title: Apollo 1

text: The review board cited "many types and classes of combustible material" close to ignition sources. The NASA crew systems department had installed of Velcro throughout the spacecraft, almost like carpeting. This Velcro was found to be flammable in a high-pressure 100% oxygen environment. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin states in his book "Men From Earth" that the flammable material had been removed per the crew's August 19 complaints and Joseph Shea's order, but was replaced before the August 26 delivery to Cape Kennedy.


title: Apollo 1

text: The inner hatch cover used a plug door design, sealed by higher pressure inside the cabin than outside. The normal pressure level used for launch ( above ambient) created sufficient force to prevent removing the cover until the excess pressure was vented. Emergency procedure called for Grissom to open the cabin vent valve first, allowing White to remove the cover, but Grissom was prevented from doing this because the valve was located to the left, behind the initial wall of flames. Also, while the system could easily vent the normal pressure, its flow capacity was utterly incapable of handling the rapid increase to caused by the intense heat of the fire.


title: Apollo 1

text: North American had originally suggested the hatch open outward and use explosive bolts to blow the hatch in case of emergency, as had been done in Project Mercury. NASA did not agree, arguing the hatch could accidentally open, as it had on Grissom's "Liberty Bell 7" flight, so the Manned Spacecraft Center designers rejected the explosive design in favor of a mechanically operated one for the Gemini and Apollo programs. Before the fire, the Apollo astronauts had recommended changing the design to an outward-opening hatch, and this was already slated for inclusion in the Block II command module design. According to Donald K. Slayton's testimony before the House investigation of the accident, this was based on ease of exit for spacewalks and at the end of flight, rather than for emergency exit.


title: Apollo 1

text: The board noted that the test planners had failed to identify the test as hazardous; emergency equipment (such as gas masks) were inadequate to handle this type of fire; that fire, rescue, and medical teams were not in attendance; and that the spacecraft work and access areas contained many hindrances to emergency response such as steps, sliding doors, and sharp turns.


title: Apollo 1

text: When designing the Mercury spacecraft, NASA had considered using a nitrogen/oxygen mixture to reduce the fire risk near launch, but rejected it based on a number of considerations. First, a pure oxygen atmosphere is comfortably breathable by humans at , greatly reducing the pressure load on the spacecraft in the vacuum of space. Second, nitrogen used with the in-flight pressure reduction carried the risk of decompression sickness (known as "the bends"). But the decision to eliminate the use of any gas but oxygen was crystalized when a serious accident occurred on April 21, 1960, in which McDonnell Aircraft test pilot G. B. North passed out and was seriously injured when testing a Mercury cabin / spacesuit atmosphere system in a vacuum chamber. The problem was found to be nitrogen-rich (oxygen-poor) air leaking from the cabin into his spacesuit feed. North American Aviation had suggested using an oxygen/nitrogen mixture for Apollo, but NASA overruled this. The pure oxygen design was judged to be safer, less complicated, and lighter in weight. In his monograph "Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions", Deputy Administrator Seamans wrote that NASA's worst mistake in engineering judgment was not running a fire test on the command module before the plugs-out test. In the first episode of the 2009 BBC documentary series "NASA: Triumph and Tragedy", Jim McDivitt said that NASA had no idea how a 100% oxygen atmosphere would influence burning. Similar remarks by other astronauts were expressed in the 2007 documentary film "In the Shadow of the Moon".


title: Apollo 1

text: Several fires in high-oxygen test environments had occurred before the Apollo fire. In 1962, USAF Colonel B. Dean Smith was conducting a test of the Gemini space suit with a colleague in a pure oxygen chamber at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, when a fire broke out, destroying the chamber. Smith and his partner narrowly escaped. On November 17, 1962, a fire broke out in a chamber at the Navy's Air Crew Equipment Laboratory during a pure oxygen test. The fire was started because a faulty ground wire arced onto nearby insulation. After attempts to extinguish the fire by smothering it, the crew escaped the chamber with minor burns across large parts of their bodies. On February 16, 1965, United States Navy Divers Fred Jackson and John Youmans were killed in a decompression chamber fire at the Experimental Diving Unit in Washington, D.C., shortly after additional oxygen was added to the chamber's atmospheric mix.


title: Apollo 1

text: In addition to fires with personnel present, the Apollo Environmental Control System experienced several accidents from 1964 to 1966 due to various hardware malfunctions. Notable is the April 28, 1966 fire, as the subsequent investigation found that several new measures should be taken to avoid fires, including improved selection of materials and that ESC and Command Module circuits have a potential for arcing or short circuits.


title: Apollo 1

text: Other oxygen fire occurrences are documented in reports archived in the National Air and Space Museum, such as:


title: Apollo 1

text: Incidents had also occurred in the Soviet space program, but due to the Soviet government's policy of secrecy, these were not disclosed until well after the Apollo1 fire. Cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died on March 23, 1961, from burns sustained in a fire while participating in a 15-day endurance experiment in a high-oxygen isolation chamber, less than three weeks before the first Vostok crewed space flight; this was disclosed on January 28, 1986.


title: Apollo 1

text: During the Voskhod 2 mission in March 1965, cosmonauts Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov could not completely seal the spacecraft hatch after Leonov's historic first walk in space. The spacecraft's environmental control system responded to the leaking air by adding more oxygen to the cabin, causing the concentration level to rise as high as 45%. The crew and ground controllers worried about the possibility of fire, remembering Bondarenko's death four years earlier.


title: Apollo 1

text: On January 31, 1967, four days after the Apollo1 fire, United States Air Force airmen William F. Bartley Jr. and Richard G. Harmon were killed in a flash fire while tending laboratory rabbits in the Two Man Space Environment Simulator, a pure oxygen chamber at the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base. Like the Apollo1 fire, the School fire was caused by an electrical spark in a pure oxygen environment. The widows of the Apollo1 crew sent condolence letters to Bartley and Harmon's families.


title: Apollo 1

text: Committees in both houses of the United States Congress with oversight of the space program soon launched investigations, including the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, chaired by Senator Clinton P. Anderson. Seamans, Webb, Manned Space Flight Administrator Dr. George E. Mueller, and Apollo Program Director Maj Gen Samuel C. Phillips were called to testify before Anderson's committee.


title: Apollo 1

text: In the February 27 hearing, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked Webb if he knew of a report of extraordinary problems with the performance of North American Aviation on the Apollo contract. Webb replied he did not, and deferred to his subordinates on the witness panel. Mueller and Phillips responded they too were unaware of any such "report".


title: Apollo 1

text: However, in late 1965, just over a year before the accident, Phillips had headed a "tiger team" investigating the causes of inadequate quality, schedule delays, and cost overruns in both the Apollo CSM and the Saturn V second stage (for which North American was also prime contractor). He gave an oral presentation (with transparencies) of his team's findings to Mueller and Seamans, and also presented them in a memo to North American president John L. Atwood, to which Mueller appended his own strongly worded memo to Atwood.


title: Apollo 1

text: During Mondale's 1967 questioning about what was to become known as the "Phillips Report", Seamans was afraid Mondale might actually have seen a hard copy of Phillips' presentation, and responded that contractors have occasionally been subjected to on-site progress reviews; perhaps this was what Mondale's information referred to. Mondale continued to refer to "the Report" despite Phillips' refusal to characterize it as such, and, angered by what he perceived as Webb's deception and concealment of important program problems from Congress, he questioned NASA's selection of North American as prime contractor. Seamans later wrote that Webb roundly chastised him in the cab ride leaving the hearing, for volunteering information which led to the disclosure of Phillips' memo.


title: Apollo 1

text: On May 11, Webb issued a statement defending NASA's November 1961 selection of North American as the prime contractor for Apollo. This was followed on June9 by Seamans filing a seven-page memorandum documenting the selection process. Webb eventually provided a controlled copy of Phillips' memo to Congress. The Senate committee noted in its final report NASA's testimony that "the findings of the [Phillips] task force had no effect on the accident, did not lead to the accident, and were not related to the accident", but stated in its recommendations:


title: Apollo 1

text: Freshman Senators Edward W. Brooke III and Charles H. Percy jointly wrote an "Additional Views" section appended to the committee report, chastising NASA more strongly than Anderson for not having disclosed the Phillips review to Congress. Mondale wrote his own, even more strongly worded Additional View, accusing NASA of "evasiveness... lack of candor... patronizing attitude toward Congress... refusal to respond fully and forthrightly to legitimate Congressional inquiries, and... solicitous concern for corporate sensitivities at a time of national tragedy".


title: Apollo 1

text: The potential political threat to Apollo blew over, due in large part to the support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who at the time still wielded a measure of influence with the Congress from his own Senatorial experience. He was a staunch supporter of NASA since its inception, had even recommended the Moon program to President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and was skilled at portraying it as part of Kennedy's legacy.


title: Apollo 1

text: Relations between NASA and North American deteriorated over assignment of blame. North American argued unsuccessfully it was not responsible for the fatal error in spacecraft atmosphere design. Finally, Webb contacted Atwood, and demanded either he or Chief Engineer Harrison A. Storms resign. Atwood elected to fire Storms.


title: Apollo 1

text: On the NASA side, Joseph Shea resorted to barbiturates and alcohol in order to help him cope. NASA administrator James Webb became increasingly worried about Shea's mental state. Shea was asked to take an extended voluntary leave of absence, but Shea refused, threatening to resign rather than take leave. As a compromise, he agreed to meet with a psychiatrist and to abide by an independent assessment of his psychological fitness. This approach to remove Shea from his position was also unsuccessful. Finally, six months after the fire, Shea's superiors reassigned him to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Shea felt that his new post was a "non-job," and left after only two months.


title: Apollo 1

text: Gene Kranz called a meeting of his staff in Mission Control three days after the accident, delivering a speech which has subsequently become one of NASA's principles. Speaking of the errors and overall attitude surrounding the Apollo program before the accident, he said: "We were too 'gung-ho' about the schedule and we blocked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we." He reminded the team of the perils and mercilessness of their endeavor, and stated the new requirement that every member of every team in mission control be "tough and competent", requiring nothing less than perfection throughout NASA's programs. In 2003, following the Space Shuttle "Columbia" disaster, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe quoted Kranz's speech, applying it to the "Columbia" crew.


