The ancient Indian Vedas contain sentences of rather varied content, including religious statements ("Varuṇa truly is the king of the gods"), words of wisdom ("Thought is quicker than speech") or even banal observations ("Wife and husband wash each other's back"). The well-known Erlangen Indo-Europeanists and Indologists Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996) and Johanna Narten (1930-2019) collected such sentences in the original language during their decades of work on the Vedas. 

In Vedic Sentences: Edited from the Literary Estate (Veda-Sätze: Aus Dem Nachlass Herausgegeben) (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2024), Antonia Ruppel and Bernhard Forssman have furnished this collection of 863 short texts with translations and a complete vocabulary in two languages (English and German) and are publishing it here for the first time.

This book is available open access here. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices