The material world
What the four collections name, and in which of them. Every figure is a Sanskrit lexical minimum: a lower bound produced by a registered set of word forms.
- Things listed
- 40
- Collections read
- 4
- Every figure is
- Partial coverage
| Named thing | Kind | Rigveda | Samaveda | Yajurveda | Atharvaveda | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cattle (go) | Animal | 458 | 76 | 33 | 190 | 757 |
| river (sindhu) | River | 181 | 15 | 8 | 32 | 236 |
| horse (aśva) | Animal | 162 | 19 | 8 | 45 | 234 |
| bull (vṛṣabha) | Animal | 131 | 19 | 13 | 38 | 201 |
| bird (vi) | Animal | 51 | 15 | 11 | 29 | 106 |
| gold (hiraṇya) | Metal | 38 | 6 | 6 | 34 | 84 |
| serpent (ahi) | Animal | 46 | 1 | 1 | 20 | 68 |
| livestock (paśu) | Animal | 17 | no match | 5 | 35 | 57 |
| sheep (avi) | Animal | 29 | 11 | 4 | 2 | 46 |
| wild animal (mṛga) | Animal | 22 | 2 | 3 | 14 | 41 |
| buffalo (mahiṣa) | Animal | 22 | 5 | 4 | 9 | 40 |
| barley (yava) | Crop | 19 | 2 | 2 | 15 | 38 |
| grain (dhānya) | Crop | 12 | no match | 1 | 13 | 26 |
| goat (aja) | Animal | 3 | no match | 1 | 13 | 17 |
| Turvasha (turvaśa) | Tribe | 11 | 3 | no match | 1 | 15 |
| metal (ayas) | Metal | 8 | no match | no match | 3 | 11 |
| Purus (pūru) | Tribe | 9 | no match | no match | 1 | 10 |
| adder (pṛdāku) | Animal | no match | no match | no match | 10 | 10 |
| Bharatas (bharata) | Tribe | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 |
| lead (sīsa) | Metal | no match | no match | 3 | 4 | 7 |
| Yadu (yadu) | Tribe | 6 | no match | no match | no match | 6 |
| frog (maṇḍūka) | Animal | 4 | no match | no match | 2 | 6 |
| sesame (tila) | Crop | no match | no match | no match | 5 | 5 |
| dog (śvan) | Animal | 1 | no match | no match | 3 | 4 |
| scorpion (vṛścika) | Animal | 1 | no match | no match | 3 | 4 |
| Parushni (paruṣṇī) | River | 1 | 1 | no match | 1 | 3 |
| Trtsus (tṛtsu) | Tribe | 3 | no match | no match | no match | 3 |
| constrictor (svaja) | Animal | no match | no match | no match | 3 | 3 |
| rice (vrīhi) | Crop | no match | no match | no match | 3 | 3 |
| Sarasvati river (sarasvatī) | River | 1 | no match | no match | 1 | 2 |
| Sarayu (sarayu) | River | 2 | no match | no match | no match | 2 |
| Vipash (vipāś) | River | 2 | no match | no match | no match | 2 |
| Yamuna (yamunā) | River | 2 | no match | no match | no match | 2 |
| beans (māṣa) | Crop | no match | no match | no match | 2 | 2 |
| dark metal (śyāma) | Metal | no match | no match | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| silver (rajata) | Metal | no match | no match | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| tin (trapu) | Metal | no match | no match | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Ganges (gaṅgā) | River | 1 | no match | no match | no match | 1 |
| Shutudri (śutudrī) | River | 1 | no match | no match | no match | 1 |
| copper (loha) | Metal | no match | no match | 1 | no match | 1 |
Gaps we know are wrong
Cells the matcher cannot reach even though the corpus names the thing. They are declared here rather than left to read as an absence.
- metal (ayas) in YajurvedaNo lexical match
NO_LEXICAL_MATCH, and knowingly wrong. metal (ayas) is named in this corpus at VSM 18.13, the verse this graph measures as naming the most metals in it (5 reached there: copper (loha), dark metal (śyāma), gold (hiraṇya), lead (sīsa), tin (trapu)). No alias reaches it here: the elided form folds to a token that is the relative pronoun in almost all of its corpus occurrences, so registering it would land wrong-sense mentions instead of one right one. This cell is therefore NOT '0 occurrences' and NOT 'absent from this Veda'. The full lexical reason is the caveat sourced 'metals_by_veda'.