title: Apollo 1

text: After the fire, the Apollo program was grounded for review and redesign. The command module was found to be extremely hazardous and, in some instances, carelessly assembled (for example, a misplaced wrench socket was found in the cabin).


title: Apollo 1

text: It was decided that remaining Block I spacecraft would be used only for uncrewed Saturn V test flights. All crewed missions would use the Block II spacecraft, to which many command module design changes were made:


title: Apollo 1

text: The astronauts' widows asked that "Apollo 1" be reserved for the flight their husbands never made, and on April 24, 1967, Mueller, as Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, announced this change officially: AS-204 would be recorded as Apollo1, "first manned Apollo Saturn flight – failed on ground test". Even though three uncrewed Apollo missions (AS-201, AS-202, and AS-203) had previously occurred, only AS-201 and AS-202 carried spacecraft. Therefore, the next mission, the first uncrewed Saturn V test flight (AS-501) would be designated Apollo4, with all subsequent flights numbered sequentially in the order flown. The first three flights would not be renumbered, and the names "Apollo2" and "Apollo3" would officially go unused. Mueller considered AS-201 and AS-202, the first and second flights of the Apollo Block I CSM, as Apollo2 and3 respectively.


title: Apollo 1

text: The crewed flight hiatus allowed work to catch up on the Saturn V and lunar module, which were encountering their own delays. Apollo4 flew in November 1967. Apollo1's (AS-204) Saturn IB rocket was taken down from Launch Complex 34, later reassembled at Launch complex 37B and used to launch Apollo5, an uncrewed Earth orbital test flight of the first lunar module, LM-1, in January 1968. A second uncrewed Saturn V AS-502 flew as Apollo6 in April 1968, and Grissom's backup crew of Wally Schirra, Don Eisele, and Walter Cunningham, finally flew the orbital test mission as Apollo7 (AS-205), in a Block II CSM in October 1968.


title: Apollo 1

text: Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Ed White was buried at West Point Cemetery on the grounds of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. NASA officials attempted to pressure Pat White, Ed White's widow, into allowing her husband also to be buried at Arlington, against what she knew to be his wishes; their efforts were foiled by astronaut Frank Borman. The names of the Apollo 1 crew are among those of multiple astronauts who have died in the line of duty, listed on the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island, Florida. President Jimmy Carter awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously to Grissom on October 1, 1978. President Bill Clinton awarded it to White and Chaffee on December 17, 1997.


title: Apollo 1

text: An Apollo 1 mission patch was left on the Moon's surface after the first crewed lunar landing by Apollo11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Apollo15 mission left on the surface of the Moon a tiny memorial statue, "Fallen Astronaut", along with a plaque containing the names of the Apollo1 astronauts, among others including Soviet cosmonauts, who perished in the pursuit of human space flight.


title: Apollo 1

text: After the Apollo 1 fire, Launch Complex 34 was subsequently used only for the launch of Apollo7 and later dismantled down to the concrete launch pedestal, which remains at the site () along with a few other concrete and steel-reinforced structures. The pedestal bears two plaques commemorating the crew.


title: Apollo 1

text: The "Dedicated to the living memory of the crew of the Apollo 1" plaque is quoted at the end of Wayne Hale's Requiem for the NASA Space Shuttle program. Each year the families of the Apollo1 crew are invited to the site for a memorial, and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex includes the site during the tour of the historic Cape Canaveral launch sites.


title: Apollo 1

text: In January 2005, three granite benches, built by a college classmate of one of the astronauts, were installed at the site on the southern edge of the launch pad. Each bears the name of one of the astronauts and his military service insignia.


title: Apollo 1

text: The Apollo 1 command module has never been on public display. After the accident, the spacecraft was removed and taken to Kennedy Space Center to facilitate the review board's disassembly in order to investigate the cause of the fire. When the investigation was complete, it was moved to the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and placed in a secured storage warehouse.


title: Apollo 1

text: On February 17, 2007, the parts of CM-012 were moved approximately to a newer, environmentally controlled warehouse. Only a few weeks earlier, Gus Grissom's brother Lowell publicly suggested CM-012 be permanently entombed in the concrete remains of Launch Complex 34.


title: Apollo 1

text: On January 27, 2017, the 50th anniversary of the fire, NASA put the hatch from Apollo1 on display at the Saturn V Rocket Center at Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. KSC's Visitor Complex also houses memorials that include parts of "Challenger" and "Columbia," which is located in the Space Shuttle "Atlantis" exhibit. "This is way, way, way long overdue. But we're excited about it," said Scott Grissom, Gus Grissom's older son.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The national flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (; ), also used as the flag of the Taliban, consists of a white field with a black "Shahada". It was adopted on 15 August 2021 with the victory of the Taliban in the 2001–2021 war. Since the Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, also known as the War of Independence, Afghanistan has used about 19 national flags, more than any other country in this period. The national flag had black, red and green colors most of the time during the period.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The tricolor flag of the internationally-recognized Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which remains in use internationally and by resistance movements against the Taliban inside Afghanistan, has vertical black, red and green stripes. It has the national emblem in white at the center. The emblem, which is surrounded by sheaves of wheat, includes a "Shahada"; a "Takbir"; rays of sun; a mosque with a "mihrab", "minbar" and two Afghan flags; the year 1298 (١۲۹٨) in the Solar Hijri calendar (i.e. Gregorian 1919); and an inscription stating Afghanistan (). A similar flag with three vertical stripes of the same colors, which had an emblem surrounded by sheaves of wheat, was first flown by King Amanullah Khan in July 1928.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: During the Afghan Independence Day rallies in Jalalabad and other cities on 18 and 19 August 2021, the Taliban killed three people and injured over a dozen others for removing Taliban flags and displaying the tricolor Afghan flags. The Taliban has issued a decree requiring the use of the Islamic Emirate's flag in all official settings.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The current flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is a plain white flag with shahada in the centre printed in black. The white stands for “the (Islamic Movement of Taliban’s) purity of faith and government.” After 1997, a black shahada was incorporated which is the Islamic declaration of faith. The current flag is unusual from other jihadist groups like those of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in that the main flag colour is white while the shahada is black, with most jihadist groups using an inverted version. It is likely that the current flag of the Islamic Emirate is inspired from the Umayyad Caliphate, which is when Islamists in the Indian subcontinent saw it as the beginning of the Ghazwa-e-Hind. It was during the 7th to 8th century under the Umayyad that Islam spread to Afghanistan. Through the 663 to 665 AD that Umayyad launched an invasion in to Afghanistan as corridor for the conquest of Transoxiana from 673 to 751 AD.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The national flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan set out in the 2004 Constitution consists of a vertical tricolor with the classical National Emblem in the center. The latest version was adopted on August 19, 2013, but many similar tricolor designs had been in use throughout most of the 20th century, starting in 1928. Due to the lack of diplomatic recognition of the Taliban government, this tricolor remains in use by most diplomatic missions of Afghanistan, despite the overthrow of the Islamic Republic in 2021. It is also used by the Afghan diaspora and republican insurgents, and is considered a symbol of resistance within the country.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The black color represents its troubled 19th century history as a protected state, the red color represents the blood of those who fought for independence (specifically, the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1919), and the green represents hope and prosperity for the future. Some have alternatively interpreted the black to represent history, the red to represent progress, and the green to represent either agricultural prosperity or Islam.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The tricolor was supposedly inspired by the Afghan King Amanullah Khan when visiting Europe with his wife in 1928. The original horizontal tricolor design was based on that of the Weimar Republic-era flag of Germany.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: Almost every Afghan tricolor flag since 1928 has had the Emblem of Afghanistan in the center. Almost every emblem has had a mosque in it, which first appeared in 1901, and wheat, first appearing in 1928.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The last tricolor flag took its current form in 2002 with modifications later on in 2004 and 2013, with some variants containing differing coloured emblems.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: Following the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul in 2021, protests took place in Jalalabad and other cities, where protesters were seen waving Afghan tricolor flags protesting its removal in defiance of Taliban rule, due to the reinstatement of the white Shahada flag and the abolishment of the former black, red, and green tricolor flag.


title: Flag of Afghanistan

text: The tricolor flag was used by the Afghan delegation at the 2020 Summer Paralympics between 25 August and 5 September 2021, as well as at the 2021 Cricket T20 World Cup between 26 October and 4 November 2021, both after the fall of Kabul.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Deborah Ann Woll (born February 7, 1985) is an American actress and model. Woll played Jessica Hamby in the HBO drama series "True Blood" (2008–2014), which earned her a nomination for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She subsequently starred as Karen Page in the Marvel series "Daredevil" (2015–2018), "The Defenders" (2017), and "The Punisher" (2017–2019). Her film roles include "Mother's Day" (2010), "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You" (2011), "Catch .44" (2011), "Ruby Sparks" (2012), "Meet Me in Montenegro" (2014), "The Automatic Hate" (2015), and the commercially-successful "Escape Room" (2019) and .


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Deborah Ann Woll was born in New York City, on February 7, 1985. Her father is an architect and her mother, Cathy Woll, is a teacher at the Berkeley Carroll School. She is of Irish and German descent. She attended the Packer Collegiate Institute, and received a BFA from USC School of Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California. She also trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Woll began her career with guest starring roles in several television series, including "Life" (2007), "ER" (2008), "" (2008), "My Name Is Earl" (2008), and "The Mentalist" (2008), and had a supporting role in the action-adventure television film "Aces 'N' Eights" (2008).


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: In 2008, Woll landed her breakout role as Bill Compton's vampire progeny, Jessica Hamby, in the HBO fantasy drama series "True Blood". She originally joined as a recurring character in the first season, but was promoted to a regular cast member for the second season onwards. In 2009, she and her "True Blood" co-stars won the Satellite Award for Best Cast – Television Series at the 14th annual ceremony. At the 16th Screen Actors Guild Awards which took place the year following, she and her co-stars were nominated for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. Woll maintained the role of Jessica until the series' ending in 2014.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: In 2009, she made a guest appearance in an episode of "", portraying a young woman who is found alive after being reported missing by her boyfriend. In 2010, Woll made her feature film debut in the psychological horror "Mother's Day". In 2011, she starred in the supernatural thriller "Little Murder", the sports drama "Seven Days in Utopia", the action film "Catch .44", and the comedy-drama "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You".


