Historical Vedic religion from c. 500 BCE, declined in India over the 5th to 12th centuries in favor of Puranic Hinduism and Islam. Historical Vedic religion The historical Vedic religion (also known as Vedism, Brahmanism, Vedic Brahmanism, and ancient Hinduism) refers to the religious ideas and practices among Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of ancient India after about 1500 BCE. These ideas and practices are found in the Vedic texts, and they were one of the major influences that shaped contemporary Hinduism. According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica", in the Hindu tradition and particularly in India, the Vedic religion is considered to be a part of Hinduism.
Vedas towards the end of the vedic period, around or after the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. These auxiliary fields of Vedic studies emerged because the language of the Vedas, composed centuries earlier, became too archaic to the people of that time. The Vedangas were sciences that focused on helping understand and interpret the Vedas that had been composed many centuries earlier. The six subjects of Vedanga are phonetics (), poetic meter (), grammar (), etymology and linguistics (Nirukta), rituals and rites of passage (), time keeping and astronomy (). Vedangas developed as ancillary studies for the Vedas, but its