The Iron Age in the Indian subcontinent had succeeded the Late Harappan (Cemetery H) culture, also known as the last phase of the Indus Valley Tradition, in about 1300 BCE.
The cultures of the Punjab and Rajasthan in this phase spread eastward across the Gangetic plain.
For this reason, the succession of Iron Age cultures of northern India and Pakistan are also known as the Indo-Gangetic Tradition.
The Painted Gray Ware culture from around 1200 BCE to 800 BCE, which is contemporary to, and a successor of the Black and Red Ware culture, probably corresponds to the Vedic civilization, which has developed the Vedic language in northwestern India.
The Rigveda, a sacred collection of Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the gods or (devas) in Hinduism, retains many common Indo-Iranian elements, both in language and in content, that are not present in any other Vedic texts.
Its creation must have taken place over several centuries, and apart from the youngest books (1 and 10), it must have been essentially complete by 1200 BCE.
Based on philological and linguistic evidence, the Rigveda was composed roughly between 1700–1100 BCE (the early Vedic period) in the Sapta Sindhu region (a land of seven great rivers) which is the region around present-day Punjab, putting it among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use, as well as among the oldest texts of any Indo-European language.
There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities between the Rigveda and the early Iranian Avesta, deriving from the Proto-Indo-Iranian times, often associated with the early Andronovo culture of around 2000 BCE.
The final portions of the Rigveda, significantly Books 1 and 10, will be written in this age.