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: In 2012, Woll made a brief appearance in the romantic comedy-drama film "Ruby Sparks". The year following, she performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in the play "Parfumerie". That same year, she joined the cast of the drama film "The Automatic Hate". In 2015, she starred in the independent romantic drama film "Forever". She has portrayed Karen Page in the Marvel series for Netflix, specifically as the female lead in "Daredevil", and as a recurring actor in "The Punisher" and "The Defenders". "Daredevil" earned her a nomination for a Saturn Award. In 2018, Woll starred in the comedy film "Silver Lake". She also appeared in the action thriller film "Escape Room" in 2019, a role she reprised in its sequel "" (2021). The former was a major commercial success, surpassing initial expectations and debuting with $18.2 million, and finishing with $155.7 million.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Woll starred in the second season of "Force Grey: Lost City of Omu" (2017), a "Dungeons & Dragons" web series which focused on the "Tomb of Annihilation" storyline, and appeared as a guest player in the 45th episode of "Critical Role" second campaign. In 2019, she was the Dungeon Master of the Geek & Sundry show "Relics and Rarities", which used a modified version of "Dungeons & Dragons". In May 2019, Woll stated that "Relics and Rarities" had not yet been picked up for a second season and said, "I can say I have written a second season, or at least I’ve outlined it. It’s ready to be fleshed out. Whether or not we get picked up, [...][the cast] will be coming over to my house and playing it, cameras or not".


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Since 2019, she has been a regular guest in seasons 7 through 10 of the web show "GameNight!" by BoardGameGeek. In 2022, it was announced that Woll would be the Dungeon Master for the ongoing "D&D" actual play show "Children of Éarte". It premiered in March 2022 on the Demiplane Twitch channel.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: Woll began dating E. J. Scott in December 2007. They married in December 2018. Scott has choroideremia, a condition that ultimately results in blindness, and Woll uses her platform to help raise awareness of the disease. She has said that Scott's attitude towards his disability has inspired courage in her own, admittedly less life-changing, battle with celiac disease.


title: Deborah Ann Woll

text: She is an enthusiastic "Dungeons & Dragons" player and has been interviewed by D&D Beyond and "Dragon Talk". She has appeared in several "Dungeons & Dragons" charity specials, as both a player and a Dungeon Master, produced by Lost Odyssey Events.


title: Bread

text: Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour (usually wheat) and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history and around the world, it has been an important part of many cultures' diet. It is one of the oldest human-made foods, having been of significance since the dawn of agriculture, and plays an essential role in both religious rituals and secular culture.


title: Bread

text: Bread may be leavened by naturally occurring microbes (e.g. sourdough), chemicals (e.g. baking soda), industrially produced yeast, or high-pressure aeration, which creates the gas bubbles that fluff up bread. In many countries, commercial bread often contains additives to improve flavor, texture, color, shelf life, nutrition, and ease of production.


title: Bread

text: Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods. Evidence from 30,000 years ago in Europe and Australia revealed starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants. It is possible that during this time, starch extract from the roots of plants, such as cattails and ferns, was spread on a flat rock, placed over a fire and cooked into a primitive form of flatbread. The oldest evidence of bread-making has been found in a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in Jordan's northeastern desert. Around 10,000 BC, with the dawn of the Neolithic age and the spread of agriculture, grains became the mainstay of making bread. Yeast spores are ubiquitous, including on the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest leavens naturally.


title: Bread

text: An early leavened bread was baked as early as 6000 BC in southern Mesopotamia, cradle of the Sumerian civilization, who may have passed on the knowledge to the Egyptians around 3000 BC. The Egyptians refined the process and started adding yeast to the flour. The Sumerians were already using ash to supplement the dough as it was baked.


title: Bread

text: There were multiple sources of leavening available for early bread. Airborne yeasts could be harnessed by leaving uncooked dough exposed to air for some time before cooking. Pliny the Elder reported that the Gauls and Iberians used the foam skimmed from beer, called barm, to produce "a lighter kind of bread than other peoples" such as barm cake. Parts of the ancient world that drank wine instead of beer used a paste composed of grape juice and flour that was allowed to begin fermenting, or wheat bran steeped in wine, as a source for yeast. The most common source of leavening was to retain a piece of dough from the previous day to use as a form of sourdough starter, as Pliny also reported.


title: Bread

text: The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all considered the degree of refinement in the bakery arts as a sign of civilization.


title: Bread

text: The Chorleywood bread process was developed in 1961; it uses the intense mechanical working of dough to dramatically reduce the fermentation period and the time taken to produce a loaf. The process, whose high-energy mixing allows for the use of grain with a lower protein content, is now widely used around the world in large factories. As a result, bread can be produced very quickly and at low costs to the manufacturer and the consumer. However, there has been some criticism of the effect on nutritional value.


title: Bread

text: Bread is the staple food of the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Europe, and in European-derived cultures such as those in the Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa. This is in contrast to parts of South and East Asia, where rice or noodles are the staple. Bread is usually made from a wheat-flour dough that is cultured with yeast, allowed to rise, and finally baked in an oven. The addition of yeast to the bread explains the air pockets commonly found in bread. Owing to its high levels of gluten (which give the dough sponginess and elasticity), common or bread wheat is the most common grain used for the preparation of bread, which makes the largest single contribution to the world's food supply of any food.


title: Bread

text: Bread is also made from the flour of other wheat species (including spelt, emmer, einkorn and kamut). Non-wheat cereals including rye, barley, maize (corn), oats, sorghum, millet and rice have been used to make bread, but, with the exception of rye, usually in combination with wheat flour as they have less gluten.


title: Bread

text: Gluten-free breads are made using flours from a variety of ingredients such as almonds, rice, sorghum, corn, legumes such as beans, and tubers such as cassava. Since these foods lack gluten, dough made from them may not hold its shape as the loaves rise, and their crumb may be dense with little aeration. Additives such as xanthan gum, guar gum, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC), corn starch, or eggs are used to compensate for the lack of gluten.


title: Bread

text: In wheat, phenolic compounds are mainly found in hulls in the form of insoluble bound ferulic acid, where it is relevant to wheat resistance to fungal diseases.


title: Bread

text: Three natural phenolic glucosides, secoisolariciresinol diglucoside, p-coumaric acid glucoside and ferulic acid glucoside, can be found in commercial breads containing flaxseed.


title: Bread

text: Glutenin and gliadin are functional proteins found in wheat bread that contribute to the structure of bread. Glutenin forms interconnected gluten networks within bread through interchain disulfide bonds. Gliadin binds weakly to the gluten network established by glutenin via intrachain disulfide bonds. Structurally, bread can be defined as an elastic-plastic foam (same as styrofoam). The glutenin protein contributes to its elastic nature, as it is able to regain its initial shape after deformation. The gliadin protein contributes to its plastic nature, because it demonstrates non-reversible structural change after a certain amount of applied force. Because air pockets within this gluten network result from carbon dioxide production during leavening, bread can be defined as a foam, or a gas-in-solid solution.


title: Bread

text: Acrylamide, like in other starchy foods that have been heated higher than 120 °C (248 °F), has been found in recent years to occur in bread. Acrylamide is neurotoxic, has adverse effects on male reproduction and developmental toxicity and is carcinogenic. A study has found that more than 99 percent of the acrylamide in bread is found in the crust.


title: Bread

text: A study by the University of Hohenheim found that industrially produced bread typically has a high proportion of FODMAP carbohydrates due to a short rising time (often only one hour). The high proportion of FODMAP carbohydrates in such bread then causes flatulence. This is particularly problematic in intestinal diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome. While in traditional bread making the dough rises for several hours, industrial breads rise for a much shorter time, usually only one hour. However, a sufficiently long rising time is important to break down the indigestible FODMAP carbohydrates. Some flours (for example, spelt, emmer and einkorn) contain fewer FODMAPs, but the difference between grain types is relatively small (between 1 and 2 percent by weight). Instead, 90% of the FODMAPs that cause discomfort can be broken down during a rising time of 4 hours. In the study, whole-grain yeast doughs were examined after different rising times; the highest level of FODMAPs was present after one hour in each case and decreased thereafter. The study thus shows that it is essentially the baking technique and not the type of grain that determines whether a bread is well tolerated or not. A better tolerance of bread made from original cereals can therefore not be explained by the original cereal itself, but rather by the fact that traditional, artisanal baking techniques are generally used when baking original cereals, which include a long dough process. The study also showed that a long rising time also breaks down undesirable phytates more effectively, flavors develop better, and the finished bread contains more biologically accessible trace elements.


title: Bread

text: Bread can be served at many temperatures; once baked, it can subsequently be toasted. It is most commonly eaten with the hands, either by itself or as a carrier for other foods. Bread can be spread with butter, dipped into liquids such as gravy, olive oil, or soup; it can be topped with various sweet and savory spreads, or used to make sandwiches containing meats, cheeses, vegetables, and condiments.


title: Bread

text: Bread is used as an ingredient in other culinary preparations, such as the use of breadcrumbs to provide crunchy crusts or thicken sauces; toasted cubes of bread, called croutons, are used as a salad topping; seasoned bread is used as stuffing inside roasted turkey; sweet or savoury bread puddings are made with bread and various liquids; egg and milk-soaked bread is fried as French toast; and bread is used as a binding agent in sausages, meatballs and other ground meat products.


title: Bread

text: Nutritionally, bread is categorized as a source of grains in the food pyramid. Further, it is a good source of carbohydrates and nutrients such as magnesium, iron, selenium, B vitamins, and dietary fiber.


title: Bread

text: Bread crust is formed from surface dough during the cooking process. It is hardened and browned through the Maillard reaction using the sugars and amino acids due to the intense heat at the bread surface. The crust of most breads is harder, and more complexly and intensely flavored, than the rest. Old wives' tales suggest that eating the bread crust makes a person's hair curlier. Additionally, the crust is rumored to be healthier than the remainder of the bread. Some studies have shown that this is true as the crust has more dietary fiber and antioxidants such as pronyl-lysine.


