What, Where, How and When?

What can we know about the past? There are several things that we can find out from the study of history - (i) What people ate (ii) The kinds of clothes they wore (iii) The houses in which they lived.

We can find out about the lives of hunters, herders, farmers, rulers, merchants, priests, craftspersons, artists, musicians, and scientists. We can also find out about the games children played, the stories they heard, the plays they saw, the songs they sang.

1.0Where did people live?

Lets talk about the river Narmada

• People have lived along the banks of this river for several hundred thousand years.
• Some of the earliest people who lived here were skilled gatherers, - that is, people who gathered their food.
• They knew about the vast wealth of plants in the surrounding forests, and collected roots, fruits and other forest produce for their food. They also hunted animals.

Sulaiman and Kirthar hills to the northwest

• Some of the areas where women and men first began to grow crops such as wheat and barley about 8000 years ago are located here.
• People also began rearing animals like sheep, goat, and cattle, and lived in villages.

The Garo hills to the north-east and the Vindhyas in central India

• These were some of the other areas where agriculture developed.
• The places where rice was first grown are to the north of the Vindhyas.

The river Indus and its tributaries

• About 4700 years ago, some of the earliest cities flourished on the banks of these rivers.
• Later, about 2500 years ago, cities developed on the banks of the Ganga and its tributaries, and along the sea coasts.

Tributaries - are smaller rivers that flow into a larger river.

The Ganga and its tributary called the Son

• In ancient times the area along these rivers to the south of the Ganga was known as Magadha now lying in the state of Bihar.
• Its rulers were very powerful, and set up a large kingdom.
• Kingdoms were set up in other parts of the country as well.
• Throughout, people travelled from one part of the subcontinent to another. The hills and high mountains including the Himalayas, deserts, rivers and seas made journeys dangerous at times, but never impossible. So, men and women moved in search of livelihood, as also to escape from natural disasters like floods or droughts.
• Sometimes men marched in armies, conquering others' lands.
• Besides, merchants travelled with caravans or ships, carrying valuable goods from place to place.
• Religious teachers walked from village to village, town to town, stopping to offer instruction and advice on the way.
• Finally, some people perhaps travelled driven by a spirit of adventure, wanting to discover new and exciting places. All these led to the sharing of ideas between people.

Why do people travel nowadays?

• Hills, mountains and seas form the natural frontiers of the subcontinent.
• While it was difficult to cross these frontiers, those who wanted could and did scale the mountains and cross the seas.
• People from across the frontiers also came into the subcontinent and settled here.
• These movements of people enriched our cultural traditions.
• People have shared new ways of carving stone, composing music, and even cooking food over several hundreds of years.

2.0Names of the land

• Two of the words we often use for our country are India and Bharat.
• The word India comes from the Indus, called Sindhu in Sanskrit.
• The Iranians and the Greeks who came through the northwest about 2500 years ago and were familiar with the Indus, called it the Hindos or the Indos, and the land to the east of the river was called India.
• The name Bharata was used for a group of people who lived in the northwest, and who are mentioned in the Rigveda, the earliest composition in Sanskrit (dated to about 3500 years ago). Later it was used for the country.

3.0Finding out about the past

• There are several ways of finding out about the past. One is to search for and read books that were written long ago. These are called manuscripts, because they were written by hand (this comes from the Latin word 'manu', meaning hand).
• These were usually written on palm leaf, or on the specially prepared bark of a tree known as the birch, which grows in the Himalayas.
• Over the years, many manuscripts were eaten away by insects, some were destroyed, but many have survived, often preserved in temples and monasteries.
  
