Ancient India, Rise and Fall: Ancient Worlds and Civilizations, #5

By A.J. Carmichael

In ancient Indian history, there were four significant eras as highlighted below, a quick introduction is important in order to digest the material in this book. Prehistoric era: From 500,000 BCE to 11,000 BCE, South Asian hunter-gatherers made stone tools and painted cave paintings at Bhimbetka during the Old and Middle Stone Ages. Merhgarh, in Baluchistan, was where South Asian farming began between 11,000 and 3000 years ago. From 2500 BCE to 1900 BCE, the great Indian cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa provide us with much archaeological evidence.

 

Eras of India: Vedic and post-Vedic, No Aryan invasion took place, but a nomadic group of Indo-European speakers migrated from Iran and Afghanistan, calling themselves Arya, or the noble. Over the past four millennia, Indo-Aryan culture has developed uniquely within India, blending the values and heritages of the Arya and indigenous peoples. In the Indo-European language family, the Rig Veda is the oldest text. Among the three Vedas and other complementary Vedic literature, it is a crucial text in Vedic Hinduism. We have today's vast agricultural infrastructure in north India due to the expansion of the Indo-Aryans from Punjab to the Ganga basin. Mahajanapadas (great states) were formed from the Vedic polity, which Magadha dominated. Northwest India was invaded by both the Persians and the Greeks later in this period. Ajivakas, Buddhists, and Jains objected to the caste system, animal sacrifices, brahman dominance, and the Vedas in Vedic Hinduism.

The Great Empires lasted from about 300 BCE to c. AD 500. From Chandragupta Maurya's Arthashastra, an excellent manual of political economy, we can understand the principles of the Mauryan Empire, founded from Magadha in 321 BCE. With the help of many rock and pillar inscriptions, Ashoka humanized the empire and propagated Buddha's principles. The smaller Shaka, Kushan, and Satavahana kingdoms followed the Mauryan Empire. A flourishing agricultural industry and trade, both domestic and international, contributed significantly to Indian prosperity during this period. China and Rome dominated trade between India and China. According to the Samanta philosophy of tolerant neighborliness, the Gupta Empire followed a model of decentralized power. The Hindu-Buddhist-Jain civilization reached its peak of elitism under the Guptas. Classical Indian culture refers to that. Throughout history, Buddhism has remained popular but has evolved into Mahayana Buddhism, which emphasizes the Bodhisattva. Buddhism, Sanskrit literature, and mathematics flourished in this era, as at Ajanta.

 

The feudal era lasted from 500 AD to 1200 AD (and beyond). Among the most prominent post-Gupta regional and feudal kingdoms were those of King Harsha, the early Chalukyas, and the Pallavas. The kings maintained their power through large land grants, feudatory power, and patronage systems. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the aggressive and iconoclastic Turco-Afghans quickly invaded India due to the inter-Indian wars waged by the Gurjara-Pratihara, Pala, and Rashtrakuta kingdoms. The deep south remained highly dynamic and Hindu under the Pallavas and Cholas. The Vedic and Puranic forms of Hinduism gradually replaced Buddhism in India, while the holy and puranic forms of Hinduism stayed. Muslim power, embodied in the slave dynasty of Qutb-ud-Din Aybak, entrenched itself in north India from 1206 onward, paving the way for Indo-Islamic culture to flourish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AJ CARMICHAEL
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215324110

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AJ CARMICHAEL

Copyright © 2019 LEARN ALCHEMICAL PRESS

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

For Manu Radesh whose guidance and support were indispensable to me in writing this book, forever indebted.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In ancient Indian history , there were four significant eras as highlighted below, a quick introduction is important in order to digest the material in this book. Prehistoric era: From 500,000 BCE to 11,000 BCE, South Asian hunter-gatherers made stone tools and painted cave paintings at Bhimbetka during the Old and Middle Stone Ages. Merhgarh, in Baluchistan, was where South Asian farming began between 11,000 and 3000 years ago. From 2500 BCE to 1900 BCE, the great Indian cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa provide us with much archaeological evidence.

