The Decipherable Rigveda: The Earliest Indo-European Poetry

The Decipherable Rigveda reprints ten articles, along with one previously unpublished piece, in which the author challenges the long-standing assumption that the earliest Sanskrit poetic anthology is ritually incomprehensible. Impeccably preserved by the tradition that named it the Rigveda, these poems have been consistently misunderstood throughout history. The book includes four seminal word studies, the first of which demonstrates that a word traditionally translated as "ritual pressing stone" actually refers to a man who is singing. An independent linguistic approach to the text reveals sophisticated ancient poetry, characterised by verbal abstraction and metrical complexity.

KAREN THOMSON'S online edition of the groundbreaking Metrically Restored Text of the Rigveda by Barend van Nooten and Gary Holland (1994) is accessible on the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) website at the University of Texas at Austin, and a new edition of her ten-lesson course on Rigvedic Sanskrit, originally written for the LRC at the invitation of its founder, Professor Winfred Lehmann, is forthcoming. Thomson studied English and Comparative Literature, with a focus on translation issues, at the universities of Bristol and Warwick, and then Sanskrit at the University of Edinburgh.