Chronological Analysis of Rigvedic Mandalas using Social Networks
This work addresses the long-standing scholarly challenge of dating ancient Vedic texts, offering an incremental computational method for historical analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of establishing the internal chronology of the Rigvedic Mandalas by analyzing deities and rivers using text analysis and social network methods, resulting in a grid-based social network that provides plausible chronological pointers and demonstrates the approach's applicability to other references.
Establishing the chronology of the Vedas has interested scholars for the last two centuries. The oldest among them is Rig-Veda which has ten Mandalas, each composed separately. In this paper, we look at deciphering plausible pointers to the internal chronology of the Mandalas, by focusing on Gods and Goddesses worshiped in different Mandalas. We apply text analysis to the Mandalas using Clustering Techniques based on Cosine Similarity. Then we represent the association of deities with Mandalas using a grid-based Social Network that is amenable to chronological analysis and demonstrates the benefits of using Social Network Analysis for the problem at hand. Further, we analyze references to rivers to arrive at additional correlations. The approach used can be deployed generically to analyze other kinds of references and mentions and arrive at more substantive inferences.