The Hindu God Indra was the chief deity and at his prime during the
Vedic period, where he was considered to be the supreme God. Indra was initially recorded in the
Rigveda, the first of the religious scriptures that comprise the
Vedas. Indra continued to play a prominent role throughout the evolution of Hinduism and played a pivotal role in the two Sanskrit epics that comprise the
Itihasas, appearing in both the
Ramayana and
Mahabharata. Although the importance of Indra has since been subsided in favor of other Gods in contemporary Hinduism, he is still venerated and worshipped. In
Greek mythology, the
Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, was the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous, evolved from a designation of a place or person
struck by lightning,
enelysion, enelysios. This could be a reference to
Zeus, the god of lightning, so "lightning-struck" could be saying that the person was blessed (struck) by Zeus (/lightning/fortune). Egyptologist
Jan Assmann has also suggested that Greek
Elysion may have instead been derived from the
Egyptian term
ialu (older
iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "
Reed fields" (Egyptian:
sekhet iaru /
ialu), a paradisiacal land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity. ==See also==