How old are our Vedas?

Bro I read somewhere that our Rigveda was written in 1500 BCE, which isn’t that long ago on the grand time scale, so why do Hindus believe our vedas are very old?

That’s a debatable dating & here’s the tea.

What most people don’t know is that the Vedas are actually not supposed to be books you can read anyway.

In Sanatan Dharma, they form part of the literature called as “Shruti” i.e. divine instructions from the Gods, which were heard by our ancestors & then passed on orally from gurus to their students like literal podcasts.

Ved comes from “vid,” which means “to know” & our Rishis are believed to have gone into deep meditation to learn the spiritual secrets of our world.

The vedas are extremely long so it wasn’t just about memorizing the words but also the pronunciations, tone, accent & sounds, which acted like quality checks to ensure that it wasn’t becoming a game of telephone or whispering wood where even a simple phrase can get distorted while being passed on.

To ensure 100% accuracy, these guys developed some mind-blowing memorization techniques called “pathas” like Samhita, Pada, Krama, Jata, Maalaa, Sikha, Rekha, Dhwaja, Danda, Rathaa, and Ghana.

The reason scholars argue this is really old is because you have impossible-to-guess references to the Saraswati River, a now-dried up bed in the Northwest, and also to specific astronomical events like Ashwini Nakshatra (Beta Arietis) before winter solstice, all of which archeologists know have happened way before 1500 BCE, possibly in 6500 BCE or even earlier.

The twist is that as we learned to write, there was a guy named Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, who compiled & curated all of this vast knowledge into 4 main editions, to make it easier to be preserved & used in our modern Kali Yuga. So the 1500 BCE figure possibly comes from one of the earliest-known written copy that somehow survived to this day.

Each veda is credited to having the knowledge of different rishis & their lineages along with other royal tribes. Rigveda has Rishi Vishwamitra, Rishi Vasishtha, Rishi Agastya. Yajurveda is said to have contributions from Rishi Yajnavalkya, Rishi Vasishtha, Rishi Tittiri. Samaveda has a key contributions from Jaimini. And Atharvaveda has contributions from Atharvaveda Atharvan, Angiras & Bhrigu.

So what you may read now on the internet is simply a drop of water from the ocean of vedic literature that’s lost in time.

Thankfully, we have the essence of all this wisdom preserved in simple language in our Srimad Bhagavad Gita, so you can always start there!