Six threads that run through every section

Where the centre of gravity of Indian religion sat in each period. It travels roughly a thousand kilometres east between the Rigveda and the Upaniṣads, drops to the Tamil south for the bhakti centuries, and returns north. Numbers are section numbers; follow them in order.

Rivers shown for orientation. The dashed one is the Ghaggar-Hakra, now dry — the river most often identified with the Vedic Sarasvatī, and the reason the dating debate in §0 is so contested.

When each idea arrives

The first datable appearance of each major concept, with the passage or object that attests it. Read top to bottom and the shape of the tradition's history is visible: almost nothing that defines Hinduism doctrinally is present in its oldest scripture.

1. c. 1400 BCE Ṛta — cosmic and moral order Consensus Rigveda, Family Books (Maṇḍalas 2–7) The Vedic word for order. Not yet dharma, and not yet ethical in the later sense.
2. c. 1200 BCE Iron Consensus Atharvaveda (śyāma / kṛṣṇa ayas); finds at Malhar The Rigveda has only undifferentiated ayas — copper and bronze.
3. c. 1100 BCE Cosmic doubt stated in scripture Consensus RV 10.129 (Nāsadīya Sūkta) The creation hymn ends by doubting whether even God knows the answer.
4. c. 1100 BCE The four varṇas Consensus RV 10.90.12 (Puruṣa Sūkta) The only four-varṇa passage in 1,028 hymns, and it is in the latest layer.
5. c. 1100 BCE Rice Consensus Yajurveda saṃhitās (vrīhi) Absent from the Rigveda entirely. The surest marker separating early from late Vedic.
6. c. 1000 BCE "Namaḥ Śivāya" Consensus Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.5.8 (Śatarudrīya) First appears as flattery of a dangerous god — śiva is still an adjective, "auspicious".
7. c. 900 BCE Ritual compels the cosmos (bandhu) Consensus The Brāhmaṇas; Agnicayana Power moves from the deity to the technician. The brahmin becomes indispensable.
8. c. 700 BCE Karma as moral causation Consensus Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.2.13 Taught in private, away from the assembly — which is why we can tell it was new.
9. c. 700 BCE Rebirth — saṃsāra Consensus BU 3.2.13; Chāndogya 5.3–10 (Pañcāgni-vidyā) The Upaniṣads credit the doctrine to a kṣatriya king, not to brahmins.
10. c. 700 BCE Mokṣa — liberation as the goal Consensus The older Upaniṣads Replaces long life, sons and cattle as what religion is ultimately for.
11. c. 700 BCE Ātman = Brahman Consensus Chāndogya 6.8.7 — tat tvam asi Relocates the sacred from the ritual arena into the person.
12. c. 500 BCE Ahiṃsā as a supreme value Majority view Ācārāṅga Sūtra 1.4.1; Chāndogya 3.17.4 lists it earlier as one virtue Enters a tradition whose central rite had been animal sacrifice.
13. c. 500 BCE Renunciation as an institution Consensus Śramaṇa orders; the āśrama scheme in the Dharmasūtras Absorbed by requiring everyone to renounce — last.
14. c. 250 BCE Writing Consensus Ashokan edicts, Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī The Vedas had already been transmitted orally for roughly a thousand years.
15. c. 250 BCE Vegetarianism as prestige Majority view Ashoka, Rock Edict 1 A king publicly prohibits sacrificial slaughter in his own capital.
16. c. 110 BCE Bhakti — devotion, attested Consensus Heliodorus pillar, Besnagar A Greek ambassador calls himself a Bhāgavata and Vāsudeva the God of Gods.
17. c. 200 BCE – 200 CE Avatāra — God takes birth Consensus Bhagavad Gītā 4.7–8 Nothing in the Vedas or Upaniṣads has a god descending into history.
18. c. 100 BCE – 200 CE Cult image — mūrti worship Consensus Gudimallam liṅga; Kuṣāṇa coins showing Śiva; Mathurā sculpture The visual vocabulary comes largely from yakṣa and nāga cults, not the Veda.
19. c. 200 BCE – 200 CE Caste as a comprehensive legal order Consensus Manusmṛti Graded punishment, impurity rules, and the disabilities of the caṇḍāla.
20. c. 200 BCE – 200 CE Women declared unfit for independence Consensus Manusmṛti 9.3 Five centuries after Gārgī argued in open assembly.
21. c. 400 CE The stone temple Consensus Sanchi Temple 17; Udayagiri; Deogarh A permanent residence for a god who can be seen. Darśana becomes central.
22. c. 450–550 CE Tantra, attested in text Majority view Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā Supplies the ritual grammar of ordinary temple pūjā to this day.
23. c. 550–600 CE The supreme Goddess Majority view Devī Māhātmya, in the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa The first text making a female deity the source of the male gods' power.
24. c. 700–750 CE Advaita as a system Contested Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya One school among many at the time; its supremacy is a modern development.
25. c. 6th–9th c. CE Vernacular scripture (Tamil) Consensus Ālvārs and Nāyanārs; the "Tamil Veda" Devotional poetry in a spoken language achieves liturgical status.
26. c. 1200–1500 CE Hindu as a religious self-description Contested Sant poetry contrasting hindū and turk Identity forms in contrast to Islam — but there is still no "-ism".
27. 1574 CE Vernacular scripture (north) Consensus Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas (Awadhi) For hundreds of millions this, not Vālmīki, is the Rāmāyaṇa.
28. c. 1800 CE "Hinduism" as a world religion Majority view Orientalists, missionaries, census officials and reformers together One canon, one essence, one census box — the category, not the tradition.
29. 1893 CE All paths lead to the same truth Majority view Vivekananda; Neo-Vedānta Would have puzzled Rāmānuja and Madhva, who argued the others were wrong.
30. 1923 CE Hindutva Consensus Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva Defined territorially and ethnically, not theologically. Savarkar was an atheist.
31. 1955–56 CE Codified Hindu law Consensus The Hindu Code Bills A secular parliament imposes monogamy, divorce and daughters' inheritance.

