Sources & Prehistoric Age

History is the story of the human past, but a story needs evidence. For the very long period before writing was invented we depend only on stones, bones and buried remains; after writing appears we also get books, inscriptions and coins. Every source of ancient Indian history therefore falls into a few families, and if you know the family, you can guess the answer.

Literary sources. Religious books such as the Vedas, the Puranas, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Buddhist Tripitakas and Jatakas, and the Jain Agamas tell us about beliefs, society and politics, but they are not written like modern histories. Secular books are closer to history. The Arthashastra of Kautilya explains statecraft in the Mauryan age; the Mudrarakshasa of Vishakhadatta tells the story of Chanakya and the rise of Chandragupta; the Harshacharita of Banabhatta is the biography of Harshavardhana; and the Rajatarangini of Kalhana (12th century) is a history of the kings of Kashmir, often called the first real historical work in Sanskrit.

Foreign accounts. Travellers and ambassadors who visited India wrote about what they saw, and they give an outsider's view that Indian books often skip. Because they come from different lands and ages, the best way to learn them is by country.

Archaeological sources. Archaeology digs up the past: tools, pottery, bones, seeds, houses, burials and whole cities. It is the only source for prehistory and for the Indus civilisation, because there is no readable writing. To date these finds, scientists use radiocarbon (Carbon-14) dating, which measures how much of a radioactive carbon is left in a dead plant or animal remain, and thermoluminescence for baked clay such as pottery. India's Archaeological Survey (ASI) was founded in 1861 with Alexander Cunningham as its first Director-General.

Inscriptions (Epigraphy) are texts carved on rocks, pillars, temple walls and copper plates. They are reliable because they were not copied again and again by scribes. The Ashokan inscriptions are the earliest deciphered royal writings; most are in Brahmi (read left to right), those in the north-west are in Kharosthi (right to left) and in Afghanistan some are in Greek and Aramaic. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837. Coins (Numismatics) show the metal, the weight, the ruler's name and often his portrait, and a find-spot map shows trade routes. The earliest Indian coins are the silver punch-marked coins (about 6th century BCE).

Imagine India about half a million years ago, in the cold and changing climate of the Ice Age (Pleistocene). There are no villages, no fields, no pots. Small bands of people walk from place to place looking for animals to hunt and fruits, roots and honey to gather. This is the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age (Greek palaios = old, lithos = stone). It is by far the longest period of human history, and the word was coined by Sir John Lubbock in 1865. In India the first Palaeolithic tool was found by Robert Bruce Foote at Pallavaram near Chennai in 1863, which is why he is called the father of Indian prehistory.

Why 'stone'? Stone was the hardest thing early humans could shape, so the whole age is named after its main tool. The change from one age to the next is decided by how the tools were made and how people got food, not by dates alone: chipped big tools = Palaeolithic, tiny tools = Mesolithic, polished tools plus farming = Neolithic.

How did they live? Palaeolithic people were hunter-gatherers and food gatherers, not food producers. They lived in caves and rock shelters, moved with the seasons and the herds, had no pottery and no farming, and they did not bury their dead with ceremony. They knew fire, which gave warmth, protection from animals and later cooked food (ash layers are found in the Kurnool caves of Andhra Pradesh). Because they depended on the weather and animals, crop failure cannot be a reason for their moving; they moved when animals migrated, when seasons changed or when local resources ran out.

Around 10,000 BCE the Ice Age ended. The climate became warmer and wetter, forests spread, and the big grazing herds of the cold period thinned out, giving way to smaller animals, fish and birds. People had to change how they hunted, and the result is the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age (mesos = middle). It is a short bridge period between the Old and the New Stone Age, and its trademark is the microlith: a tiny, sharp stone tool, usually less than 5 cm long.

A microlith by itself is tiny, but it becomes powerful when fixed into a handle of wood or bone with natural gum. These composite tools gave arrows with sharp heads, harpoons, sickles and saws. Think of it as a blade that you can replace: when one stone chip breaks, you simply glue in another. That is the big idea of the Mesolithic.

New signs of life. In the Mesolithic people still lived mostly by hunting, fishing and gathering, but we see the first steps towards a settled life. The dog was the first animal to be tamed; sheep and goat were domesticated at Bagor and Adamgarh; people buried their dead, often with tools and ornaments; and rock paintings became livelier, with scenes of group hunting, dancing, and honey collection. A few sites show the beginning of plant cultivation, but farming as a way of life belongs to the Neolithic.

Now ask a simple question: what if you did not have to walk after food any more? What if you could plant a seed, wait, and harvest? That one idea changed everything. The Neolithic or New Stone Age (neos = new) is the age of the first farmers. People began to grow crops, tame animals for milk, meat and work, make pots to store grain, and live in the same village year after year. The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe called this change the Neolithic Revolution.

Neolithic is not defined by 'polished tools' alone. Its core is food production: agriculture and animal domestication, leading to permanent settlement and pottery. Bronze belongs to a later age. That is why a question asking which of these is NOT a Neolithic feature always has 'use of bronze tools' as the answer.

Tools and pottery. The typical Neolithic tool is the celt, a stone axe or adze whose edge was ground and polished smooth so that it cut better and lasted longer. There were also stone querns for grinding grain, bone tools, and ring stones. Pottery began as hand-made and later became wheel-made. People also learnt to spin and weave: at Mehrgarh there is evidence of cotton.

By about 3000 BCE a new idea reached some villages: copper. It was the first metal humans used. But copper was rare and costly, and stone tools did not disappear. So this is an age of both, called the Chalcolithic (Greek khalkos = copper, lithos = stone), or the Copper-Stone age. In India it spread from about 3000 to 700 BCE in regional cultures, mostly in the villages of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and the eastern plains. These were rural farming cultures, not cities, and that is the main difference from the Indus civilisation, which was urban and used bronze.

Why did the Chalcolithic cultures fade away? Copper was expensive and the metal was soft, so it could not clear forests or plough hard soil. Child death was high (Inamgaon has many child burials). Many villages were also hit by drying climate around 1000 BCE. Iron, which is harder and cheap, finally replaced copper in tools.

Before we leave the prehistoric world, put the four stone-age stages on a single line. Every question on 'order', 'first' or 'odd one out' becomes easy once this ladder is in your head. After the ladder we will meet the megaliths, the great stone tombs of the Iron Age south, which show how death was treated before written history became common.

Megaliths (mega = large, lith = stone) are burial monuments made of big stones. They belong mostly to the Iron Age of peninsular India, from about 1000 BCE to the early centuries CE, and are widespread in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Vidarbha in Maharashtra. Graves were often marked with big stones, and the dead were buried with iron tools, weapons, pots (especially Black-and-Red Ware) and sometimes horse bones. Some of these people may be the Sangam-age Tamils. Similar stone monuments are also found in north-east India and in the Kashmir and Gilgit region.