title: Bread

text: Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed (e.g., mantou), fried (e.g., puri), or baked on an unoiled frying pan (e.g., tortillas). It may be leavened or unleavened (e.g. matzo). Salt, fat and leavening agents such as yeast and baking soda are common ingredients, though bread may contain other ingredients, such as milk, egg, sugar, spice, fruit (such as raisins), vegetables (such as onion), nuts (such as walnut) or seeds (such as poppy).


title: Bread

text: Methods of processing dough into bread include the straight dough process, the sourdough process, the Chorleywood bread process and the sponge and dough process.


title: Bread

text: Professional bread recipes are stated using the baker's percentage notation. The amount of flour is denoted to be 100%, and the other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of that amount by weight. Measurement by weight is more accurate and consistent than measurement by volume, particularly for dry ingredients. The proportion of water to flour is the most important measurement in a bread recipe, as it affects texture and crumb the most. Hard wheat flours absorb about 62% water, while softer wheat flours absorb about 56%. Common table breads made from these doughs result in a finely textured, light bread. Most artisan bread formulas contain anywhere from 60 to 75% water. In yeast breads, the higher water percentages result in more CO bubbles and a coarser bread crumb. 500 grams (1 pound) of flour yields a standard loaf of bread or two baguettes.


title: Bread

text: Flour is grain ground to a powdery consistency. Flour provides the primary structure, starch and protein to the final baked bread. The protein content of the flour is the best indicator of the quality of the bread dough and the finished bread. While bread can be made from all-purpose wheat flour, a specialty bread flour, containing more protein (12–14%), is recommended for high-quality bread. If one uses a flour with a lower protein content (9–11%) to produce bread, a shorter mixing time is required to develop gluten strength properly. An extended mixing time leads to oxidization of the dough, which gives the finished product a whiter crumb, instead of the cream color preferred by most artisan bakers.


title: Bread

text: Wheat flour, in addition to its starch, contains three water-soluble protein groups (albumin, globulin, and proteoses) and two water-insoluble protein groups (glutenin and gliadin). When flour is mixed with water, the water-soluble proteins dissolve, leaving the glutenin and gliadin to form the structure of the resulting bread. When relatively dry dough is worked by kneading, or wet dough is allowed to rise for a long time (see no-knead bread), the glutenin forms strands of long, thin, chainlike molecules, while the shorter gliadin forms bridges between the strands of glutenin. The resulting networks of strands produced by these two proteins are known as gluten. Gluten development improves if the dough is allowed to autolyse.


title: Bread

text: Water, or some other liquid, is used to form the flour into a paste or dough. The weight or ratio of liquid required varies between recipes, but a ratio of three parts liquid to five parts flour is common for yeast breads. Recipes that use steam as the primary leavening method may have a liquid content in excess of one part liquid to one part flour. Instead of water, recipes may use liquids such as milk or other dairy products (including buttermilk or yogurt), fruit juice, or eggs. These contribute additional sweeteners, fats, or leavening components, as well as water.


title: Bread

text: Fats, such as butter, vegetable oils, lard, or that contained in eggs, affect the development of gluten in breads by coating and lubricating the individual strands of protein. They also help to hold the structure together. If too much fat is included in a bread dough, the lubrication effect causes the protein structures to divide. A fat content of approximately 3% by weight is the concentration that produces the greatest leavening action. In addition to their effects on leavening, fats also serve to tenderize breads and preserve freshness.


title: Bread

text: Bread improvers and dough conditioners are often used in producing commercial breads to reduce the time needed for rising and to improve texture and volume and to give antistaling effects. The substances used may be oxidising agents to strengthen the dough or reducing agents to develop gluten and reduce mixing time, emulsifiers to strengthen the dough or to provide other properties such as making slicing easier, or enzymes to increase gas production.


title: Bread

text: Salt (sodium chloride) is very often added to enhance flavor and restrict yeast activity. It also affects the crumb and the overall texture by stabilizing and strengthening the gluten. Some artisan bakers forego early addition of salt to the dough, whether wholemeal or refined, and wait until after a 20-minute rest to allow the dough to autolyse.


title: Bread

text: Mixtures of salts are sometimes employed, such as employing potassium chloride to reduce the sodium level, and monosodium glutamate to give flavor (umami).


title: Bread

text: Leavening is the process of adding gas to a dough before or during baking to produce a lighter, more easily chewed bread. Most bread eaten in the West is leavened.


title: Bread

text: A simple technique for leavening bread is the use of gas-producing chemicals. There are two common methods. The first is to use baking powder or a self-raising flour that includes baking powder. The second is to include an acidic ingredient such as buttermilk and add baking soda; the reaction of the acid with the soda produces gas. Chemically leavened breads are called "quick breads" and "soda breads". This method is commonly used to make muffins, pancakes, American-style biscuits, and quick breads such as banana bread.


title: Bread

text: Many breads are leavened by yeast. The yeast most commonly used for leavening bread is "Saccharomyces cerevisiae", the same species used for brewing alcoholic beverages. This yeast ferments some of the carbohydrates in the flour, including any sugar, producing carbon dioxide. Commercial bakers often leaven their dough with commercially produced baker's yeast. Baker's yeast has the advantage of producing uniform, quick, and reliable results, because it is obtained from a pure culture. Many artisan bakers produce their own yeast with a growth culture. If kept in the right conditions, it provides leavening for many years.


title: Bread

text: The baker's yeast and sourdough methods follow the same pattern. Water is mixed with flour, salt and the leavening agent. Other additions (spices, herbs, fats, seeds, fruit, etc.) are not needed to bake bread, but are often used. The mixed dough is then allowed to rise one or more times (a longer rising time results in more flavor, so bakers often "punch down" the dough and let it rise again), loaves are formed, and (after an optional final rising time) the bread is baked in an oven.


title: Bread

text: Many breads are made from a "straight dough", which means that all of the ingredients are combined in one step, and the dough is baked after the rising time; others are made from a "pre-ferment" in which the leavening agent is combined with some of the flour and water a day or so ahead of baking and allowed to ferment overnight. On the day of baking, the rest of the ingredients are added, and the process continues as with straight dough. This produces a more flavorful bread with better texture. Many bakers see the starter method as a compromise between the reliable results of baker's yeast and the flavor and complexity of a longer fermentation. It also allows the baker to use only a minimal amount of baker's yeast, which was scarce and expensive when it first became available. Most yeasted pre-ferments fall into one of three categories: "poolish" or "pouliche", a loose-textured mixture composed of roughly equal amounts of flour and water (by weight); "biga", a stiff mixture with a higher proportion of flour; and "pâte fermentée", which is a portion of dough reserved from a previous batch.


title: Bread

text: Sourdough is a type of bread produced by a long fermentation of dough using naturally occurring yeasts and lactobacilli. It usually has a mildly sour taste because of the lactic acid produced during anaerobic fermentation by the lactobacilli.


title: Bread

text: Sourdough breads are made with a sourdough starter. The starter cultivates yeast and lactobacilli in a mixture of flour and water, making use of the microorganisms already present on flour; it does not need any added yeast. A starter may be maintained indefinitely by regular additions of flour and water. Some bakers have starters many generations old, which are said to have a special taste or texture. At one time, all yeast-leavened breads were sourdoughs. Recently there has been a revival of sourdough bread in artisan bakeries.


title: Bread

text: Traditionally, peasant families throughout Europe baked on a fixed schedule, perhaps once a week. The starter was saved from the previous week's dough. The starter was mixed with the new ingredients, the dough was left to rise, and then a piece of it was saved (to be the starter for next week's bread).


title: Bread

text: The rapid expansion of steam produced during baking leavens the bread, which is as simple as it is unpredictable. Steam-leavening is unpredictable since the steam is not produced until the bread is baked. Steam leavening happens regardless of the raising agents (baking soda, yeast, baking powder, sour dough, beaten egg white) included in the mix. The leavening agent either contains air bubbles or generates carbon dioxide. The heat vaporises the water from the inner surface of the bubbles within the dough. The steam expands and makes the bread rise. This is the main factor in the rising of bread once it has been put in the oven. CO generation, on its own, is too small to account for the rise. Heat kills bacteria or yeast at an early stage, so the CO generation is stopped.


title: Bread

text: Salt-rising bread employs a form of bacterial leavening that does not require yeast. Although the leavening action is inconsistent, and requires close attention to the incubating conditions, this bread is making a comeback for its cheese-like flavor and fine texture.


title: Bread

text: Aerated bread was leavened by carbon dioxide being forced into dough under pressure. From the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, bread made this way was somewhat popular in the United Kingdom, made by the Aerated Bread Company and sold in its high-street tearooms. The company was founded in 1862, and ceased independent operations in 1955.


title: Bread

text: The Pressure-Vacuum mixer was later developed by the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association for the Chorleywood bread process. It manipulates the gas bubble size and optionally the composition of gases in the dough via the gas applied to the headspace.


title: Bread

text: The Old English word for bread was ( in Gothic: modern English "loaf"), which appears to be the oldest Teutonic name. Old High German and modern German derive from this Proto-Germanic word, which was borrowed into some Slavic (, , Russian: ) and Finnic (, ) languages as well.


title: Bread

text: The Middle and Modern English word bread appears in Germanic languages, such as , , , , and Norwegian and ; it may be related to "brew" or perhaps to "break", originally meaning "broken piece", "morsel".


title: Bread

text: Bread has a significance beyond mere nutrition in many cultures because of its history and contemporary importance. Bread is also significant in Christianity as one of the elements (alongside wine) of the Eucharist, and in other religions including Paganism.


title: Bread

text: In many cultures, bread is a metaphor for basic necessities and living conditions in general. For example, a "bread-winner" is a household's main economic contributor and has little to do with actual bread-provision. This is also seen in the phrase "putting bread on the table". The Roman poet Juvenal satirized superficial politicians and the public as caring only for ""panem et circenses"" (bread and circuses). In Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks promised "peace, land, and bread." The term "breadbasket" denotes an agriculturally productive region. In parts of Northern, Central, Southern and Eastern Europe bread and salt is offered as a welcome to guests. In India, life's basic necessities are often referred to as "roti, kapra aur makan" (bread, cloth, and house).


