What, Where, How and When?

• Introduction
  • Meaning of History
  • Understanding our past to build the future
• Finding out what happened (What)
  • What people ate
    • Types of clothes worn
    • Kinds of houses they lived in
  • Lives of different people
    • Hunters and herders
    • Farmers and rulers
    • Merchants and craftspersons
    • Artists and musicians
  • History of children (games, stories, songs)
• Where did people live? (Where)
  • Narmada River Valley
    • Early people lived here for hundreds of thousands of years
    • Skilled gatherers who knew about forest wealth
  • Sulaiman and Kirthar hills (North-West)
    • Areas where women and men first began to grow crops
    • Wheat and barley about 8000 years ago
    • Rearing animals like sheep, goats, and cattle
  • Garo hills (North-East) and Vindhyas (Central India)
    • Agriculture developed
    • Rice first grown to the north of the Vindhyas
  • River Indus and its tributaries
    • Early cities flourished about 4700 years ago along rivers
  • Ganga valley and Son river
    • Cities developed about 2500 years ago along rivers and coastlines
    • Magadha kingdom (present-day Bihar) was a large and powerful state
• Names of the Land
  • India
    • Derived from the Indus, called Hindos or Indos by Iranians and Greeks (about 2500 years ago)
    • The land to the east of the river was called India
  • Bharat
    • Used for a group of people living in the north-west
    • Mentioned in the Rigveda (earliest composition in Sanskrit, c. 3500 years ago)
• Finding out about the past (How)
  • Manuscripts
    • Handwritten books on palm leaf or bark of the birch tree
    • Preserved in temples and monasteries
    • Subjects: religious beliefs, kings, medicine, science, epics, plays, poems
  • Inscriptions
    • Writings on hard surfaces like stone or metal
    • Orders of kings, records of victories, activities of men and women
  • Archaeology
    • Study of remains of buildings, paintings, sculpture
    • Excavation (digging underground)
    • Finding tools, weapons, pots, pans, ornaments, coins
    • Study of bones of animals, birds, fish to find out what people ate
    • Study of plant remains (seeds survive as burnt charcoal)
  • Historians
    • Scholars who study the past
    • Use information from manuscripts, inscriptions, and archaeology like detectives
• One past or many?
  • Title of book: "Our Pasts" (plural)
  • Different experiences of different groups of people
    • Lives of kings and queens were different from farmers and herders
    • Even today, people follow different customs and practices in different parts of India
• What do dates mean?
  • Counting years from the birth of Jesus Christ
  • BC (Before Christ)
  • AD (Anno Domini, meaning 'in the year of the Lord')
  • Modern usage: BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era)
  • Meaning of BP (Before Present)
  • Decipherment
    • Reading scripts from the past
    • Famous example: Rosetta Stone (Egypt) with Greek and Egyptian scripts deciphered by scholars