Before stone temples rose against the sky, before epics were sung in royal courts, and before philosophy took the shape of debate and doctrine, there was sound.
It did not belong to any one tribe, kingdom, or language as later generations would understand them. It belonged to the open sky, to the wind that moved across the plains, to the crackle of ritual fire, and to the deep stillness in which human beings first began to wonder not merely how they lived, but why. In the long dawn of civilization on the Indian subcontinent, this sound became memory, memory became tradition, and tradition became what later ages would call the Vedas.