Indian religions these hero stones to bless them with victory. The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans, which were collected and later redacted into the "Samhitas" (usually known as the Vedas), four canonical collections of hymns or mantras composed in archaic Sanskrit. These texts are the central "shruti" (revealed) texts of Hinduism. The period of the composition, redaction and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE. The Vedic Period is most significant for the composition of the four Vedas,
Vedas inspired later Hindu scholars such as Adi Shankara to classify each Veda into "karma-kanda" (कर्म खण्ड, action/ritual-related sections) and "jnana-kanda" (ज्ञान खण्ड, knowledge/spirituality-related sections). The texts considered "Vedic" in the sense of "corollaries of the Vedas" is less clearly defined, and may include numerous post-Vedic texts such as the later Upanishads and the Sutra literature. Texts not considered to be "shruti" are known as "smriti" (Sanskrit: ""; "the remembered"), or texts of remembered traditions. This indigenous system of categorization was adopted by Max Müller and, while it is subject to some debate, it is still widely used. As Axel Michaels