in ancient Indian history named for the Vedas, the oldest surviving Sanskrit religious texts and the foundational scriptures of Hinduism, composed and orally transmitted across the period by communities of Indo-Aryan speakers who had migrated into and settled the northwestern Indian subcontinent. Its earlier centuries, associated with the Rigveda, describe a predominantly pastoral, semi-nomadic society organized around kinship and cattle wealth; its later centuries saw the composition of the Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda alongside the early Upanishads, settled agriculture along the Ganges plain, the emergence of the varna social classification system that underlies the later caste system, and the growth of organized kingdoms called mahajanapadas. The period's religious and philosophical developments, including early formulations of karma, dharma and reincarnation, laid direct groundwork for classical Hinduism as well as for the roughly contemporary rise of Buddhism and Jainism at the period's close. It gives way to India's classical age with the rise of the Maurya Empire in the fourth century BCE.