Material life, period by period

What people grew, worked, lived in and worshipped in — the evidence that dates the texts. A word that is missing from a text dates it more sharply than a word that is present: the Rigveda has no rice and no iron, and that alone places it before the Atharvaveda.

Coloured cells mark the 21 genuine discontinuities — a real break from the period above, not just different wording. The densest row is Early Vedic, and it breaks backwards: cities become camps, a script becomes no script, and the grain list shrinks to barley alone. That is the clearest single argument that the Rigvedic and Harappan worlds are not the same culture (§2). Note also that writing stays empty until c. 250 BCE: everything in sections 3 to 5 was composed and transmitted without it.

Text stratigraphy

Which text belongs to which century, and which stream it belongs to. Bars show composition ranges, not single dates — most of these texts grew over generations, and several are stratified internally. Hover any bar for its note.

Bar opacity tracks confidence in the dating — solid for consensus, faded where contested (Śaṅkara's lifetime, the Yogasūtra). Two things this view makes obvious: the Rigveda is separated from the Bhagavad Gītā by more time than separates the Gītā from us; and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the great Kṛṣṇa text, is younger than the Tamil Ālvārs whose devotion it reflects.

Women's standing, tracked

Not an assertion that things got better or worse, but a cited datapoint at each stage. The line is genuinely non-monotonic: it falls hard between the Upaniṣads and Manu, rises through the bhakti centuries at the cost of leaving ordinary life, and is transformed legally in the 1950s while ritual authority barely moves.

