Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The Indo-Iranians came from two areas of Central Asia. The Aryans in
India are known from the Rig Veda. This text is the earliest text of the
Indo-European languages. The Indo-Aryans were engaged in fighting
with the pre-Aryans and amongst themselves. The Rig Vedic people
had a superior knowledge of agriculture and they were a predominantly
pastoral people. The administrative machinery of the Aryans in the
Rig Vedic period functioned with the tribal chief. The Rig Veda does
not mention any officer for administration of justice. The practice of
levirate and widow remarriage was also shown. It then displays some
consciousness of the physical appearance of people in north-western
India. The significant divinities addressed in the Rig Veda include Indra,
Agni, Varuna, Soma, Maruts and Sarasvati. They have many deities who
represent the different forces of nature in one form or another but are
also assigned human activities.
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The principal traits of Aryan culture are started by Vedic, Iranian, and
Greek literary texts and cognate terms found in the proto-Indo-European
languages. The texts that help to reconstruct the material and other
aspects of Aryan culture comprise the Rig Veda, Zend-Avesta, and Iliad
and Odyssey. These texts present agriculture and pastoralism as the
principal sources of livelihood. The horse plays a crucial role in the life of
the early Indo-Europeans. War chariot with spoked wheels also appear.
The pit-dwelling may have developed in cold conditions. The use of birchwood appears to be an Aryan feature along with underground houses.
The fire altar is mentioned in the Rig Veda, and fire worship is very
important in Avesta. Animal sacrifice was an important Aryan ritual. The
cult of soma was confined to only the Iranian and Vedic peoples. The
migration of the Indo-Aryans is finally described.
in Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice
Published in print: 2005 Published Online: May Publisher: University of California Press
2012
DOI: 10.1525/
ISBN: 9780520240872 eISBN: 9780520930889 california/9780520240872.003.0005
Item type: chapter
This chapter reviews the ways in which viniyogas have created different
kinds of associative worlds about eating in the Vedic literature. The
food imagery of the Rig Veda becomes used in the Upanisads as
representative of the emerging idea of a cycle of birth, death, and
rebirth. In both the rauta and Grhya worlds a new class of rites, called
pkayaja, or sacrifices of cooking, emerge as ways of thinking about
food. In the application of Rig Veda hymns 1.2 and 1.3, the communal
process of consumption involving the full participation of the deities
in the rauta world became a solitary eating. The next set of Rig
Vedic hymns (10.15) links fire, eating, and the Sun. The hymn to the
waters, Rig Veda 10.30, creates an elegant set of mutually referential
metonymies. Rig Veda 10.88 is a hymn that celebrates both Soma and
Agni. This hymn describes the Soma libation as undecaying and pleasant,
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offered to Agni, who touches the sky, and the gods supply Agni, the giver
of happiness, with food.
You can'T get here from there: The Logical Paradox of Hindu
Creation Myths 1
Wendy Doniger
in On Hinduism
Published in print: 2014 Published Online: April Publisher: Oxford University Press
2014
DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199360079 eISBN: 9780199377923 acprof:oso/9780199360079.003.0013
Item type: chapter
This chapter examines one of the puzzling myths in the Rig Veda:
the case of Indra as the wife (mena) of the seed-bearing stallion (or
bull-stallion, vrishanashva), which may be half horse and half bull. It
considers the contrasting opposition between incest and the process of
procreation in the myth of Indra as the bull-stallion, how the mare can
accommodate both the stallion and the donkey, and the relationship
between the mare and the seed of a series of male animals other than
stallions. It also looks at the myth of the chariot race.
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