Named at VSM 18.13, in the same verse as copper (loha), dark metal (śyāma), gold (hiraṇya), lead (sīsa), tin (trapu).
The metals grid returned 28 of 28 cells: 15 lexical minimum, 13 no lexical match.
See every recorded limit of this build
How these counts were measured6
Lexical mentions only.
animals_by_vedaLexical mentions on Sanskrit evidence. A mention is not a claim that the passage is about agriculture.
crops_by_vedaEvery metal is returned against every Veda, so a cell that found nothing says NO_LEXICAL_MATCH in its own row rather than going missing: absence here is a fact about the matcher, never about the text. That distinction is load-bearing and there is a known false cell. The Yajurveda names ayas at VSM 18.13, where the Devanagari source writes it with avagraha elision (`me `yas ca me`) and it folds to the token `yasca`, which is the relative pronoun in 11 of its 12 corpus occurrences; registering it would land 11 wrong-sense mentions, so ayas reads NO_LEXICAL_MATCH for YV although that verse names it. `ayo` was rejected on the same precision test -- 6 token hits, of which only about half are the metal. Aliases are whole-word inflections only: the bare stem `ayas` substring-matches 645 times inside payasa/madayasva, and the bare `syama` token-matches a verb form at RV 6.5.7 and sits inside asyama 22 times, so only the attested `syamam`/`syamam` forms are admitted. Counts are lower bounds. `per_1000_mantras` is the figure to compare Vedas on, and it reorders the raw counts: gold is RV 38 against AV 34 raw but 3.601 against 5.823 normalised.
metals_by_vedaThere is deliberately no Sarasvati RIVER node: its forms match 172 mantras of which the great majority are the goddess, and a river node claiming them would assert 'this passage is about a river' of passages about a deity. Ancient names are not mapped to modern identifications.
rivers_mentionedFive tribes, 42 mentions. Published separately from rivers_and_tribes because the join of the two is empty: the tribes are attested and the rivers are attested, and they never share a mantra in this corpus.
tribes_mentionedThe lexical mention layer reaches all four corpora, so a corpus with no figure had no registered alias match rather than no coverage. A null is still not a zero: alias recall is partial and measured per entity, not assumed.
measured
Notes on the metals grid4
Every metal is returned against every Veda, so a cell that found nothing says NO_LEXICAL_MATCH in its own row rather than going missing: absence here is a fact about the matcher, never about the text. That distinction is load-bearing and there is a known false cell. The Yajurveda names ayas at VSM 18.13, where the Devanagari source writes it with avagraha elision (`me `yas ca me`) and it folds to the token `yasca`, which is the relative pronoun in 11 of its 12 corpus occurrences; registering it would land 11 wrong-sense mentions, so ayas reads NO_LEXICAL_MATCH for YV although that verse names it. `ayo` was rejected on the same precision test -- 6 token hits, of which only about half are the metal. Aliases are whole-word inflections only: the bare stem `ayas` substring-matches 645 times inside payasa/madayasva, and the bare `syama` token-matches a verb form at RV 6.5.7 and sits inside asyama 22 times, so only the attested `syamam`/`syamam` forms are admitted. Counts are lower bounds. `per_1000_mantras` is the figure to compare Vedas on, and it reorders the raw counts: gold is RV 38 against AV 34 raw but 3.601 against 5.823 normalised.
metals_by_vedaEvery registered metal is returned against every corpus, so no cell is omitted. A cell with no lexical match carries a null count and NO_LEXICAL_MATCH rather than 0: the registry admits attested whole-word inflections only, so the miss is a fact about the matcher.
measuredKnown-wrong cells, typed in their own rows and not only here: metal (ayas) in YV, attested at VSM 18.13. Read each cell's source_witness before concluding an absence.
measuredNormalising reorders gold (hiraṇya), lead (sīsa): each of those rows ranks corpora differently raw than per 1,000 mantras, and the row states both orderings.
measured