1. c. 1400 BCE ▲ Women named as composers of Vedic hymns Majority view The Rigveda's traditional list of ṛṣis includes women — Lopāmudrā, Ghoṣā, Apālā, Viśvavārā. Whatever their historicity, the tradition preserved female authorship as unremarkable. Rigveda; the Anukramaṇī index
2. c. 1300 BCE ◆ Lopāmudrā argues her husband into bed — and Griffith hides it Majority view She demands sex from her ascetic husband Agastya and wins. The nineteenth-century translation exiled the hymn to an appendix and left the frank lines in Latin, which is its own datum about who was reading these texts and how. RV 1.179
3. c. 1200 BCE ▲ The widow is raised from the pyre Consensus "Rise, come to the world of the living, O woman." The funeral hymn returns the widow to the living — and the verse was later altered by a single syllable to make it read as a procession instead. Satī's scriptural warrant had to be manufactured. RV 10.18.8
4. c. 1100 BCE ◆ A wife is property a gambler can lose Consensus The Gambler's Hymn lists what the ruined man forfeits: cattle first, then his wife. She is a household's central figure and also, in this framing, an asset. RV 10.34.13
5. c. 1000 BCE ◆ The wife becomes ritually indispensable — and only that Majority view Śrauta sacrifice is invalid without the patnī present; she has assigned roles and formulas. Ritual necessity, without ritual authority. The Brāhmaṇas; Śrautasūtras
6. c. 900 BCE ▼ A Yajurveda text calls women "powerless" and without inheritance Majority view Taittirīya Saṃhitā 6.5.8.2 says women "are powerless, have no inheritance, and speak more humbly than even a bad man." The often-repeated claim that girls lost access to upanayana in this period has no Brāhmaṇa-period evidence, only much later digests. Taittirīya Saṃhitā 6.5.8.2
7. c. 700 BCE ▲ Gārgī argues in open assembly — and is credited in scripture Consensus She questions Yājñavalkya publicly, is told not to press too far, and returns to challenge him again "like a warrior stringing his bow." He gives her his deepest answer. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.6 and 3.8
8. c. 700 BCE ▲ Maitreyī chooses knowledge over property Consensus Offered half her husband's estate, she asks whether it would make her immortal, and on being told no, asks for the teaching instead. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4
9. c. 500 BCE ▲ Ordained women's communities appear Consensus The Buddhist bhikkhunī order and Jain nun lineages create, for the first time, an institutional religious life for women outside marriage. Jain nuns outnumber monks and still do. Pali Vinaya; Jain canonical texts
10. c. 200 BCE – 200 CE ◆ Liberation opened to women — in the language of deficit Consensus The Gītā declares that women, vaiśyas and śūdras reach the highest goal through devotion, in a sentence that also classes them as "of sinful birth" and says "even they." Bhagavad Gītā 9.32
11. c. 200 BCE – 200 CE ▼ "A woman is never fit for independence" Consensus Manusmṛti states lifelong male guardianship as doctrine — father, husband, sons. The clearest single statement of the reversal from §5. Manusmṛti 9.3
12. 1st–3rd c. CE ▲ Women endow monasteries in their own names Consensus Donative inscriptions at Sanchi, Bharhut, Amarāvatī and Mathurā record gifts by women — including nuns and courtesans — acting as independent property-holders. Practice contradicts the prescriptive texts. Buddhist donative inscriptions
13. c. 550–600 CE ▲ A goddess becomes the supreme reality Majority view The Devī Māhātmya makes a female deity the source of the male gods' power and the slayer of the demon they could not kill. Theological, not social, elevation — but not nothing. Devī Māhātmya, Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa
14. c. 6th c. CE ▲ Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār — a woman among the founding saints Majority view The earliest Nāyanār asks Śiva to strip her of beauty so she can attend him at the cremation ground. One of the founding voices of Tamil Śaivism. Tamil Śaiva canon
15. c. 9th c. CE ▲ Āṇṭāḷ's poems enter temple liturgy Consensus The only woman among the twelve Ālvārs. Her Tiruppāvai is recited across Tamil Nadu every Mārgaḻi month, twelve centuries later. Nālāyira Divya Prabandham
16. c. 12th c. CE ▲ Akka Mahādēvi writes at the centre of a movement Majority view Her vacanas are core texts of Vīraśaivism, a movement that also rejected caste and the ritual subordination of women — and met lethal retaliation. Kannada vacana corpus
17. c. 16th c. CE ◆ Mīrābāī: devotion as exit Majority view She uses devotion to refuse marriage, seclusion and family honour. The route out of a prescribed female role runs through leaving society altogether. Mīrā's padas
18. 1829 CE ▲ Sati abolished Consensus Regulation XVII, after campaigning by Rammohan Roy. The first major legal intervention by a state into Hindu religious practice. Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829
19. 1856 CE ▲ Widow remarriage legalized Consensus The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act. Legal permission ran far ahead of social acceptance, and largely still does in some communities. Act XV of 1856
20. 1955–56 CE ▲ Monogamy, divorce, and a share of the inheritance Consensus The Hindu Code Bills impose monogamy, permit divorce to both spouses, and give daughters inheritance rights — over sustained religious objection. Hindu Marriage Act 1955; Hindu Succession Act 1956
21. 2005 CE ▲ Daughters become full coparceners Consensus The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act finally gives daughters the same birthright in ancestral property as sons — half a century after the original Act. Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005
22. 2018–19 CE ◆ Sabarimala: courts against custom Consensus The Supreme Court admitted women of all ages to the temple; mass protests followed, including by women devotees, and the matter was referred to a larger bench. Ritual access remains the least-moved dimension. Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala

The inversion

Hymns dedicated to each deity in the Rigveda, against what became of them. The two gods who define Hinduism for the last two thousand years are, in its oldest scripture, a bit player with five hymns and a feared outsider with three.

• Indra 250 ▼ Collapses to a minor king of a lesser heaven
• Agni 200 ▼ Survives only as ritual apparatus
• Soma 120 ▼ The plant is lost; the name transfers to the moon
• Aśvins 50 ▼ Fade almost entirely
• Mitra–Varuṇa 35 ▼ Varuṇa demoted to a sea-god
• Maruts 33 ▼ Fade
• Uṣas 21 ▼ Disappears
• Viṣṇu 5 ▲ Becomes one of the two supreme gods
• Rudra 3 ▲ Becomes Śiva, the other supreme god

Counts are approximate — some hymns address multiple deities. Full evidence in §3, The Oral Rigveda. Consensus