History of India

Indian History - from the Harappans to the Muslims

The first civilization in India was about 3000 years B.C. - find out what happened to it, and who ruled after them. Learn about the Guptas, the Ghaznavids, and the Mongols. But there's more to India than politics - we have sections on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in India too.

• Harappan (3000 - 1500 BC/BCE)
• Aryan (1500 - 800 BC - Vedic)
• Aryan push to the Ganges (800-600 BC/BCE)
• Alexander invades India• Mauryan Empire (ca. 325-184 BC)
• Period of small kingdoms (184-320 AD)
• Guptas (320-550 AD) (Huns invade)
• Post-Gupta golden age (600-1100)
• Muslim invasions and Delhi Sultanate (1100-1526)
• Tamerlane and the Mongols invade (1397)








Harappan Civilization in India

The first people seem to have reached India from Africa around 40,000 BC. At first they were hunters and gatherers, like other people around the world at this time. But by around 4000 BC, these people had begun farming and by 2500 BC settled in the Indus river valley, where they began to live in cities and use irrigation to water their fields. This is a little later than in West Asia, probably because India was not as crowded as West Asia at this time. A lot of people think that the reason they began to farm, and then build cities was that a gradual warming trend was making it harder to get water, and harder to find wild plants to eat, every year. So every year more and more people moved into the Indus river valley, where there was still plenty of water. When it got really crowded there, people began to build cities.

There were two main cities that we know of, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) away. Both are in modern Pakistan. The people of these cities lived in stone houses two and three stories high, and had sewage systems. They used bronze tools. They may have learned to make bronze from the Sumerians.The Harappa people used an early form of writing based on hieroglyphs, like the Egyptians. But we can't read it, because there isn't very much left of it.

By around 2000 BC, though, the Harappan civilization had collapsed. We don't know what caused this collapse. Most people think the most likely reason is that the warming trend continued until there wasn't enough water even in the Indus river valley to support these cities and the farmers who fed them. Some people probably starved to death, while others moved up into the hills, where it was cooler and some rain fell.

But by 1500 BC, the Indus river valley saw an invasion of Indo-Europeans, like similar invasions in Greece and Italy a little earlier.

Indo-Europeans in Ancient India

About 1500 BC, India was invaded by Indo-European people. These people came from the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian sea. Between 2500 and 2000 BC, many Indo-Europeans migrated all over Eurasia. Some went to Europe and became the Romans and the Greeks, some settled in Turkey and became the Hittites. Others migrated south-east instead. Some of them stopped in Iran, while others continued south-east to Pakistan and India. The slow migration did not arrive in northern India until about 1500 BC. In India, the Indo-Europeans are usually called the Aryans.
Some people have disputed this arrival of the Indo-Europeans, and if you search the web you will find some sites saying that it never happened. But there are written records of the language that these Indo-European people brought with them to India, Sanskrit. We can read Sanskrit, and we can easily see that many words in Sanskrit are basically the same as in other Indo-European languages.
In addition, recent genetic evidence supports the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.In addition to their language, the Aryans brought their gods with them to India. These gods form the basis of the Rig Veda and other sagas which were first written down in Sanskrit. They also brought the domesticated horse.


first settled along the Indus River, in the same place where the Harappa people had lived. They settled down and mixed with the local Indian people. They lived there from about 1500 BC to about 800 BC. It seems to be at this time that the caste system got started in India.

About 800 BC, the Aryans learned how to use iron for weapons and tools. They probably learned to work iron from the people of West Asia, the Assyrians, who had learned it from the Indo-European Hittites. Once the Aryans learned how to use iron, they used their new weapons to conquer more of India, and moved to the south and east into the Ganges river valley. They settled there not long after 800 BC.



Aryans, Part II

After the Aryans moved into the Ganges valley about 800 BC, they were further from West Asia and had less contact with West Asian people. They began to mix more with the Indian people and the Indian gods became mixed with the Aryan gods. The Aryan conquest of the Ganges is remembered in the Mahabharata, first told about this time.But still the Aryans did not control all of India. Southern India was ruled by a bunch of independent kings who did not have to do what the Aryans wanted. Stories of fights between the Aryans and the southerners are told in the Ramayana.


In the 500's BC, part of north-western India (modern Pakistan) was conquered by the Persians under their kings Cyrus and Darius. The Persians were also Indo-Europeans, but they had left their homeland later and settled in modern Iran. But the Persians never really controlled India much- they made the Indians pay tribute in gold to Persia, but they didn't really tell them what to do.

