History & Civilization
Indian history and civilization
The long background to everything else on this site, with dates that come from historians rather than from folklore.
2 pages
Two rules govern this section. Dates come with a range and a source, and where scholarship is genuinely divided — the chronology of the Vedic texts, the nature of the Indus script, the dating of the epics — the division is stated rather than resolved.
That is duller than the version that gives you one number, and it is the only version worth publishing under this domain name.
Everything in History & Civilization
Questions people ask
Why are dates here given as ranges?
Because that is how they are known. Indian chronology before roughly 500 BCE is reconstructed from texts that were composed orally and from archaeology, and honest ranges are wide. A single confident year is usually a sign that someone has picked a side in an argument without saying so.
India,
once a week.
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