How we know about the past, and early India

What this heading covers

The history section opens with a chapter that is not about events at all — how we know. That is not an introduction to be skipped: questions on sources, dating and evidence appear throughout, and they reflect the syllabus's whole position that history is argued from evidence rather than memorised.

Then a sequence, each stage defined by how people fed themselves and organised: hunter-gatherers, farmers, city dwellers, states, empire.

How we know: the sources

Archaeological sources — things people made and left:

• Tools and pottery — the commonest finds, and the basis for dating a site.
• Buildings and structures — houses, drains, granaries, forts.
• Coins — who ruled, how far their authority reached, what they wanted to be seen as.
• Bones (human and animal), seeds and grains — what people ate, what they farmed, what they domesticated.
• Ornaments, beads and seals.

Literary or written sources — what people wrote:

• Inscriptions are cut into hard surfaces — stone pillars, rock faces, copper plates, temple walls. They survive well, and being official they say what a ruler wished recorded.
• Manuscripts are written by hand on palm leaf or birch bark (bhurja patra), later on paper. They are fragile, were copied repeatedly, and copying introduces changes — which is why historians treat a manuscript and an inscription differently.

The distinction the paper sets most often is inscription versus manuscript: cut into a hard surface versus written on a soft one, contemporary and fixed versus copied and altered over time.

Note what the sources leave out. Writing records mainly the concerns of rulers, priests and the literate; ordinary people, women and labourers appear rarely and usually through archaeology rather than text. "Whose account survives, and whose did not" is the standard critical question here.

How we date: when

• BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) are the older labels; BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) are now generally preferred and mean the same years.
• BCE years count backwards: 2000 BCE is earlier than 1000 BCE. There is no year zero.
• BP means "before present", with the present conventionally fixed at 1950.
• A decade is 10 years, a century 100, a millennium 1000.

Dates for the ancient period are approximations from archaeological evidence, and scholars differ. A paper question will use the round figures the NCERT books give.

The earliest societies: hunter-gatherers

People lived by hunting animals, fishing, and gathering fruits, roots, nuts and honey. They moved constantly — following animals, following the seasons, and because gathered food in one place runs out.

• Tools of stone, wood and bone; the period is called the Palaeolithic (old stone age), followed by the Mesolithic with smaller tools called microliths.
• Fire was used for warmth, cooking, light and protection.
• Sites: Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, famous for its rock paintings and its caves; Hunsgi in Karnataka; the Kurnool caves in Andhra Pradesh, where traces of ash suggest early use of fire.
• Society was small, mobile and without permanent leaders or stored wealth — there is little to store and nothing to guard.

The first farmers and herders

The change that made everything after it possible: people began to grow crops and keep animals rather than only take what they found. The period is the Neolithic (new stone age).

• Earliest crops in the subcontinent: wheat and barley; later rice. Earliest animals kept: sheep, goat and cattle. The dog is generally held to be the first animal tamed.
• Because crops must be tended and harvested, people settled — the first villages, and with them storage, pottery for it, polished stone tools, and eventually the loom.
• Key sites: Mehrgarh (in present-day Pakistan) for the earliest evidence of wheat and barley cultivation and of herding; Burzahom in Kashmir, known for pit dwellings; Koldihwa and Chirand for early rice; Daojali Hading in the north-east.
• Settled life brings what mobile life had no use for: surplus, property, and differences in wealth.

The first cities: the Harappan civilisation

Roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE, along the Indus and its tributaries and beyond — the subcontinent's first cities, and among the earliest anywhere.

What defines them, and what questions test:

• Planning. Streets crossing at right angles, a citadel (higher, walled, west) and a lower town (larger, residential, east).
• Drainage. Covered drains along the streets, with inspection holes — the feature most often named as the civilisation's distinctive achievement.
• Standardisation. Baked bricks of a fixed ratio (1 : 2 : 4), and a uniform system of weights, across sites hundreds of kilometres apart.
• Sites and what each is known for: Mohenjodaro (the Great Bath), Harappa, Kalibangan (ploughed field, fire altars), Lothal (a dockyard, and bead-making), Dholavira (a signboard in the Harappan script; divided into three parts), Rakhigarhi.
• Seals of stone with animal figures and a script that has not been deciphered — which is why so much about the civilisation remains uncertain.
• Crafts: beads, shell, copper and bronze; cotton was grown and woven.
• Decline around 1900 BCE. Explanations offered include rivers drying or changing course, deforestation, floods and declining trade. No single cause is established, and a question offering one as settled fact is usually wrong.

