The Dawn, and a Link Between India and Europe

Ushas is the dawn, and the hymns addressed to her are widely held to be the finest poetry in the Rigveda. She is imagined as a radiant young woman who uncovers herself, drives a chariot drawn by ruddy cows, opens the doors of the sky and wakes the sleeping world; the poets praise her generosity and reproach her, gently, for her age, for she has worn out generation after generation of mortals while remaining forever young herself.

Ushas is one of the clearest single pieces of evidence for the common origin of the Indian and European religious traditions: her name is cognate with Greek Eos and Latin Aurora (and Lithuanian Ausra), all from a reconstructed Indo-European dawn-goddess, and the poetic descriptions across these traditions are close enough to point to a shared inheritance. Unlike almost every other major Vedic deity, Ushas has no later cult and no Puranic career, she belongs almost entirely to the archaic world of the hymns, which makes her survival in them all the more valuable.