You also have to remember the context in which the “chants” were passed down. It is better to see the Rig Vedas and the Vedas as a ritual manual for doing a successful rite. And the success of the rite was paramount. One wrong action, one wrong word would spell disaster for the efficacy of the whole endeavor. People prepared for a long time to do the ritual.
You had several priestly functions, like the Hotar, who recites the invocations of the Veda, and there is also the Brahman. The Brahman checks if everything is done to precision and no mistakes are made. If there are, they need to do corrections.
This is another reason why one can say it has been passed down without much change. There is a critical edition by scholars that reconstructs the changes in meter that might have occurred, but nothing else.
No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.
am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me different articles?
According to my Internet the oldest surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.
The oldest written copy may be from 1040, but this is a written copy of a written copy of a written copy of ... etc, going back another millennia or so, before we get to the oral tradition.
Correct, thank you. Palm-leaf manuscripts typically last about 200 years. WP does claim that some experts believe the Rig Veda was not written down until quite late:
> It is unclear as to when the Rigveda was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE.[3][78] According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800–1000 CE.[79] The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period).[33][80] Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the Smriti rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel.[33] The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.[81]
As I understand it, the Tipitaka, Panini, Patanjali, etc., were also first written down around the end of the first millennium BCE or the beginning of the first millennium CE, as writing was adopted relatively late in India.
which is obviously pure speculation, as is the assumption that these hypothetical texts were unaltered. there might be reasons to assume that this was the case but it's still speculation
Only in the sense that everything we "know" about the world is speculation, inferred from our fallible senses by way of our fallible reason. The world may not actually exist, after all, being pure illusion. A common Vedanta belief is that the whole world is just a dream Brahman is having which will vanish when he wakes up. Even if the world exists, you might be dreaming right now, and I might not have actually replied to your comment. Perhaps you have been in a coma for years, your loved ones desperately hoping you'll wake up, while you dream about posting poorly-thought-out comments on a web site.
But actually there are rather solid reasons for believing that the alterations in the Rig Veda over the last 3000 years have been minimal, going far beyond what is commonly described as "pure speculation". Some of them have been described already in this thread, but there is an extensive academic literature on the topic, much of it linked from the Wikipedia article you started reading.