Early states: janapadas and mahajanapadas

• A janapada is the land where a jana (people) settled. By about the sixth century BCE some had grown into sixteen mahajanapadas — "great" janapadas.
• Most had a fortified capital, a standing army and officials paid from taxes. The usual land tax was one-sixth of the produce, called bhaga.
• Magadha became the most powerful, helped by fertile land, iron ore, elephants and the Ganga for transport. Its capital was Rajgir, later moved to Pataliputra (modern Patna).
• Not all were monarchies. Vajji, with its capital at Vaishali, was a gana or sangha, governed by an assembly of many rulers rather than one king — the standard example when a question asks about early non-monarchical government.

New ideas

The same centuries saw intense questioning about life, death and what a person should do.

• The Upanishads record discussions about the self (atman) and the universal (brahman), and about rebirth.
• Buddhism, founded by Siddhartha Gautama, later the Buddha — born at Lumbini, attained enlightenment under a tree at Bodh Gaya, gave his first sermon at Sarnath near Varanasi, and died at Kushinagar. He taught in Prakrit, the ordinary people's language, rather than Sanskrit.
• Jainism, whose best-known teacher is Mahavira (Vardhamana), the twenty-fourth tirthankara, teaching ahimsa — non-violence — and severe self-discipline.
• Both rejected the authority of birth-based hierarchy and both admitted people of many backgrounds, which is a large part of why they spread.

The first empire: the Mauryas

• Founded by Chandragupta Maurya around 321 BCE, advised by Chanakya (Kautilya), to whom the Arthashastra is attributed.
• Ashoka, his grandson, is the ruler the paper asks about. After the Kalinga war — and, by his own account, appalled by its suffering — he gave up war and promoted dhamma: respect for elders, kindness to servants and animals, truthfulness, and tolerance between sects.
• He had his messages inscribed on rocks and pillars across the empire, in Prakrit and mostly in the Brahmi script, so that people could read them. The decipherment of Brahmi in the nineteenth century is what made these edicts readable again.
• Administration ran from Pataliputra, with provinces under governors, and dhamma mahamatta appointed to spread his message.

Contacts with distant lands

• Trade moved along the Silk Route overland and by sea with the Roman world; hoards of Roman gold coins have been found in south India.
• Exports included spices, cotton textiles, ivory and precious stones.
• The Sangam poems of the far south describe its chiefdoms — Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas — and their trade.
• The Kushanas, whose best-known ruler is Kanishka, controlled the routes through the north-west; Buddhism spread along those routes into Central Asia and China.

A question of the kind the paper sets

Which of these is a primary source for the reign of Ashoka? (A) A modern textbook chapter on the Mauryas (B) A rock edict in Brahmi (C) A historian's article on Mauryan administration (D) A television documentary

A primary source was made at the time by someone connected to the events. The rock edict was cut during Ashoka's reign at his own instruction — (B). The other three are later accounts built on sources like it.

Notice the second half of the thought, which better questions go on to ask: the edict is primary and partial. It tells us what Ashoka wished proclaimed, not how his subjects lived or what they made of him. Primary does not mean impartial.

Mistakes that cost marks here

• Confusing inscriptions (cut into hard surfaces, contemporary) with manuscripts (written on palm leaf or bark, copied over time).
• Thinking BCE dates count forward. 2000 BCE is earlier than 1000 BCE.
• Treating "primary source" as "reliable source".
• Naming a single settled cause for the decline of the Harappan cities.
• Forgetting that the Harappan script is undeciphered — a claim that it has been read is always wrong.
• Calling every mahajanapada a kingdom. Vajji was a gana or sangha, governed by an assembly.

In one line

History at this level is the story of how people got their food and organised themselves around it — and, before any of that, of how we can claim to know it at all.

For the classroom

The pedagogy section of this paper asks for enquiry and sources, and this chapter is where it is easiest: one photograph of a Harappan seal, and the questions what can you tell from this, what can you not tell, and who made it will carry a full lesson — and teach the difference between evidence and assertion better than the sentence that defines it.