Ancient Indian History

Ancient Indian History

Earliest historical evidence from Mehargarh (north-west India) shows beginning of civilization in India at around 6500 B.C. It is the earliest and largest urban site of the period in the world. This site has yielded evidence for the earliest domestication of animals, evolution of agriculture, as well as arts and crafts. The horse was first domesticated here in 6500 B.C. The people in this tradition are the same basic ethnic groups as in India today, with their same basic types of languages Indo-European and Dravidian. There is a progressive process of the domestication of animals, particularly cattle, the development of agriculture, beginning with barley and then later wheat and rice, and the use of metal, beginning with copper and culminating in iron, along with the development villages and towns.

Two important cities were discovered: Harappa on the Ravi river, and Mohenjodaro on the Indus during excavations in 1920. The remains of these two cities were part of a large civilization and well developed ancient civilization, which is now called by historians as 'Indus Valley Civilization', or 'Saraswati Civilization'. Later Harappan (Sarasvati) civilization 3100-1900 BC shows massive cities, complex agriculture and metallurgy, sophistication of arts and crafts, and precision in weights and measures. They built large buildings, which were mathematically-planned. The city planning in those ancient cities is comparable to the best of our modern cities. This civilization had a written language and was highly sophisticated. Some of these towns were almost three miles in diameter with thousands of residents. These ancient municipalities had granaries, citadels, and even household toilets. In Mohenjodaro, a mile-long canal connected the city to the sea, and trading ships sailed as far as Mesopotamia. At its height, the Indus civilization extended over half a million square miles across the Indus river valley, and though it existed at the same time as the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Sumer, it far outlasted them. This Sarasvati civilization was a center of trading and for the diffusion of civilization throughout south and west Asia, which often dominated the Mesopotamian region.
Mehrgarh, Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Kalibangan and Lothal are peripheral cities of the great Sarasvati civilization with more than 500 sites along its banks awaiting excavation.

4500 B.C. marks Mandhatr's defeat of Druhyus, driving them to the west into Iran. 4000-3700 B.C. was the Rig Veda period. In 3730 B.C. occurred the 'Battle of Ten' Kings - the age of Sudas and his sage advisors, Vasistha and Visvamitra. 3600 to 3100 B.C. was the late Vedic age during which Yajur, Sama, and Atharva Vedas were composed. 3100 B.C. is the date of the Mahabharata, composed by Vyasa. At this time, a tectonic plate shift resulted in river Yamuna which was a tributary of river Saraswati shifted its course and Saraswati became smaller. It was the beginning of 'Kali Yuga'. In 1900 B.C., another tectonic plate shift made Saraswati lose Sutlej. This dried up Sarasvati, causing massive exodus of people towards the Ganga valley in east, whence arose the classical civilization of India. Post-Harappan civilization 1900-1000 BC shows the abandonment of the Harappan towns owing to ecological and river changes but without a real break in the continuity of the culture. There is a decentralization and relocation in which the same basic agricultural and artistic traditions continue, along with a few significant urban sites like Dwaraka. This gradually develops into the Gangetic civilization of the first millennium BC, which is the classical civilization of ancient India, which retains its memory of its origin in the Saraswati region through the Vedas.

David Frawley and other modern scholars propose -

1. 6500-3100 BC, Pre-Harappan, early Rig Vedic

2. 3100-1900 BC, Mature Harappan 3100-1900, period of the Four Vedas.

3. 1900-1000 BC, Late Harappan, late Vedic and Brahmana period
Buddha and Mahavira -
The sequence of development in the literature does not parallel a migration into India but the historical development of civilization in India from the Sarasvati to the Ganges'. In the 5th century BC, Siddhartha Gautama founded the religion of Buddhism, a profoundly influential work of human thought still espoused by much of the world. In the same another religion called Jainism was founded by Mahavira.

Around 500 BC, when the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius, pushing their empire eastward, conquered the ever-prized Indus Valley. The Persians were in turn conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great, who came as far as the Beas River, where he defeated king Porus and an army of 200 elephants in 326 BC. The tireless, charismatic conqueror wanted to extend his empire even further eastward, but his own troops (undoubtedly exhausted) refused to continue. Alexander returned home, leaving behind garrisons to keep the trade routes open.