The word puja does not appear in the earliest layer of Hindu scripture. Vedic religion centered on yajna, fire offerings poured to gods with no fixed body or image, chanted by priests according to precise formulas. Puja as devotion offered to a housed image, a murti treated as a living guest to be woken, bathed, dressed, and fed, rises to prominence only in the later Puranic and Agamic periods, roughly the first millennium of the common era, alongside the growth of bhakti, devotion to a personal god one can see and touch.
Temple Agama texts from this period supply the detailed manuals still used to consecrate an image and conduct its daily service, and it is this image centered devotion, not the older fire ritual, that most Hindus today mean by worship. The change was not uncontested: currents within Hinduism itself, and later reform movements such as the nineteenth century Arya Samaj, criticized image worship as a departure from the aniconic Vedic religion and argued for a return to fire and mantra without a physical image. Puja also diverged sharply by setting: elaborate priest led temple worship with its Agama rulebook coexists with an entirely informal home puja that a householder performs without any priest, using whatever image, however modest, the family keeps.