title: Bread

text: Words for bread, including "dough" and "bread" itself, are used in English-speaking countries as synonyms for money. A remarkable or revolutionary innovation may be called the best thing since "sliced bread". The expression "to break bread with someone" means "to share a meal with someone". The English word "lord" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "hlāfweard", meaning "bread keeper."


title: Bread

text: Bread is sometimes referred to as "the staff of life", although this term can refer to other staple foods in different cultures: the "Oxford English Dictionary" defines it as "bread (or similar staple food)". This is sometimes thought to be a biblical reference, but the nearest wording is in Leviticus 26 "when I have broken the staff of your bread". The term has been adopted in the names of bakery firms.


title: Rigveda

text: The Rigveda or Rig Veda ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns ("sūktas"). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts ("śruti") known as the Vedas. Only one Shakha of the many survive today, namely the Śakalya Shakha. Much of the contents contained in the remaining Shakhas are now lost or are not available in the public forum.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Its early layers are among the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The sounds and texts of the "Rigveda" have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE. Philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the "Rigveda" Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent (see) Rigvedic rivers), most likely between 1500 and 1000 BCE, although a wider approximation of 19001200 BCE has also been given.


title: Rigveda

text: The text is layered, consisting of the "Samhita", "Brahmanas", "Aranyakas" and "Upanishads". The "Rigveda Samhita" is the core text and is a collection of 10 books ('s) with 1,028 hymns ('s) in about 10,600 verses (called ', eponymous of the name "Rigveda"). In the eight booksBooks 2 through 9that were composed the earliest, the hymns predominantly discuss cosmology, rites, and rituals and praise deities. The more recent books (Books 1 and 10) in part also deal with philosophical or speculative questions, virtues such as "dāna" (charity) in society, questions about the origin of the universe and the nature of the divine, and other metaphysical issues in their hymns.


title: Rigveda

text: Some of its verses continue to be recited during Hindu prayer and celebration of rites of passage (such as weddings), making it probably the world's oldest religious text in continued use.


title: Rigveda

text: According to Jamison and Brereton, in their 2014 translation of the "Rigveda", the dating of this text "has been and is likely to remain a matter of contention and reconsideration". The dating proposals so far are all inferred from the style and the content within the hymns themselves. Philological estimates tend to date the bulk of the text to the second half of the second millennium BCE. Being composed in an early Indo-Aryan language, the hymns must post-date the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly 2000 BCE. A reasonable date close to that of the composition of the core of the "Rigveda" is that of the Mitanni documents of northern Syria and Iraq (c. 14501350 BCE), which also mention the Vedic gods such as Varuna, Mitra and Indra. Other evidence also points to a composition close to 1400 BCE.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda"'s core is accepted to date to the late Bronze Age, making it one of the few examples with an unbroken tradition. Its composition is usually dated to roughly between c. 1500 and 1000 BCE. According to Michael Witzel, the codification of the "Rigveda" took place at the end of the Rigvedic period between ca. 1200 and 1000 BCE, in the early Kuru kingdom. Asko Parpola argues that the "Rigveda" was systematized around 1000 BCE, at the time of the Kuru kingdom.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" is far more archaic than any other Indo-Aryan text. For this reason, it was in the center of attention of Western scholarship from the times of Max Müller and Rudolf Roth onwards. The "Rigveda" records an early stage of Vedic religion. There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the early Iranian Avesta, deriving from the Proto-Indo-Iranian times, often associated with the early Andronovo culture (or rather, the Sintashta culture within the early Andronovo horizon) of c. 2000 BCE.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" offers no direct evidence of social or political systems in the Vedic era, whether ordinary or elite. Only hints such as cattle raising and horse racing are discernible, and the text offers very general ideas about the ancient Indian society. There is no evidence, state Jamison and Brereton, of any elaborate, pervasive or structured caste system. Social stratification seems embryonic, then and later a social ideal rather than a social reality. The society was semi-nomadic and pastoral with evidence of agriculture since hymns mention plow and celebrate agricultural divinities. There was division of labor and a complementary relationship between kings and poet-priests but no discussion of a relative status of social classes. Women in the "Rigveda" appear disproportionately as speakers in dialogue hymns, both as mythical or divine Indrani, Apsaras Urvasi, or Yami, as well as Apāla Ātreyī (RV 8.91), Godhā (RV 10.134.6), Ghoṣā Kākṣīvatī (RV 10.39.40), Romaśā (RV 1.126.7), Lopāmudrā (RV 1.179.12), Viśvavārā Ātreyī (RV 5.28), Śacī Paulomī (RV 10.159), Śaśvatī Āṅgirasī (RV 8.1.34). The women of the "Rigveda" are quite outspoken and appear more sexually confident than men, in the text. Elaborate and aesthetic hymns on wedding suggest rites of passage had developed during the Rigvedic period. There is little evidence of dowry and no evidence of sati in it or related Vedic texts.


title: Rigveda

text: The Rigvedic hymns mention rice and porridge, in hymns such as 8.83, 8.70, 8.77 and 1.61 in some versions of the text; however, there is no discussion of rice cultivation. The term "áyas" (metal) occurs in the "Rigveda", but it is unclear which metal it was. Iron is not mentioned in "Rigveda", something scholars have used to help date "Rigveda" to have been composed before 1000 BCE. Hymn 5.63 mentions "metal cloaked in gold", suggesting metal working had progressed in the Vedic culture.


title: Rigveda

text: Some of the names of gods and goddesses found in the "Rigveda" are found amongst other belief systems based on Proto-Indo-European religion, while most of the words used share common roots with words from other Indo-European languages. However, about 300 words in the "Rigveda" are neither Indo-Aryan nor Indo-European, states the Sanskrit and Vedic literature scholar Frits Staal. Of these 300, manysuch as "kapardin", "kumara", "kumari", "kikata"come from Munda or proto-Munda languages found in the eastern and northeastern (Assamese) region of India, with roots in Austroasiatic languages. The others in the list of 300such as "mleccha" and "nir"have Dravidian roots found in the southern region of India, or are of Tibeto-Burman origins. A few non-Indo-European words in the "Rigveda"such as for camel, mustard and donkeybelong to a possibly lost Central Asian language. The linguistic sharing provides clear indications, states Michael Witzel, that the people who spoke Rigvedic Sanskrit already knew and interacted with Munda and Dravidian speakers.


title: Rigveda

text: The earliest text were composed in northwestern regions of the Indian subcontinent, and the more philosophical later texts were most likely composed in or around the region that is the modern era state of Haryana.


title: Rigveda

text: The "family books" (27) are associated with various clans and chieftains, containing hymns by members of the same clan in each book; but other clans are also represented in the "Rigveda". The family books are associated with specific regions, and mention prominent Bharata and Pūru kings.


title: Rigveda

text: Tradition associates a rishi (the composer) with each (verse) of the "Rigveda". Most sūktas are attributed to single composers; for each of them the "Rigveda" includes a lineage-specific "" hymn (a special sūkta of rigidly formulaic structure, used for rituals). In all, 10 families of rishis account for more than 95 per cent of the


title: Rigveda

text: The codification of the "Rigveda" took place late in the Rigvedic or rather in the early post-Rigvedic period at ca. 1200 BCE, by members of the early Kuru tribe, when the center of Vedic culture moved east from the Punjab into what is now Uttar Pradesh. The "Rigveda" was codified by compiling the hymns, including the arrangement of the individual hymns in ten books, coeval with the composition of the younger Veda Samhitas. According to Witzel, the initial collection took place after the Bharata victory in the Battle of the Ten Kings, under king Sudās, over other Puru kings. This collection was an effort to reconcile various factions in the clans which were united in the Kuru kingdom under a Bharata king. This collection was re-arranged and expanded in the Kuru Kingdom, reflecting the establishment of a new Bharata-Puru lineage and new srauta rituals.


title: Rigveda

text: The fixing of the Vedic chant (by enforcing regular application of sandhi) and of the padapatha (by dissolving Sandhi out of the earlier metrical text), occurred during the later Brahmana period, in roughly the 6th century BCE.


title: Rigveda

text: The surviving form of the "Rigveda" is based on an early Iron Age collection that established the core 'family books' (mandalas 27, ordered by author, deity and meter) and a later redaction, coeval with the redaction of the other Vedas, dating several centuries after the hymns were composed. This redaction also included some additions (contradicting the strict ordering scheme) and orthoepic changes to the Vedic Sanskrit such as the regularization of sandhi (termed "orthoepische Diaskeuase" by Oldenberg, 1888).


title: Rigveda

text: The text is organized in ten "books", or "maṇḍalas" ("circles"), of varying age and length. The "family books", mandalas 27, are the oldest part of the "Rigveda" and the shortest books; they are arranged by length (decreasing length of hymns per book) and account for 38% of the text.


title: Rigveda

text: The hymns are arranged in collections each dealing with a particular deity: "Agni" comes first, "Indra" comes second, and so on. They are attributed and dedicated to a rishi (sage) and his family of students. Within each collection, the hymns are arranged in descending order of the number of stanzas per hymn. If two hymns in the same collection have equal numbers of stanzas then they are arranged so that the number of syllables in the metre are in descending order. The second to seventh mandalas have a uniform format.


title: Rigveda

text: The eighth and ninth mandalas, comprising hymns of mixed age, account for 15% and 9%, respectively. The ninth mandala is entirely dedicated to Soma and the Soma ritual.


title: Rigveda

text: The hymns in the ninth mandala are arranged by both their prosody structure (chanda) and by their length.


title: Rigveda

text: The first and the tenth mandalas are the youngest; they are also the longest books, of 191 suktas each, accounting for 37% of the text. Nevertheless, some of the hymns in mandalas 8, 1 and 10 may still belong to an earlier period and may be as old as the material in the family books. The first mandala has a unique arrangement not found in the other nine mandalas. The first 84 hymns of the tenth mandala have a structure different than the remaining hymns in it.


title: Rigveda

text: Each mandala consists of hymns or 's (', literally, "well recited, eulogy") intended for various rituals.