Eras of India: Vedic and post-Vedic, No Aryan invasion took place, but a nomadic group of Indo-European speakers migrated from Iran and Afghanistan, calling themselves Arya, or the noble. Over the past four millennia, Indo-Aryan culture has developed uniquely within India, blending the values and heritages of the Arya and indigenous peoples. In the Indo-European language family, the Rig Veda is the oldest text. Among the three Vedas and other complementary Vedic literature, it is a crucial text in Vedic Hinduism. We have today's vast agricultural infrastructure in north India due to the expansion of the Indo-Aryans from Punjab to the Ganga basin. Mahajanapadas (great states) were formed from the Vedic polity, which Magadha dominated. Northwest India was invaded by both the Persians and the Greeks later in this period. Ajivakas, Buddhists, and Jains objected to the caste system, animal sacrifices, brahman dominance, and the Vedas in Vedic Hinduism.

The Great Empires lasted from about 300 BCE to c. AD 500. From Chandragupta Maurya's Arthashastra, an excellent manual of political economy, we can understand the principles of the Mauryan Empire, founded from Magadha in 321 BCE. With the help of many rock and pillar inscriptions, Ashoka humanized the empire and propagated Buddha's principles. The smaller Shaka, Kushan, and Satavahana kingdoms followed the Mauryan Empire. A flourishing agricultural industry and trade, both domestic and international, contributed significantly to Indian prosperity during this period. China and Rome dominated trade between India and China. According to the Samanta philosophy of tolerant neighborliness, the Gupta Empire followed a model of decentralized power. The Hindu-Buddhist-Jain civilization reached its peak of elitism under the Guptas. Classical Indian culture refers to that. Throughout history, Buddhism has remained popular but has evolved into Mahayana Buddhism, which emphasizes the Bodhisattva. Buddhism, Sanskrit literature, and mathematics flourished in this era, as at Ajanta.

The feudal era lasted from 500 AD to 1200 AD (and beyond). Among the most prominent post-Gupta regional and feudal kingdoms were those of King Harsha, the early Chalukyas, and the Pallavas. The kings maintained their power through large land grants, feudatory power, and patronage systems. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the aggressive and iconoclastic Turco-Afghans quickly invaded India due to the inter-Indian wars waged by the Gurjara-Pratihara, Pala, and Rashtrakuta kingdoms. The deep south remained highly dynamic and Hindu under the Pallavas and Cholas. The Vedic and Puranic forms of Hinduism gradually replaced Buddhism in India, while the holy and puranic forms of Hinduism stayed. Muslim power, embodied in the slave dynasty of Qutb-ud-Din Aybak, entrenched itself in north India from 1206 onward, paving the way for Indo-Islamic culture to flourish.

On the eve of British India's partition, modern India was born. In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, India is an increasingly powerful political and economic force and the largest democracy in the world. India geographically encompassed the entire Indian subcontinent before 1947, including the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Only through excavations and fieldwork, primarily in Pakistan, can the earliest roots of Indian civilization be understood. In addition to Nepal and Sri Lanka, the Indian cultural world has also been closely linked to them. There was a lasting symbiotic relationship between Afghanistan and India during various periods of ancient history.

A Sanskrit word, Sindhu, means river frontier and is the etymological root of the term 'India. It is possible to identify the province of Punjab, once the land of seven rivers, as the Sapta-Sindhava mentioned in India's earliest sacred text, the Rig-Veda. Today, it has five major rivers, the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej/Beas, but some 4,000 years ago, there were two other rivers, the Sarasvati and the Drasadvati. During the sixth century B.C., the Persians invaded Indian lands and referred to the modern River Indus as Hindhu in Old Persian, a cognate of Sindhu in India. The same region was invaded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C., who used the Greek Indos to refer to the river and India to refer to the surrounding land.

A native Indian would not have considered using the term 'India' because it is a Greek expression. Aryavarta (the land of the Aryans), Bharat (the descendant of the ancient Puru clan), and Jambudvipa (the shape of a Jambu tree, broad at the top and narrow at the base, like an Indian map) were among the Sanskritic proper nouns they used to describe the vast terrain they became familiar with. India continues to be called Bharat by its constitution even today. 'Antiquity' refers to ancient times. When did that occur? When does 'ancient' become 'modern' or 'pre-modern'? The Ancient World is often referred to as 'The Ancient World' rather than 'Ancient Europe' in European History.  

