Indra is the king of the gods and by a wide margin the most invoked deity of the Rigveda, roughly a quarter of its hymns are addressed to him. He is the wielder of the vajra, the thunderbolt, the great drinker of soma, and the warrior whose central deed is the slaying of the serpent Vritra, who had penned up the waters: in releasing them Indra frees the rivers, brings the rains and, in one reading, sets the ordered world in motion. This victory is the founding myth of the earliest layer of Indian religion, retold and alluded to constantly, and it casts Indra as the champion who wins cosmos from chaos.
Indra's antiquity is confirmed by evidence older than the Rigveda itself: a treaty between the Hittite and Mitanni kingdoms, inscribed on a cuneiform tablet from around the fourteenth century BCE and recovered from the Hittite capital Hattusa, invokes a group of gods including Indara, along with Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatya twins, as divine witnesses to the oath, a startling appearance of recognisably Vedic deity names in a Near Eastern political document centuries before the Rigveda's hymns were composed in India. Indra's central deed, freeing the pent waters by slaying the serpent Vritra, is also widely compared by scholars to other Indo-European dragon-slaying myths, among them Thor's battle with the world-serpent Jormungandr and Zeus's defeat of Typhon, a recurring chaos-battle pattern some trace to a shared inherited myth.