title: Rigveda

text: The s in turn consist of individual stanzas called ' ("praise", "pl." '), which are further analysed into units of verse called "" ("foot" or step).


title: Rigveda

text: The hymns of the "Rigveda" are in different poetic metres in Vedic Sanskrit. The meters most used in the are the gayatri (3 verses of 8 syllables), anushtubh (4×8), trishtubh (4×11) and jagati (4×12). The trishtubh meter (40%) and gayatri meter (25%) dominate in the "Rigveda".


title: Rigveda

text: As with the other Vedas, the redacted text has been handed down in several versions, including the "Padapatha", in which each word is isolated in pausa form and is used for just one way of memorization; and the "Samhitapatha", which combines words according to the rules of sandhi (the process being described in the "Pratisakhya") and is the memorized text used for recitation.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Padapatha" and the "Pratisakhya" anchor the text's true meaning, and the fixed text was preserved with unparalleled fidelity for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone. In order to achieve this the oral tradition prescribed very structured enunciation, involving breaking down the Sanskrit compounds into stems and inflections, as well as certain permutations. This interplay with sounds gave rise to a scholarly tradition of morphology and phonetics.


title: Rigveda

text: It is unclear as to when the "Rigveda" was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE. According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800-1000 CE. The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period). Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the "Smriti" rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel. The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.


title: Rigveda

text: Several shakhas (from skt. "śākhā" f. "branch", i. e. "recension") of the Rig Veda are known to have existed in the past. Of these, Śākala Śākhā (named after the scholar Śākalya) is the only one to have survived in its entirety. Another śākhā that may have survived is the Bāṣkala, although this is uncertain.


title: Rigveda

text: The surviving padapāṭha version of the "Rigveda" text is ascribed to Śākalya. The recension has 1,017 regular hymns, and an appendix of 11 "" hymns which are now customarily included in the 8th mandala (as 8.498.59), for a total of 1028 hymns. The recension includes eight of these hymns among its regular hymns, making a total of 1025 regular hymns for this śākhā. In addition, the recension has its own appendix of 98 hymns, the Khilani.


title: Rigveda

text: In the 1877 edition of Aufrecht, the 1028 hymns of the "Rigveda" contain a total of 10,552 s, or 39,831 padas. The Shatapatha Brahmana gives the number of syllables to be 432,000, while the metrical text of van Nooten and Holland (1994) has a total of 395,563 syllables (or an average of 9.93 syllables per pada); counting the number of syllables is not straightforward because of issues with sandhi and the post-Rigvedic pronunciation of syllables like súvar as svàr.


title: Rigveda

text: Three other shakhas are mentioned in "Caraṇavyuha", a pariśiṣṭa (supplement) of Yajurveda: Māṇḍukāyana, Aśvalāyana and Śaṅkhāyana. The Atharvaveda lists two more shakhas. The differences between all these shakhas are very minor, limited to varying order of content and inclusion (or non-inclusion) of a few verses. The following information is known about the shakhas other than Śākala and Bāṣkala:


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" hymns were composed and preserved by oral tradition. They were memorized and verbally transmitted with "unparalleled fidelity" across generations for many centuries. According to Barbara West, it was probably first written down about the 3rd-century BCE. The manuscripts were made from birch bark or palm leaves, which decompose and therefore were routinely copied over the generations to help preserve the text.


title: Rigveda

text: There are, for example, 30 manuscripts of "Rigveda" at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, collected in the 19th century by Georg Bühler, Franz Kielhorn and others, originating from different parts of India, including Kashmir, Gujarat, the then Rajaputana, Central Provinces etc. They were transferred to Deccan College, Pune, in the late 19th century. They are in the Sharada and Devanagari scripts, written on birch bark and paper. The oldest of the Pune collection is dated to 1464. The 30 manuscripts of "Rigveda" preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.


title: Rigveda

text: Of these thirty manuscripts, nine contain the samhita text, five have the padapatha in addition. Thirteen contain Sayana's commentary. At least five manuscripts (MS. no. 1/A1879-80, 1/A1881-82, 331/1883-84 and 5/Viś I) have preserved the complete text of the "Rigveda". MS no. 5/1875-76, written on birch bark in bold Sharada, was only in part used by Max Müller for his edition of the "Rigveda" with Sayana's commentary.


title: Rigveda

text: Müller used 24 manuscripts then available to him in Europe, while the Pune Edition used over five dozen manuscripts, but the editors of Pune Edition could not procure many manuscripts used by Müller and by the Bombay Edition, as well as from some other sources; hence the total number of extant manuscripts known then must surpass perhaps eighty at least.


title: Rigveda

text: "Rigveda" manuscripts in paper, palm leaves and birch bark form, either in full or in portions, have been discovered in the following Indic scripts:


title: Rigveda

text: The various "Rigveda" manuscripts discovered so far show some differences. Broadly, the most studied Śākala recension has 1017 hymns, includes an appendix of eleven "valakhīlya" hymns which are often counted with the eighth mandala, for a total of 1028 metrical hymns. The Bāṣakala version of "Rigveda" includes eight of these "vālakhilya" hymns among its regular hymns, making a total of 1025 hymns in the main text for this śākhā. The Bāṣakala text also has an appendix of 98 hymns, called the "Khilani", bringing the total to 1,123 hymns. The manuscripts of Śākala recension of the "Rigveda" have about 10,600 verses, organized into ten Books ("Mandalas"). Books 2 through 7 are internally homogeneous in style, while Books 1, 8 and 10 are compilation of verses of internally different styles suggesting that these books are likely a collection of compositions by many authors.


title: Rigveda

text: The first mandala is the largest, with 191 hymns and 2006 verses, and it was added to the text after Books 2 through 9. The last, or the 10th Book, also has 191 hymns but 1754 verses, making it the second largest. The language analytics suggest the 10th Book, chronologically, was composed and added last. The content of the 10th Book also suggest that the authors knew and relied on the contents of the first nine books.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" is the largest of the four Vedas, and many of its verses appear in the other Vedas. Almost all of the 1875 verses found in Samaveda are taken from different parts of the "Rigveda", either once or as repetition, and rewritten in a chant song form. Books 8 and 9 of the "Rigveda" are by far the largest source of verses for Sama Veda. Book 10 contributes the largest number of the 1350 verses of "Rigveda" found in Atharvaveda, or about one fifth of the 5987 verses in the Atharvaveda text. A bulk of 1875 ritual-focussed verses of Yajurveda, in its numerous versions, also borrow and build upon the foundation of verses in "Rigveda".


title: Rigveda

text: In western usage, "Rigveda" usually refers to the "Rigveda" Samhita, while the Brahmanas are referred to as the "Rigveda Brahmanas" (etc.). Technically speaking, however, "the Rigveda" refers to the entire body of texts transmitted along with the Samhita portion. Different bodies of commentary were transmitted in the different shakhas or "schools".


title: Rigveda

text: Only a small portion of these texts has been preserved: The texts of only two out of five shakhas mentioned by the Rigveda Pratishakhya have survived.


title: Rigveda

text: The late (15th or 16th century) "Shri Guru Charitra" even claims the existence of twelve Rigvedic shakhas.


title: Rigveda

text: The Rigvedic hymns are dedicated to various deities, chief of whom are Indra, a heroic god praised for having slain his enemy Vrtra; Agni, the sacrificial fire; and Soma, the sacred potion or the plant it is made from. Equally prominent gods are the Adityas or Asura gods MitraVaruna and Ushas (the dawn). Also invoked are Savitr, Vishnu, Rudra, Pushan, Brihaspati or Brahmanaspati, as well as deified natural phenomena such as Dyaus Pita (the shining sky, Father Heaven), Prithivi (the earth, Mother Earth), Surya (the sun god), Vayu or Vata (the wind), Apas (the waters), Parjanya (the thunder and rain), Vac (the word), many rivers (notably the Sapta Sindhu, and the Sarasvati River). The Adityas, Vasus, Rudras, Sadhyas, Ashvins, Maruts, Rbhus, and the Vishvadevas ("all-gods") as well as the "thirty-three gods" are the groups of deities mentioned.


title: Rigveda

text: Of the Brahmanas that were handed down in the schools of the "" (i.e. "possessed of many verses"), as the followers of the "Rigveda" are called, two have come down to us, namely those of the Aitareyins and the Kaushitakins. The "Aitareya-brahmana" and the "Kaushitaki-" (or "Sankhayana-") "brahmana" evidently have for their groundwork the same stock of traditional exegetic matter. They differ, however, considerably as regards both the arrangement of this matter and their stylistic handling of it, with the exception of the numerous legends common to both, in which the discrepancy is comparatively slight. There is also a certain amount of material peculiar to each of them.


title: Rigveda

text: The Kaushitaka is, upon the whole, far more concise in its style and more systematic in its arrangement features which would lead one to infer that it is probably the more modern work of the two. It consists of 30 chapters ("adhyaya"); while the Aitareya has 40, divided into eight books (or pentads, "pancaka"), of five chapters each. The last 10 adhyayas of the latter work are, however, clearly a later addition though they must have already formed part of it at the time of Pāṇini (c. 5th century BCE), if, as seems probable, one of his grammatical sutras, regulating the formation of the names of Brahmanas, consisting of 30 and 40 adhyayas, refers to these two works. In this last portion occurs the well-known legend (also found in the Shankhayana-sutra, but not in the Kaushitaki-brahmana) of Shunahshepa, whom his father Ajigarta sells and offers to slay, the recital of which formed part of the inauguration of kings.


title: Rigveda

text: While the Aitareya deals almost exclusively with the Soma sacrifice, the Kaushitaka, in its first six chapters, treats of the several kinds of "haviryajna", or offerings of rice, milk, ghee, etc., whereupon follows the Soma sacrifice in this way, that chapters 710 contain the practical ceremonial and 1130 the recitations ("shastra") of the hotar. Sayana, in the introduction to his commentary on the work, ascribes the Aitareya to the sage Mahidasa Aitareya (i.e. son of Itara), also mentioned elsewhere as a philosopher; and it seems likely enough that this person arranged the Brahmana and founded the school of the Aitareyins. Regarding the authorship of the sister work we have no information, except that the opinion of the sage Kaushitaki is frequently referred to in it as authoritative, and generally in opposition to the Paingya—the Brahmana, it would seem, of a rival school, the Paingins. Probably, therefore, it is just what one of the manuscripts calls it—the Brahmana of Sankhayana (composed) in accordance with the views of Kaushitaki.


