When was sanskrit written

These steppe people, representing what is called the Andronovo culture, first appear just before BC. From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.

David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east.

These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom. While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion. However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on. The group that went east and later on composed the Rig Veda , we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root.

So much so that 3, years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city. Popular national myths in India urgently paint Sanskrit as completely indigenous to India. This is critical given how the dominant Hindutva ideology treats geographical indigenousness as a prerequisite for nationality.

If Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism, has a history that predates its arrival in India, that really does pull the rug from out under the feet of Hindutva. Arabic Overview. Bashkort Bashkir. Haitian Creole. Hawaiian Creole. Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia. Irish Gaelic. Malay Bahasa Melayu. Mandarin Chinese. Afro Asiatic Language Family. Algic Language Family.

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Indo-Iranian Branch. International Languages. Iroquoian Language Family. Khoisan Language Family. Language Isolates. Mayan Language Family. Famous Sanskrit dramatists include Shudraka, Bhasa, Asvaghosa, and Kalidasa; their numerous plays are still available, although little is known about the authors themselves.

Works of Sanskrit literature, such as the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali, which are still consulted by practitioners of yoga today, and the Upanishads , a series of sacred Hindu treatises, were translated into Arabic and Persian.

Sanskrit fairy tales and fables were characterized by ethical reflections and proverbial philosophy, with a particular style making its way into Persian and Arabic literature and exerting influence over such famed tales as One Thousand and One Nights , better known in English as Arabian Nights. Poetry was also a key feature of this period of the language.

Kalidasa was the foremost Classical Sanskrit poet, with a simple but beautiful style, while later poetry shifted toward more intricate techniques including stanzas that read the same backwards and forwards, words that could be split to produce different meanings, and sophisticated metaphors.

Sanskrit is vital to Indian culture because of its extensive use in religious literature, primarily in Hinduism, and because most modern Indian languages have been directly derived from, or strongly influenced by, Sanskrit. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment in ancient India, and it was taught mainly to members of the higher castes social groups based on birth and employment status.

In the medieval era, Sanskrit continued to be spoken and written, particularly by Brahmins the name for Hindu priests of the highest caste for scholarly communication. Today, Sanskrit is still used on the Indian Subcontinent. More than 3, Sanskrit works have been composed since India became independent in , while more than 90 weekly, biweekly, and quarterly publications are published in Sanskrit. Sudharma , a daily newspaper written in Sanskrit, has been published in India since Sanskrit is used extensively in the Carnatic and Hindustani branches of classical music, and it continues to be used during worship in Hindu temples as well as in Buddhist and Jain religious practices.

Sanskrit is a major feature of the academic linguistic field of Indo-European studies, which focuses on both extinct and current Indo-European languages, and can be studied in major universities around the world.