Who Prithvi is
Prithvi is the Earth. Her name means the broad one, and the Vedic poets liked to explain it: she is called Prithvi because she was spread out. They also call her Bhumi, which is simply the word for ground.
In the Rigveda she is almost never alone. She is the Mother, and beside her stands Dyaus, the Father Sky. The two are praised together in six hymns as the parents of the gods and of everything that lives. Prithvi by herself has one small hymn of three verses (5.84). It says that she bears the weight of the mountains, that she holds the great forest trees fast in the ground, and that rain comes down on her from the lightning of the cloud.
The Rigveda has one more picture of her, and it comes at a funeral. The mourners speak to the dead man and send him to "Earth the Mother", wide and kind and soft as wool. Then they speak to her and ask her to cover him gently, as a mother draws her skirt over her child.
Her great hymn is in the Atharvaveda (12.1). It runs to sixty-three verses and it is spoken by someone who loves the ground under his feet. He praises her hills and snowy mountains, her forests, her rivers that run day and night, and her soil that is brown, black and red. He says she carries people of many languages and many customs and gives room to all of them. He asks her for milk as a son asks his mother, and he promises not to wound her when he digs.
The Earth is my mother and I am her son.
The same hymn names her husband as Parjanya, the rain, and asks that whatever is dug out of her may quickly grow again.
She is patient above all. The hymn says she carries the wise man and the fool alike, lets both good and bad people walk her roads, and makes a bed for everyone who lies down on her.