title: Rigveda

text: Each of these two Brahmanas is supplemented by a "forest book", or Aranyaka. The "Aitareyaranyaka" is not a uniform production. It consists of five books ("aranyaka"), three of which, the first and the last two, are of a liturgical nature, treating of the ceremony called "mahavrata", or great vow. The last of these books, composed in sutra form, is, however, doubtless of later origin, and is, indeed, ascribed by Hindu authorities either to Shaunaka or to Ashvalayana. The second and third books, on the other hand, are purely speculative, and are also styled the "Bahvrca-brahmana-upanishad". Again, the last four chapters of the second book are usually singled out as the Aitareya Upanishad, ascribed, like its Brahmana (and the first book), to Mahidasa Aitareya; and the third book is also referred to as the "Samhita-upanishad". As regards the "Kaushitaki-aranyaka", this work consists of 15 adhyayas, the first two (treating of the mahavrata ceremony) and the 7th and 8th of which correspond to the first, fifth, and third books of the Aitareyaranyaka, respectively, whilst the four adhyayas usually inserted between them constitute the highly interesting Kaushitaki (Brahmana-) Upanishad, of which we possess two different recensions. The remaining portions (915) of the Aranyaka treat of the vital airs, the internal Agnihotra, etc., ending with the "vamsha", or succession of teachers.


title: Rigveda

text: The text is a highly stylized poetical Vedic Sanskrit with praise addressed to the Vedic gods and chieftains. Most hymns, according to Witzel, were intended to be recited at the annual New Year Soma ritual. The text also includes some nonritual poetry, fragments of mythology, archaic formulas, and a number of hymns with early philosophical speculations. Composed by the poets of different clans, including famed Vedic "rishis" (sages) such as Vishvamitra and Vasishtha, these signify the power of prestige therewith to "vac" (speech, sound), a tradition set in place. The text introduced the prized concepts such as "Rta" (active realization of truth, cosmic harmony) which inspired the later Hindu concept of Dharma. The Rigvedic verses formulate this "Rta" as effected by "Brahman", a significant and non-self-evident truth. The text also contains hymns of "highly poetical value"some in dialogue form, along with love stories that likely inspired later Epic and classical poets of Hinduism, states Witzel.


title: Rigveda

text: According to Nadkarni, several hymns of the "Rigveda" embed cherished virtues and ethical statements. For example, verses 5.82.7, 6.44.8, 9.113.4, 10.133.6 and 10.190.1 mention truthful speech, truthful action, self-discipline and righteousness. Hymn 10.117 presents the significance of charity and of generosity between human beings, how helping someone in need is ultimately in the self-interest of the helper, its importance to an individual and the society. According to Jamison and Brereton, hymns 9.112 and 9.113 poetically state, "what everyone [humans and all living beings] really want is gain or an easy life", even a water drop has a goalnamely, "simply to seek Indra". These hymns present the imagery of being in heaven as "freedom, joy and satisfaction", a theme that appears in the Hindu Upanishads to characterize their teachings of self-realization.


title: Rigveda

text: its younger parts, specifically mandalas 1 and 10, have been noted as containing monistic or henotheistic speculations.


title: Rigveda

text: Max Müller notably introduced the term "henotheism" for the philosophy expressed here, avoiding the connotations of "monotheism" in Judeo-Christian tradition.


title: Rigveda

text: Other widely cited examples of monistic tendencies include hymns 1.164, 8.36 and 10.31, Other scholars state that the "Rigveda" includes an emerging diversity of thought, including monotheism, polytheism, henotheism and pantheism, the choice left to the preference of the worshipper. and the Nasadiya Sukta (10.129), one of the most widely cited Rigvedic hymns in popular western presentations.


title: Rigveda

text: Ruse (2015) commented on the old discussion of "monotheism" vs. "henotheism" vs. "monism" by noting an "atheistic streak" in hymns such as .


title: Rigveda

text: Examples from Mandala 1 adduced to illustrate the "metaphysical" nature of the contents of the younger hymns include:


title: Rigveda

text: 1.164.34: "What is the ultimate limit of the earth?", "What is the center of the universe?", "What is the semen of the cosmic horse?", "What is the ultimate source of human speech?";


title: Rigveda

text: 1.164.34: "Who gave blood, soul, spirit to the earth?", "How could the unstructured universe give origin to this structured world?";


title: Rigveda

text: .20 (a hymn that is widely cited in the Upanishads as the parable of the Body and the Soul): "Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions; Have found refuge in the same sheltering tree. One incessantly eats from the fig tree; the other, not eating, just looks on.".


title: Rigveda

text: The Vedas as a whole are classed as "shruti" in Hindu tradition. This has been compared to the concept of divine revelation in Western religious tradition, but Staal argues that "it is nowhere stated that the Veda was revealed", and that "shruti" simply means "that what is heard, in the sense that it is transmitted from father to son or from teacher to pupil". The "Rigveda", or other Vedas, do not anywhere assert that they are apauruṣeyā, and this reverential term appears only centuries after the end of the Vedic period in the texts of the Mimamsa school of Hindu philosophy. The text of the "Rigveda" suggests it was "composed by poets, human individuals whose names were household words" in the Vedic age, states Staal.


title: Rigveda

text: Yaska (4th c. BCE), a lexicographer, was an early commentator of the "Rigveda" by discussing the meanings of difficult words. In his book titled "Nirukta" Yaska asserts that the "Rigveda" in the ancient tradition can be interpreted in three ways - from the perspective of religious rites ("adhiyajna"), from the perspective of the deities ("adhidevata"), and from the perspective of the soul ("adhyatman"). The fourth way to interpret the "Rigveda" also emerged in the ancient times, wherein the gods mentioned were viewed as symbolism for legendary individuals or narratives. It was generally accepted that creative poets often embed and express double meanings, ellipses and novel ideas to inspire the reader.


title: Rigveda

text: By the period of Puranic Hinduism, in the medieval period, the language of the hymns had become "almost entirely unintelligible", and their interpretation mostly hinged on mystical ideas and sound symbolism.


title: Rigveda

text: According to the Puranic tradition, Ved Vyasa compiled all the four Vedas, along with the Mahabharata and the Puranas. Vyasa then taught the "Rigveda" samhita to Paila, who started the oral tradition. An alternate version states that Shakala compiled the "Rigveda" from the teachings of Vedic rishis, and one of the manuscript recensions mentions Shakala.


title: Rigveda

text: Madhvacharya, a Hindu philosopher of the 13th century, provided a commentary of the first 40 hymns of the "Rigveda" in his book "Rig Bhashyam". In the 14th century, wrote an exhaustive commentary on the complete text of the "Rigveda" in his book "Rigveda Samhita". This book was translated from Sanskrit to English by Max Müller in the year 1856. H.H. Wilson also translated this book into English as "Rigveda Sanhita" in the year 1856. Both Madvacharya and Sayanacharya studied at the Sringeri monastery.


title: Rigveda

text: A number of other commentaries ("s") were written during the medieval period, including the commentaries by Skandasvamin (pre-Sayana, roughly of the Gupta period), Udgitha (pre-Sayana), Venkata-Madhava (pre-Sayana, c. 10th to 12th centuries) and Mudgala (after Sayana, an abbreviated version of Sayana's commentary).


title: Rigveda

text: In the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, reformers like Swami Dayananda Saraswati (founder of the Arya Samaj) and Sri Aurobindo (founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram) discussed the philosophies of the Vedas. According to Robson, Dayananda believed "there were no errors in the Vedas (including the "Rigveda"), and if anyone showed him an error, he would maintain that it was a corruption added later".


title: Rigveda

text: According to Dayananda and Aurobindo the Vedic scholars had a monotheistic conception. Sri Aurobindo gave commentaries, general interpretation guidelines, and a partial translation in "The secret of Veda" (1946). Sri Aurobindo finds Sayana's interpretation to be ritualistic in nature, and too often having inconsistent interpretations of Vedic terms, trying to fit the meaning to a narrow mold. Accorording to Aurobindo, if Sayana's interepretation were to be accepted, it would seem as if the Rig Veda belongs to an unquestioning tradition of faith, starting from an original error. Aurobindo attempted to interpret hymns to Agni in the "Rigveda" as mystical. Aurobindo states that the Vedic hymns were a quest after a higher truth, define the "Rta" (basis of Dharma), conceive life in terms of a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, and sought the ultimate reality.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda", in contemporary Hinduism, has been a reminder of the ancient cultural heritage and point of pride for Hindus, with some hymns still in use in major rites of passage ceremonies, but the literal acceptance of most of the textual essence is long gone. Musicians and dance groups celebrate the text as a mark of Hindu heritage, through incorporating Rigvedic hymns in their compositions, such as in "Hamsadhvani" and "Subhapantuvarali" of Carnatic music, and these have remained popular among the Hindus for decades.


title: Rigveda

text: According to Axel Michaels, "most Indians today pay lip service to the Veda and have no regard for the contents of the text." According to Louis Renou, the Vedic texts are a distant object, and "even in the most orthodox domains, the reverence to the Vedas has come to be a simple raising of the hat". According to Andrea Pinkney, "the social history and context of the Vedic texts are extremely distant from contemporary Hindu religious beliefs and practice", and the reverence for the Vedas in contemporary Hinduism illustrates the respect among the Hindus for their heritage.


title: Rigveda

text: The Rig Veda plays a role in the modern construction of a Hindu identity, portraying Hindus as the original inhabitants of India. The "Rigveda" has been referred to in the "Indigenous Aryans" and Out of India theory. Dating the Rig Veda as contemporaneous, or even preceding the Indus Valley civilisation, an argument is made that the IVC was Aryan, and the bearer of the Rig Veda. Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his "Orion: Or Researches Into The Antiquity Of The Vedas" (1893) has concluded that the date of composition of the "Rigveda" dates at least as far back as 60004000 BCE based on his astronomical research into the position of the constellation Orion. These theories are controversial, and not accepted or propagated in mainstream scholarship.