This means Greek and Roman history but also includes brief references to Egypt and Mesopotamia because European historians have always acknowledged, and rightly so, that the genesis of European civilization lay in the histories of those two ancient lands beyond Europe.  According to them, ad 476 marks the end of that ancient world. We place our starting point for ancient India at around 7000 BCE, during the emergence of the first farming communities in Baluchistan. However, this book begins with our earliest ancestors in the Stone Age period. A civilization's age can be determined by its farming history, one of the most important criteria. 7000 B.C. is the result of systematic archaeological research.2 No ancient text or mythological interpretation has been used to arrive at this date. Approximately 1200 AD marks the end of the story.

A broad overview of ancient Indian history for 8,200 years is presented in this book. The choice of ad 1200 as the endpoint may be legitimately contested, and earlier or later dates have been proposed for differing reasons.3 This date was chosen because, after it, the Indian civilization came under intense pressure from two other major world civilizations, the Islamic and the West European. While India had been attacked by outside forces and absorbed a variety of foreign influences before ad 1200, the rulers of India, whether imperial or regional, remained the masters of their lands apart from a few centuries of relatively minor Persian and Greek influence on the northern and eastern periphery of northwest India, occasionally conquered by Central Asians like the Kushans or the Hunas, and occasionally invaded by Arabs and Turks.  Their independence and ability to act independently, however, were increasingly undermined after AD 1200, first by the Turco4 – Afghan/Mogul rulers, who eventually considered India to be their only home, and then by the British, who saw India as merely a means to expand and enrich Britain. India's civilization already had a composite nature, but it was deeply rooted in its native soil before the year 1200; after that, foreign concepts and practices profoundly changed it. In the end, the new fusion, whether Indo-Islamic or Indo-Western, enhanced rather than diminished the cultures of the subcontinent. As a result, only the period before 1200 can be considered ancient in the context of India's political and cultural fortunes.

Originally coined by the Persians to refer to the people who lived beyond the river Indus, the term 'Hindu' became widely used by Arabs and Turks. At first, they called all the people of India Hindu. Still, after they gained a better understanding of Indian social structures; they could distinguish Hindus from non-Hindu Buddhist or Jain religious groups. Hindus called themselves that even later in history. Ancient Indians described themselves according to their sects or castes.  Despite their caste system, certain ritual practices, and the teachings of their religious texts, legends, and epics, they were always highly diverse. It would be a mistake to consider the ancient period as the 'Hindu period.'

There is little archaeological evidence of Hindu culture during the first 4,000 years of ancient Indian history, from 7000 BCE to 3000 BCE. Through the artifacts of the following thousand years, precocious signs of this culture can be traced in the northwest. Hinduism as we know it today started around 2000 B.C. and flourished for some 1,500 years until 500 BCE. For a thousand years and more, Buddhist and Jain influences permeated many sectarian differences. As early as ad 500, Hinduism resurrected and was rebranded into Puranic and devotional Hinduism, which survived for centuries. There is no doubt that India's classical civilization resulted from a partnership between architects, designers, artisans, masons, and laborers who may have been Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, dissenters, or atheists. In the ancient period, India also advanced intellectually.

1. INDIA AND THE WEST

Ancient India has fascinated people in the West primarily because of its religion. Studying ancient India to glorify it and proclaim the relatively unproven achievements of its people would be unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, some modern Indians have this tendency because it is a defensive response to the progress made in the West over the past 200 years. It has also been encouraged by excessively lavish praises showered on India by some foreign intellectuals and philosophers. A study of ancient India is also done to draw attention to the so-called decline of India after Islam and to compare the post-Ad 1200 period with the pre-Ad 1200 period unfavorably. Over the past 150 years, Hindu and Buddhist traditions have been extensively researched and popularized in the West. Westerners have been made aware of these two religions by many scholars and thinkers, such as Sir William Jones (1746-1994), Professor Max Muller (1823-1900), Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), and Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Their pioneering work saved western civilization from spiritual impoverishment.

There has been a significant Western bias in its perception of the subcontinent because of an obsession with the religions of India. Stereotypes have grown in the West, the most common being that Indians are highly spiritual people who don't care about material goods or have a fatalistic approach to life that entrusts everything to their gods. Other valuable legacies from ancient India can be used to correct this imbalance in thinking about India. Intellectual heritage is one such heritage that needs to be explored more deeply. Their epics deal with issues of eternal significance, making them so popular with millions of Indians today. In addition to being the first great grammarians, the Indians composed learned texts long before the Europeans. There were also brilliant mathematicians and astronomers among ancient Indians, whose work eventually became mainstream science and technology.6 Without the ancient Indians, we wouldn't have our number system. Ancient Indians were also dissenters and quite disputatious.7 Long before European civilization developed such experiments, they argued passionately and logically on issues.

