Indian
The Vedic corpus was composed in northern India between roughly 1500 and 500 BCE and transmitted orally for centuries before it was written down. Its authors are named in the tradition as rishis, seers who did not compose the hymns but heard them, and the earliest layers are attributed to family lineages—Vishvamitra, Vasishtha, Bharadvaja—rather than to individuals. The later Upanishads introduce named teachers such as Yajnavalkya, Uddalaka Aruni, and the woman philosopher Gargi Vachaknavi, though the texts are anonymous compositions built from debates rather than authored books. Transmission depended on memorisation techniques of extraordinary precision, with reciters cross-checking word order by chanting the same text in permuted patterns; scholars believe the Rig Veda survived largely unchanged for three thousand years by this method. This author record covers the anonymous Sanskrit works of the Vedic and Upanishadic tradition, kept separate from other anonymous traditions so that origin and language are not conflated.