Lecture for Ancient India Hist1014

>> Okay, welcome back. So what we'll be talking about today or this week is ancient India. And what I'll do next -- for the next scene, I will show you a timeline, but we usually start off with the neolithic for every civilization, and this is no different in India. So their neolithic is called the early food producing era. If you remember, neolithic means new stone age, which isn't very descriptive. But early food producing era sounds much better, and it's much more easy to remember what's going on during this time. So it lasts from around 7,000 to 5,000 BC. And then India moves into something called the regionalization era. And what's happening during this period or what happened just before is India is full of little villages and they're fairly isolated villages. They're all starting to do their farming. And then around 500 or so you've got redeveloping, where you've got common cultures, and you can look at archeology for this. And we'll certainly look at one time period for this. So here's a timeline of ancient India, and don't write all of this down. So what we'll be doing for this lecture, we'll be looking at the neolithic, which is on this slide. We'll be looking at Harappa, the Harappan civilization. And what I want you to do on your own is to look at the *** history, the development of Buddhism on your own. And what I'll do is I'll make a series of slides on Aryanism and their impact they had on India. And so for this lecture we're going to go from the Harappan civilization and then we're going to jump right down into Alexander the Great. And we will look at the very first period in Indian history where you have kings, and this starts the Maurya dynasty. So we'll look at Chandragupta Maurya. And then we'll skip a generation and we will look at the reign of his grandson Ashoka. So here's a map of India. And if I ask you to name one of the major rivers in India, more than likely you will mention the Ganges, and the Ganges is on at least on this map sort of center right. But the first place that you find civilization developing is not in the Ganges, but it's along the Indus River, which is in modern-day Pakistan. And one thing I should mention here while you're looking at a map of India. Ancient India was much larger than modern-day India. So it covered the standard land mass of modern India. But it also pushed into Pakistan and Afghanistan. So all of that was considered to be India. And you got two cities here, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. So we will definitely take a look at those in much more closer detail. But what I first want to do is look at a neolithic site called Mehrgarh. And this is a close up map showing you the Indus River again, with Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and we will spend some time looking at Mehrgarh, which is a neolithic site. And then what we'll do is we'll push right into civilization and look at the Harappans, the Harappan civilization or the Indus River valley civilization. And I've given you the dates here on the scene.