Artistic and aesthetic heritage is also central to ancient India. A special place is given to artisans in Indian society. Archaeologists have uncovered beautiful and stylish jewelry and toys dating back to the very first civilization of India, the Harappan. They show the sophisticated lifestyle of the people of that time. Indian artisans have always been in demand for their bronze and copper works. Textiles from ancient India are still sought after by international fashion houses, and temples from ancient India attract millions of tourists annually. A people as concerned with material goods as anyone else can be seen in the Indian trade and trading skills.

In ancient India, a morally ordered society was envisioned as being at peace with itself and busy at its work. Over 8,200 years, ancient India developed gradually and peacefully compared with many other countries despite violence and disorder at various points. India resisted rapacious warfare and humiliated foreigners, unlike many ancient and modern nations toward their neighbors and peoples abroad. The Indians' moral responsibility has always been to promote international amity and goodwill during warfare.10 Since the beginning, Indian warfare has been guided by ethical principles. Modern Indians have emphasized this particularly affirmative and attractive characteristic of India and her people, including Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964).

The approach we take must be critical and comparative. The history of ancient Indians has many positive aspects. Ancient India lagged Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome in some aspects of public life, and its shortcomings should be acknowledged. When China is far more advanced than any other nation in this area, it does not make sense for modern Indians to boast about ancient Indian technology. Additionally, Indians developed intelligible scripts later than ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. In contrast, other ancient civilizations, such as the Chinese and the Romans, were scrupulous with their historiography, whereas the early Indians paid scant attention to this. The ancient Indians showed an abject disregard for the conditions of poverty and inequality that have disfigured the face of India throughout history.11 While many Indian texts lament poverty and inequality, we find no expression of outrage or passion in any of them. Ancient India's caste system was primarily responsible for this passivity, and it remains perhaps its most significant moral blot.

Despite being great calculators at the time, the ancient Indians did not uniformly standardize the dates of important events. In ancient India, political and cultural fragmentation and regionalization dominated, except for two relatively brief imperial periods, 321 BCE and 185 BCE and 320 AD to 467 AD. Each ancient Indian dynasty or religious community used a different calendar with its commencement year. By systematizing ancient Indian studies, ancient scholars and historians contributed to developing modern European dating systems for events before and after Christ (bc and ad). These three examples illustrate how ancient Indian mathematics and foreign sources contributed to synchronization's success.

From the Greek sources, for example, we learn that Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BCE; this, along with the information about the Buddha's dates from Sanskritic and Pali sources, enabled the scholars to work out the accession date of the first Mauryan emperor, Chandra- Gupta Maurya.13 Again, the famous astronomer Aryabhatta wrote his definitive mathematical work in ad 499, which was the year that, through his astronomical calculations, he claimed to complete 3,600 years of the Kali Yuga, the latest of the periods of the main Hindu religious calendar that began in 3101 BCE. In ad 2000–01, the Hindus had just completed the first century of their sixth millennium when the third Christian millennium began. Finally, Islamic historiography, being more systematic in its approach than the ancient Indian, also developed a more reliable dating system: calculating dates from the start-year of the Islamic lunar calendar (ad 622) against modern solar reckoning ensures that Islamic chronology on solid ground.

As a result of the fact that Christ was born four years earlier than what we consider to be the start-year of the European dating system, supposedly the year in which he was born, and that there have been both slippages and artificial additions of days by church authorities at various times in European history, the modern European dating system is inaccurate. It is now more meaningful to today's researchers as a universal dating system than many Indian calendars. Keep in mind that all dates in ancient Indian history are fluid, and in determining the dates of some events, it is necessary to give and take a few years. For this reason, we can be confident that, for example, Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India in AD 1000.

In ancient India, geography played a crucial role in shaping its history. The great dramatist and poet Kalidasa mentions the geographical configuration of the subcontinent in the fourth century. According to Kumarasambhavam, "in the north. . . extends to . . . lord of all mountains, also known as Himalaya.