title: Rigveda

text: The "Rigveda" is considered particularly difficult to translate, owing to its length, poetic nature, the language itself, and the absence of any close contemporary texts for comparison. Staal describes it as the most "obscure, distant and difficult for moderns to understand". As a result, he says, it "is often misinterpreted" – with many early translations containing straightforward errors – "or worse: used as a peg on which to hang an idea or a theory." Another issue is technical terms such as "mandala", conventionally translated "book", but more literally rendered "cycle". Karen Thomson, editor of the Metrically Restored Text Online at the University of Texas at Austin, argues, as linguists in the nineteenth century had done (Friedrich Max Müller, Rudolf von Roth, William Dwight Whitney, Theodor Benfey, John Muir, Edward Vernon Arnold), that the apparent obscurity derives from the failure to discard a mass of assumptions about ritual meaning inherited from Vedic tradition.


title: Rigveda

text: The first published translation of any portion of the "Rigveda" in any European language was into Latin, by Friedrich August Rosen, working from manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke. In 1849, Max Müller published his six-volume translation into German, the first printed edition and most studied. H. H. Wilson was the first to make a translation of the Rig Veda into English, published from 185088. Wilson's version was based on a commentary of the complete text by , a 14th-century Sanskrit scholar, which he also translated.


title: Rigveda

text: Translations have since been made in several languages, including French and Russian. Karl Friedrich Geldner completed the first scholarly translation in the 1920s, which was published after his death. Translations of shorter cherrypicked anthologies have also been published, such as those by Wendy Doniger in 1981 and Walter Maurer in 1986, although Jamison and Brereton say they "tend to create a distorted view" of the text. In 1994, Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. Holland published the first attempt to restore the entirety of the "Rigveda" to its poetic form, systematically identifying and correcting sound changes and sandhi combinations which had distorted the original metre and meaning.


title: Salton Sea

text: The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline body of water in Riverside and Imperial counties at the southern end of the U.S. state of California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough that stretches to the Gulf of California in Mexico. Over millions of years, the Colorado River has flowed into the Imperial Valley and deposited alluvium (soil), creating fertile farmland, building up the terrain, and constantly moving its main course and river delta. For thousands of years, the river has alternately flowed into the valley, or diverted around it, creating either a saline lake called Lake Cahuilla, or a dry desert basin, respectively. When the Colorado River flows into the valley, the lake level depends on river flows and the balance between inflow and evaporative loss. When the river diverts around the valley, the lake dries completely, as it did around 1580. Hundreds of archaeological sites have been found in this region, indicating possibly long-term Native American villages and temporary camps.


title: Salton Sea

text: The current lake was formed from an inflow of water from the Colorado River in 1905. Beginning in 1900, an irrigation canal was dug from the Colorado River to the old Alamo River channel to provide water to the Imperial Valley for farming. The headgates and canals sustained a buildup of silt, so a series of cuts were made in the bank of the Colorado River to further increase the water flow. Water from spring floods broke through a canal head-gate diverting a portion of the river flow into the Salton Basin for two years before repairs were completed. The water in the formerly dry lake bed created the modern lake, which is about .


title: Salton Sea

text: The lake would have dried up, but farmers used generous amounts of Colorado River water and let the excess flow into the lake. In the 1950s and into the '60s, the area became a resort destination, and communities grew with hotels and vacation homes. Birdwatching was also popular as the wetlands were a major resting stop on the Pacific Flyway.


title: Salton Sea

text: In the 1970s, scientists issued warnings that the lake would continue to shrink and become more inhospitable to wildlife. In the 1980s, contamination from farm runoff promoted the outbreak and spread of diseases. Massive die-offs of the avian populations have occurred, especially after the loss of several species of fish on which they depend. Salinity rose so high that large fish kills occurred, often blighting the beaches of the sea with their carcasses. Tourism was drastically reduced.


title: Salton Sea

text: After 1999, the lake began to shrink as local agriculture used the water more efficiently so less runoff flowed into the lake. As the lake bed became exposed, the winds sent clouds of toxic dust into nearby communities. Smaller amounts of dust reached into the Los Angeles area and people there could sometimes smell an odor coming from the lake. The state is mainly responsible for fixing the problems, and California lawmakers pledged to fund air-quality management projects in conjunction with the signing of the 2003 agreement to send more water to coastal cities. Local, state, and federal bodies all had found minimal success dealing with the dust, dying wildlife, and other problems for which warnings had been issued decades before. At the beginning of 2018 local agencies declared an emergency and, along with the state, funded and developed the Salton Sea Management Program.


title: Salton Sea

text: In 2020, "Palm Springs Life" magazine summarized the ecological situation as "Salton Sea derives its fame as the biggest environmental disaster in California history".


title: Salton Sea

text: After a slow start and some small projects, construction started on a $206.5 million project in early 2021 on the delta of the New River, creating ponds and wetlands on the southern shore of the lake.


title: Salton Sea

text: The Gulf of California would extend as far north as the city of Indio, were it not for the delta created by the Colorado River. Over three million years, through all of the Pleistocene, the river's delta expanded until it cut off the northern part of the gulf. Since then, the Colorado River has alternated between emptying into the basin, creating a freshwater lake, and emptying into the gulf, leaving the lake to dry and turn to desert. Wave-cut shorelines at various elevations record a repeated cycle of filling and drying over hundreds of thousands of years. The most recent freshwater lake was Lake Cahuilla, also known as the Blake Sea after American professor and geologist William Phipps Blake. It covered over , six times the area of the Salton Sea.


title: Salton Sea

text: Archaeological sites and radiocarbon dates indicate that the lake was filled three or four times over the last 1300 years. When full, the lake would attract Native Americans to its shores. Hundreds of sites have been found, some possibly long-term villages and other temporary camps. The occupants ate at least four species of fish (two of which were razorback sucker and bonytail chub), birds (particularly the coot), black-tailed jackrabbit, black-tailed cottontail rabbit, and sometimes deer and bighorn sheep. Among the plants they used were bulrush, cattail, mesquite, and saltbush. The Cahuilla people have an oral memory of the last lake, which existed in the 17th century and dried up soon after 1700.


title: Salton Sea

text: Throughout the Spanish period of California's history, the area was referred to as the "Colorado Desert" after the Colorado River. In a railroad survey completed in 1855, it was called "the Valley of the Ancient Lake". On several old maps from the Library of Congress, it has been found labeled "Cahuilla Valley" (after the local Native American tribe) and "Cabazon Valley" (after a local Native American chief – Chief Cabazon). "Salt Creek" first appeared on a map in 1867 and "Salton Station" is on a railroad map from 1900, although this place had been there as a rail stop since the late 1870s. Until the advent of the modern sea, the Salton Sink was the site of a major salt-mining operation.


title: Salton Sea

text: In 1900, under governor James Budd, the California Development Company began construction of irrigation canals to divert water from the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed. After construction of these irrigation canals, the Salton Sink became fertile for a time, allowing farmers to plant crops.


title: Salton Sea

text: Within two years, the Alamo Canal became filled with silt from the Colorado River. Engineers tried to alleviate the blockages to no avail. In 1905, heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning the third intake cut into the bank of the river and sending the flood into the Alamo Canal. The resulting flood poured down the canal, and down two former dry arroyos, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about long. Over about two years, these two newly created rivers carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink.


title: Salton Sea

text: The Southern Pacific Railroad tried to stop the flooding by dumping earth into the canal's headgates area, but the effort was not fast enough, and the river eroded deeper and deeper into the dry desert sand of the Imperial Valley. A large waterfall formed as a result and began cutting rapidly upstream along the path of the Alamo Canal that now was occupied by the Colorado. This waterfall was initially high, but grew to high before the flow through the breach was stopped. Originally, the waterfall was feared to recede upstream to the true main path of the Colorado, becoming up to high, when it would be practically impossible to stop the flow.


title: Salton Sea

text: As the basin filled, the town of Salton, a Southern Pacific Railroad siding, the New Liverpool Salt Company facility and miniature railroad, and Torres-Martinez Native American land were submerged. The tribe's reservation now straddles the northern end of the lake. The sudden influx of water and the lack of any drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea.


title: Salton Sea

text: In the 1920s, agriculture had boomed in the valley as the Imperial Irrigation District delivered large quantities of Colorado River water to irrigate the crops. The lake would have dried up naturally, but with flood irrigation being commonly used, plenty of water ran off the farms into the lake and kept it full. The district holds senior rights to water from the Colorado River according to Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, which is based on whoever first put the water to beneficial use could continue to claim it.<ref name="TNY 2015/05/04"></ref> In 1930, a wildlife refuge was established on some wetlands along the edge of the lake that had attracted many birds. The fish flourished in the lake and provided a source of food for massive populations of migratory birds. Birdwatchers flocked to this new refuge in the middle of a desert.


title: Salton Sea

text: The continuing intermittent flooding of the Imperial Valley from the Colorado River ended with the construction of Hoover Dam. The Imperial Dam, built in 1938, serves as a desilting dam for water entering the irrigation canals.


title: Salton Sea

text: In the 1950s and into the 1960s, the communities expanded as the area's reputation as a resort destination and sport fishery grew. Hotels and yacht clubs were built on the shore along with homes and schools. Resorts in communities like Bombay Beach hosted entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys and Bing Crosby. Yacht clubs held parties at night and golf courses provided recreation. Many people came for boating activities such as water skiing and fishing as stocked fish proliferated. Lakeshore communities grew as vacation homes were built. More than 1.5 million visitors visited annually at the peak.


title: Salton Sea

text: In the 1970s, scientists issued warnings about the changes coming to this lake with no outlet. Studies that started in the 1960s found a complex problem for which any remediation would be expensive. The Imperial Valley has about of farmland for which flood irrigation is typical. Water from the Colorado River is diverted near Yuma, Arizona, into the All-American Canal. The canal runs west along the Mexican border and then north into of irrigation channels that crisscross the farms.<ref name="KPPC 2015/06/03"></ref>