• These books dealt with all kinds of subjects: religious beliefs and practices, the lives of kings, medicine and science.
• Besides, there were epics, poems, plays. Many of these were written in Sanskrit, others were in Prakrit (languages used by ordinary people) and Tamil.
• We can also study inscriptions. These are writings on relatively hard surfaces such as stone or metal. Sometimes, kings got their orders inscribed so that people could see, read and obey them.
• There are other kinds of inscriptions as well, where men and women (including kings and queens) recorded what they did. For example, kings often kept records of victories in battle.
• There were many other things that were made and used in the past. Those who study these objects are called archaeologists.
• They study the remains of buildings made of stone and brick, paintings and sculpture.
• They also explore and excavate (dig under the surface of the earth) to find tools, weapons, pots, pans, ornaments and coins.
• Some of these objects may be made of stone, others of bone, baked clay or metal. Objects that are made of hard, imperishable substances usually survive for a long time.
• Archaeologists also look for bones - of animals, birds, and fish - to find out what people ate in the past.
  
• Plant remains survive far more rarely - if seeds of grain or pieces of wood have been burnt, they survive in a charred form.
• Historians, that is, scholars who study the past, often use the word source to refer to the information found from manuscripts, inscriptions and archaeology. Once sources are found, learning about the past becomes an adventure, as we reconstruct it bit by bit.
• So historians and archaeologists are like detectives, who use all these sources like clues to find out about our pasts.

4.0One past or many?

• We have used the word 'pasts' in plural to draw attention to the fact that the past was different for different groups of people. For example, the lives of herders or farmers were different from those of kings and queens, the lives of merchants were different from those of crafts persons, and so on.
• Also, as is true even today, people followed different practices and customs in different parts of the country. For example, today most people living in the Andaman Islands get their own food by fishing, hunting, and collecting forest produce.
• By contrast, most people living in cities depend on others for supplies of food. Differences such as these existed in the past as well.
• Besides, there is another kind of difference. We know a great deal about kings and the battles they fought because they kept records of their victories.
• Generally, ordinary people such as hunters, fishing folk, gatherers, farmers or herders did not keep records of what they did. While archaeology helps us to find out about their lives, there is much that remains unknown.

5.0What do dates mean?

• If somebody asks you the date, you will probably mention the day, month and year, 2000 and something.
• These years are counted from the date generally assigned to the birth of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity.
• So, 2000 means 2000 years after the birth of Christ.
• All dates before the birth of Christ are counted backwards and usually have the letters BC (Before Christ) added on.
• In this book, we will refer to dates going back from the present, using 2000 as our starting point.

6.0Glossary

• Skilled Gatherers - People who gathered their food are called as Skilled gatherers. They are aware about the properties and massive wealth of plants in the surrounding forests. They not only gathered forest produce such as plant roots, fruits, and leaves, etc. but also hunt animals for their food.
• Caravans - A group of travellers, as merchants or pilgrims, journeying together for safety in passing through deserts, hostile territory, etc. any group traveling in or as if in a caravan and using a specific mode of transportation, as pack animals or motor vehicles: a caravan of trucks; a camel caravan.
• Frontiers - The line where one country joins another; border.
• Manuscripts - The noun manuscript evolved from the Latin manu scriptus, meaning "written by hand." Manu is "hand" and scriptus is "to write." It refers to old documents actually written by hand before books were made, but it can also refer to a writer's unpublished work whether it's handwritten or typed.
• Prakrit - The Prakrits were Middle Indo-Aryan languages spoken between about 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The name Prakrit (prākrta) means 'derived', a name contrasting with Sanskrit (sampskṛta) 'complete, perfected', reflecting the fact that the Prakrit languages were considered historically secondary to, and less prestigious than.
• Inscriptions - Inscriptions were the writings engraved on hard surfaces. They were written mostly on rocks, stones, walls of buildings, metals etc. They depicted important events of the past. Various languages such as Prakrit, Sanskrit, Kannada etc., were used for writing the inscriptions.
• Archaeologists - An archaeologist is a scientist who studies human history by digging up human remains and artifacts.
• Before Christ (BC) - Used in the Christian calendar when referring to a year before Jesus Christ was born.

7.0MIND MAP