Dipping his two arms into the eastern and western seas, he stands as the measuring rod of the earth.' As a result of the subcontinent's physical geography, ancient India was shaped by four central landscape profiles. First, the excellent northern mountain chain runs from the Sulaiman, Hindu Kush, and Chitral valleys in the northwest to the Karakorams and Himalayas north. Many mountains pass dotted along this chain, which may appear impenetrable. Bolan, Gomal, and Khyber are the most famous passes in the northwest. It is believed that the earliest humans came to the subcontinent through these passes, followed later by Indo-European waves such as the Aryans and other Central and West Asians. Through Chitral and Karakoram passes, communication was established with central Asia; and certain remote high passes linked India directly with Tibet. These passes allowed Buddhism to spread from India to Central Asia. However, the northeast mountains separated India and China, which had fewer passes.

In spring and summer, glaciers melt in the northern mountains, filling the rivers with enough water to relieve the parched plains below. Tibetan and Indian Himalayas give rise to three great river systems. The Indus, joined by its tributaries, flows from Tibet to the northwest, drops south through Kashmir and Punjab, and empties into the Arabian Sea. Flowing east from Tibet, the Brahma-Putra turns southwest and flows into India, passing through the Garo Hills and confluent with the Padma. Two parallel rivers spring from the Indian Himalayas, the Ganga (the Ganges) and the Yamuna, which flow the first southeast and meet at Allahabad before continuing east and ending in the Bay of Bengal. During the ancient period, most of the subcontinent's population lived, farmed, and built cities in these three great Northern River systems - the Indus, the Brahmaputra, and the Ganga-Yamuna. It's still the same today. Plains terrain has relied on ample water from glaciers and monsoon rains for thousands of years. Baluchistan and the Indus region were relatively fertile areas where farming began. There was also the first Indian civilization, the Harappan. Aryans fell forests during the second millennium B.C., but it was not until the Ganga-Yamuna plain was cleared for farming that Vedic culture and some of the great cities were established and flourished.

In ancient times, the Vindhya Mountains served as a barrier between the north and south due to their location south of the plains. Despite this, they weren't wholly impenetrable either. The brahman priests of the north could migrate to the south to settle and promote Vedic Hinduism through the passageways on either side of the Vindhyas rather than through them. As soon as one crosses the Vindhyas, one is in the rain shadow of the monsoon winds and the relatively barren Deccan plateau. Water is scarce in this thirsty land since rains are limited to the monsoon season, and rivers carry little water compared to the north. A sparse supply of water is provided by the Narmada, the Tapti, and the Mahanadi, which all originate in the Vindhyas, to Gujarat and Orissa, but the five other rivers – the Godavari, the Krishna, the Tungabhadra, the Penner, and the Kaveri – have poor inflows to northern rivers. The Western Ghats, relatively low mountains along the peninsula's western coast, are the origin of four latter easterly rivers. The amount of water brought down by these rivers is minimal since there are no glaciers. They become mere trickling streams in the hot, dry summer. Parallel to the Eastern Ghats, no significant rivers are along the eastern coast. In ancient times, southern people practiced irrigation due to a significant water shortage on the peninsula.

A major contributor to the Deccan's importance was irrigation and commerce, both trans-Indian and international. This region was the site of many great regional kingdoms in the ancient world, such as the Satavahanas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, and, outside our period, Hoysalas and Vijayanagar. Several rock-cut temples, monuments, and palaces carved out of the Deccan's volcanic rock bear witness to these policies' wealth and glory. Ancient Kerala and Tamil kingdoms grew up in the deep south, below the Deccan, along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. The lusher terrain, irrigation skills, and international trade in the first millennium A.D. made these lands prosperous. In addition to the subcontinent's landscape, its coastline is also essential. Despite not being indented enough to support natural harbors and ports, the subcontinent's coastline is extensive, stretching from the Makran coast in the West to the Bangladesh delta. The ancient world relied heavily on sea routes through India. Traders and travelers from Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Roman Empire, East Africa, and those of the eastern Mediterranean came, traded, exchanged ideas, and sometimes settled along the western coastline, from the Indus delta to the southern tip of India. The east coast of India was also a hub for trade and traffic between India and Southeast Asia.

Hindu mythology and religion are deeply infused with the idea of sacred geographical space. In the minds of most Hindus, this space