Meanwhile, the Aryans continued to rule north-eastern India. In the 400's BC, this was where Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, lived and started the faith of Buddhism.









Alexander the Great in India

In 325 BC, northern India was conquered by Alexander the Great, a Macedonian (and also an Indo-European) king. Alexander had already conquered the whole Persian Empire, and he also conquered northern India (modern Pakistan) as part of that. Alexander didn't stay very long though. He left after a couple of years and went back to Babylon, where he died.

Still, Alexander had a lasting effect on India. Alexander left behind several thousand Greek soldiers, to keep an eye on things. These soldiers had with them writers, artists, sculptors, and teachers, and they built Greek cities in Afghanistan and in the Indus valley. The Indians learned about a lot of Greek culture this way, and the Greeks learned a lot of Indian ideas too.

Mauryan India

After Alexander went back to Babylon in 324 BC, a man named Chandragupta was able to overthrow the old Aryan kingdom of Nanda and form a big new empire over all of northern India and into Afghanistan. When people asked him how he had done it, he said (according to Greek historians) that he got the idea from Alexander. Chandragupta conquered the Indus valley back from the Greeks and as part of the peace treaty he married the daughter of Seleucus, who had succeeded Alexander, and gave Seleucus 200 elephants.

Chandragupta died in 298 BC and was succeeded by his son Bindusara. Bindusara's son Ashoka made the Mauryan Empire even stronger, ruling some of southern India as well as the north.

But Ashoka's victories at Orissa were so bloody and awful, that (at least according to tradition) after that battle he gave up warfare for the rest of his life. Ashoka converted from traditional Indian Hinduism to the new faith of Buddhism, and he used his power to convince millions of other people to convert to Buddhism too, all over Central Asia.

After Ashoka died in 231 BC, though, his sons and grandsons were not as strong rulers as he was, and the Mauryan Empire gradually fell apart.

Period of Small Kingdoms

Between about 100 BC, when the Mauryan Empire collapsed, and 319 AD, when the Guptan Empire was founded, India was split up into a lot of small kingdoms. These small kingdoms were weak and so they were often invaded by stronger neighbors. The Greeks came back in 150 BC and conquered the Indus Valley again, but they didn't stay for long. The Chinese, under the strong Han Dynasty, invaded frequently. And the Parthians and Sassanians sometimes attacked as well.

Guptan Empire

In 319 AD, the king Chandragupta II (the second) managed to unite all of northern India into a great empire again. (He was not related to the first Chandragupta, but he wanted people to think he was). Even some of the south was brought under Guptan power. The Gupta kings were not Buddhists but Hindus, following the older Indian religion.

But in 455 AD the Huns invaded India from the north and destroyed the Guptan Empire. After that, India was split into small kingdoms again until the Muslim invasions around 1000 AD.

Guptan architecture

When the Mauryan empire collapsed, about 200 BC, for more than five hundred years Indian leaders were too busy fighting wars against each other to build any big buildings. But around 350 AD some victorious leaders formed a new empire, the Guptan Empire. Once there was peace, people began to build again, and, for the first time, they began to build free-standing stone temples. By by this time not so many Indian people were Buddhists anymore, and the new temples were mainly Hindu temples.



These first stone temples were built to honor the Hindu gods like Krishna and Vishnu. The earliest stone temple is a small one at Tigawa, in central India. The Tigawa temple has a small stone chamber, with a flat stone roof, and a porch supported by four carved stone columns in the front. The temple's thick walls and small size show that the builders were not used to working in stone yet.

But people kept on cutting rock-cut temples too. Around 600 AD, builders in Mumbai carved the rock-cut temple of Elephanta Cave in Mumbai, a temple to the Hindu god Shiva. Like the earlier Tigawa temple, Elephanta has a porch with four columns in front, and a room with a statue of Shiva in the back.

People also carved many more rock-cut temples at the old site of Ajanta, near Mumbai. These later temples are much fancier than the earlier Mauryan period temples. And, between 600 and 1000 AD, they carved many other temples at a new site at Ellora, not far from Ajanta.

