Ancient India | myHistro

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Ancient India

2600BC

Indus civilization

The rise of civilization in the Indus valley around 2500 BC duplicates what occurred in Mesopotamia nearly one thousand years earlier. In both areas, Neolithic farmers lived in food-producing villages situated on the hilly flanks of a large river valley..

2600BC - 1800BC

1700BC

Aryan invasion

The invaders who brought an end to what was left of Indus civilization called themselves Aryans, meaning "nobles." They spoke Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, and were a part of the great Indo-European migrations of the second millennium BC, whose...

1700BC - 1300BC

1500BC

Early Vedic Age

We know more about the Aryans than we know about their Indus civilization predecessors. Our knowledge comes largely from the four Vedas ("Knowledge"), great collections of hymns to the gods and ritual texts composed and handed down orally between 1500...

1500BC - 1000BC

1000BC

Later Vedic Age

Most of our knowledge about the five hundred years that comprise the Later Vedic Age is gleaned from two great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and from the religious compositions of the Brahmin priests...

1000BC - 500BC

800BC

Ancient Indian society

In the Later Vedic Age, the three pillars of traditional Indian society - the autonomous village, caste, and the joint family - were established. India has always been primarily agricultural, and its countryside is still a patchwork of thousands of...

800BC

700BC

Brahmanas and Upanishads

Radical changes in Indian religion and thought occurred during the Later Vedic Age, producing what became one of the world's most complex religious and philosophical systems. The first phase of this development is clearly seen in the Brahmanas...

700BC - 100BC

600BC

Changes in religion

Upanishadic thought became a part of Hinduism, the developing religion of India, when the Brahmin priests incorporated it into their teaching. In doing so they gave the caste system additional religious support by linking it to karma and the process of...

600BC

563BC

Siddharta Gautama (Buddha)

By taking over Upanishadic thought, the Brahmins had laid the foundations of classical Hinduism, but they continued to place great emphasis upon the importance of sacrifice, priestly ritual, and magical spells...

563BC - 483BC

400BC

Buddhism as a religion

What is "the truth" that the Buddha believed could be discovered by individual effort, without the need for priestly assistance? The answer had been revealed to him during the Great Enlightenment in the form of the Four Noble Truths: (1) existence is...

400BC

326BC

Alexander the Great invades India

By the end of the Later Vedic Age about 500 BC, a thousand years after the collapse of the Indus civilization, the Aryan invaders of India had established sixteen major kingdoms and tribal oligarchies in northern India, stretching from modern Pakistan...

326BC

320BC

Chandragupta Maurya

In 322 BC, shortly after Alexander's death, a new era began in India. In that year Chandragupta Maurya seized the state of Magadha in the Ganges valley. Over the next 24 years Chandragupta conquered northern India and founded the Maurya Dynasty, which...

320BC - 298BC

319BC

Mauryan Empire

Seleucus' ambassador to the court of Chandragupta, whose name was Megasthenes, wrote a detailed account of India, fragments of which have survived. They give a fascinating picture of life in the empire...

319BC - 185BC

269BC

Ashoka

Following Chandragupta's death in 297 BC, his son and grandson expanded the empire southward into the Deccan Peninsula. However, Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka (269-232 BC), the most renowned of all Indian rulers, was more committed to peace than to war..

269BC - 232BC

185BC

Fall of the Mauryan Empire

Almost immediately after Ashoka's death in 232 BC, the Mauryan Empire began to disintegrate. The last emperor was assassinated about 185 BC in a palace revolution led by a Brahmin priest. Some five centuries of disintegration and disorder followed...

185BC

30BC

Contacts with the Romans

In the centuries immediately preceding and following the birth of Christ, the great civilizations of the world - Roman, Indian, and Chinese – were connected by commercial and diplomatic exchanges...

30BC - 300

1BC

Sea traffic to India

By the late 1st century BC, after Egypt and Syria had succumbed to Rome, Roman capital and appetite for the luxury goods of India – ivory, pearls, spices, dyes, and cotton – greatly stimulated trade with the East...

1BC

30

Kushans

In the 2nd century BC, a wave of migrations of nomadic peoples was triggered in Central Asia. In the course of these migrations, Yuezhi, a confederation of tribes that had inhabited eastern China, invaded the Hellenistic Indo-Greek kingdoms of Bactria,...

30 - 375

120

Silk trade with China

The Chinese made the first move to pierce the land barrier separating them from the West. In 138 BC the Han emperor Wu Ti dispatched an envoy to Bactra to seek allies against the Hsiung-nu (Mongolian nomads)...

120

220

Decline in East-West trade

Beginning in the 3rd century AD, contacts between the East and the West gradually declined. With the overthrow of the Han Dynasty in AD 220, China's power and prestige dwindled in Central Asia...

220

300

South India

With the exception of a short period during the Mauryan Empire, the vast tableland of south India - the Deccan - and its fertile coastal plains remained outside the main forces of political change in the north...

300

Thinking..

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