A question before time: the Nasadiya Sukta meets the Big Bang
Nowhere else in the ancient world did a people place at the head of their scripture not a triumphant creator but an open question. The Nasadiya Sukta, the Rigveda's Hymn of Creation, asks what was there before there was anything - and refuses an easy answer.
Read beside modern cosmology, the hymn is uncanny. It denies both being and non-being before creation; physics, at the Planck frontier, runs out of language at the same wall. It names desire as the first seed; cosmology finds primordial fluctuations that grew into galaxies.
This is "binocular history": the testimony of the texts in one eye, the seen evidence of science in the other, and an honest harmony - or an honest silence - where they meet.