At the same time, other Indian builders were working in the Chalukya kingdom in southern India. Chalukya builders began to work in stone at about the same time as in northern India. At Aihole (eye-HO-lee),they built six stone temples between about 500 and 800 AD. Around this time, Indian builders began to use cement mortars to hold the stones together. This Durga Temple, from about 675 AD, has a central room with solid walls and columns all around the outside, like a Greek temple. The apse is curved, which is unusual in Indian temples, and there's a tower on top of the flat roof.


Post-Guptan Golden Age

After the Guptan empire fell apart in the 500's AD, India had a lot of smaller kings ruling a lot of small kingdoms. There were a lot of wars among these small kingdoms, but there was also a lot of great architecture and art during this time. In northern India, King Harsha ruled one of the small kingdoms, but after he died in the 600's AD, his kingdom fell apart into three even smaller ones. During this time, southern India had bigger, more powerful kingdoms than northern India did. The most important southern kingdom was the Chola, which got rich partly by selling pepper and cinnamon and other spices at their seaports to Arab traders who resold the spices in the Islamic Empire and to medieval Europe.

By about 800 AD, though, some small kingdoms in northern India began to gradually get more power. The kings of these kingdoms came from a group of people called the Rajputs, so historians call their kingdoms the Rajput kingdoms. They spent a lot of their time fighting off the Abbasid armies that were trying to invade northern India.

By about 1100 AD, however, the Abbasid invaders succeeded in conquering northern India.


Medieval Indian architecture


By the 700's AD, after the collapse of the Guptan Empire, there were two different styles of temple-building in India, a north Indian style and a south Indian style. This temple from Osian shows the north Indian style - a high tower called a shikhara, and an open porch for visitors to the temple, called a mandapa. North Indian temples also had a high porch, like earlier Etruscan and Roman temples.

In south India, about 1000 AD, the Chola king Rajaraja the Great (his name means King-king) built a very big temple to the Hindu god Shiva. Like the northern temples, this southern temple has a shikhara (tower), but this tower is much higher - thirteen stories high! The southern temple is also much longer than the northern one, and is has several porches on the front ( mandapas) instead of only one. Both the northern and the southern temples have flat stone roofs. This temple is about fifty feet high, not counting the tower - compare this to Romanesque churches in Europe built about the same time, or to the Fatimid mosques in Egypt. Because it is so hot and sunny most of the time in southern India, the architects were more concerned to keep the sun out, so the temple would stay cool, than to let in light, as in northern Europe.By 1061 AD, some builders in India started to use a new method of building using iron beams to replace wooden beams, because wooden beams were very hard to get in India. One example is Brahmeshwar temple in eastern India at Orissa.

Delhi Sultanate in India


Around 1100 AD, the Mamluks who had already conquered Persia (modern Iran) came to conquer India as well. By 1192 AD, the Mamluks were able to beat the Indians and take over northern India (and modern Pakistan). In 1192 AD, the Muslim general Muhammed Ghor captured Delhi and started a dynasty of rulers which, together with some later dynasties, is called the Delhi Sultanate. The first dynasty was called the Slave Dynasty because the first leaders had been slave soldiers, or Mamluks Little by little, many Hindus and Buddhists in northern India decided to convert to Islam, the religion of their conquerors.. When the Slave Dynasty ended in civil war in 1290, the Khalji Dynasty took over. This was the time of the greatest power of the Delhi Sultanate, when the Sultans in Delhi could control even the most southern part of India, at least some of the time.

Under the Tughluq Dynasty, however, beginning about 1325, the Delhi Sultans began to weaken. There were a lot of rebellions and civil wars, and by 1351 southern India regained its independence as a Hindu state. The Deccan, or central India, also broke away and became independent, although as an Islamic state.

In the end, Delhi was sacked by the Mongol invader Tamerlane or Timur in 1398, which pretty much ended the power of the Delhi Sultanate.

Mongols

In the 1100's AD, some people living in Central Asia (modern Mongolia, among other places) began to expand out of where they had been living.The Mongols invaded Persia and India. Under their king, Genghis Khan, the Mongols took over Northern India for a while.

Some of them went to China. They were very good fighters and they managed to take over China. The Mongols ruled China for about a hundred years, under Genghis Khan's grandson, the great king Kublai Khan.

It was the Mongol conquest of China that opened up communication between China and West Asia, and then to Europe. The Mongols controlled all of Persia and China and northern India. They kept this land so safe that people said that a girl could walk from Persia to China with a bag of gold and be perfectly safe.