Among the earliest surviving written records are the Vedas, composed in Sanskrit on the Indian subcontinent, with portions that date from as far back as 1500 BC. Together with the Upanishads, a rich body of commentary likely written sometime after the eighth century BC, the Vedas are a voluminous collection of verse, mantra, and prose that constitutes the sacred texts of what would become the Hindu religion—now practiced by one in seven inhabitants of the earth, about 1.1 billion people.
