The Cemetery H culture was a Bronze Age culture in the Punjab region in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, from about 1900 BCE until about 1300 BCE. It is regarded as a regional form of the late phase of the Harappan civilisation, but also as a phase of the Indo-Aryan migrations.
A chariot is a type of cart driven by a charioteer, usually using horses to provide rapid motive power. The oldest known chariots have been found in burials of the Sintashta culture in modern-day Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, dated to c. 1950–1880 BC and are depicted on cylinder seals from Central Anatolia in Kültepe dated to c. 1900 BC. The critical invention that allowed the construction of light, horse-drawn chariots was the spoked wheel.
The Kurukshetra War, also called the Mahabharata War, is a war described in the Hindu epic poem Mahabharata, arising from a dynastic struggle between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, for the throne of Hastinapura. The war is used as the context for the dialogues of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages. These are the predominant languages of today's Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, North India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
The Ochre Coloured Pottery culture (OCP) is a Bronze Age culture of the Indo-Gangetic Plain "generally dated 2000–1500 BCE," extending from eastern Punjab to northeastern Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.
The Painted Grey Ware culture (PGW) is an Iron Age Indo-Aryan culture of the western Gangetic plain and the Ghaggar-Hakra valley in the Indian subcontinent, conventionally dated c.1200 to 600–500 BCE, or from 1300 to 500–300 BCE. It is a successor of the Cemetery H culture and Black and red ware culture (BRW) within this region, and contemporary with the continuation of the BRW culture in the eastern Gangetic plain and Central India.
The Gandhara grave culture of present-day Pakistan is known by its "protohistoric graves", which were spread mainly in the middle Swat River valley and named the Swat Protohistoric Graveyards Complex, dated in that region to c. 1200–800 BCE. The Italian Archaeological Mission to Pakistan (MAIP) holds that there are no burials with these features after 800 BCE. More recent studies by Pakistani scholars, such as Muhammad Zahir, consider that these protohistoric graves extended over a much wider geography and continued in existence from the 8th century BCE until the historic period. The core region was in the middle of the Swat River course and expanded to the valleys of Dir, Kunar, Chitral, and Peshawar. Protohistoric graves were present in north, central, and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province as well as in north-western tribal areas, including Gilgit-Baltistan province, Taxila, and Salt Range in Punjab, Pakistan, along with their presence in Indian Kashmir, Ladakh, and Uttarakhand.
Kalibangān is a town located at 29.47°N 74.13°E on the left or southern banks of the Ghaggar in Tehsil Pilibangān, between Suratgarh and Hanumangarh in Hanumangarh District, Rajasthan, India 205 km from Bikaner. It is also identified as being established in the triangle of land at the confluence of Drishadvati and Sarasvati Rivers. The prehistoric and pre-Mauryan character of Indus Valley civilization was first identified by Luigi Tessitori at this site. Kalibangan's excavation report was published in its entirety in 2003 by the Archaeological Survey of India, 34 years after the completion of excavations. The report concluded that Kalibangan was a major provincial capital of the Indus Valley Civilization. Kalibangan is distinguished by its unique fire altars and "world's earliest attested ploughed field". It is around 2900 BC that the region of Kalibangan developed into what can be considered a planned city.
Braj Basi Lal was an Indian writer and archaeologist. He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) from 1968 to 1972 and has served as Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. Lal also served on various UNESCO committees.
The horse has been present in the Indian subcontinent from at least the middle of the second millennium BC, more than two millennia after its domestication in Central Asia. The earliest uncontroversial evidence of horse remains on the Indian Subcontinent date to the early Swat culture. While horse remains and related artifacts have been found in Late Harappan sites, indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times, horses did not play an essential role in the Harappan civilisation, in contrast to the Vedic period. The importance of the horse for the Indo-Aryans is indicated by the Sanskrit word Ashva, "horse," which is often mentioned in the Vedas and Hindu scriptures.
Ratha is the Indo-Iranian term for a spoked-wheel chariot. The term has been used since antiquity for both fast chariots and other wheeled vehicles pulled by animals or humans, in particular the large temple cars or processional carts still used in Indian religious processions to carry images of a deity.
Pottery in the Indian subcontinent has an ancient history and is one of the most tangible and iconic elements of Indian art. Evidence of pottery has been found in the early settlements of Lahuradewa and later the Indus Valley Civilisation. Today, it is a cultural art that is still practiced extensively in the subcontinent. Until recent times all Indian pottery has been earthenware, including terracotta.
Banawali is an archaeological site belonging to the Indus Valley civilization period in Fatehabad district, Haryana, India and is located about 120 km northeast of Kalibangan and 16 km from Fatehabad. Banawali, which is earlier called Vanavali, is on the left banks of dried up Sarasvati River. Comparing to Kalibangan, which was a town established in lower middle valley of dried up Sarasvathi River, Banawali was built over upper middle valley of Sarasvati River.
Indigenous Aryanism, also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT), is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view of Indian history, and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model, which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.
Bhirrana, also Bhirdana and Birhana, is an archaeological site, located in a small village in the Fatehabad district of the north Indian state of Haryana. Bhirrana's earliest archaeological layers predates the Indus Valley civilisation times, dating to the 8th-7th millennium BCE. The site is one of the many sites seen along the channels of the seasonal Ghaggar river, identified by ASI archeologists to be the Post-IVC, Rigvedic Saraswati river of ~1500 BCE.
Copper Hoard culture describes find-complexes which mainly occur in the western Ganges–Yamuna doab in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. They occur in hoards large and small, and are dated to the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, although very few derive from controlled and dateable excavation contexts. The copper hoards are associated with the Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP), which is closely associated with the Late Harappan phase of the IVC. Associations with the Indo-Aryan of the second millennium BCE have also been proposed, though association with the Vedic Aryans is problematic, since the hoards are found east of the territory of the Vedic Aryans.
The Harappan language is the unknown language or languages of the Bronze Age Harappan civilization. The Harappan script is yet undeciphered, indeed it has not even been demonstrated to be a writing system, and therefore the language remains unknown. The language being yet unattested in readable contemporary sources, hypotheses regarding its nature are based on possible loanwords, the substratum in Vedic Sanskrit, and some terms recorded in Sumerian cuneiform, in conjunction with analyses of the Harappan script.
The Vedic period, or the Vedic age, is the period in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age of the history of India when the Vedic literature, including the Vedas, was composed in the northern Indian subcontinent, between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation, which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. The Vedas are liturgical texts which formed the basis of the influential Brahmanical ideology, which developed in the Kuru Kingdom, a tribal union of several Indo-Aryan tribes. The Vedas contain details of life during this period that have been interpreted to be historical and constitute the primary sources for understanding the period. These documents, alongside the corresponding archaeological record, allow for the evolution of the Indo-Aryan and Vedic culture to be traced and inferred.
Mitathal is a village and Indus Valley civilization (IVC) Archaeological sites in the Bhiwani tehsil of the Bhiwani district in the Indian state of Haryana. Part of Hisar division, it lies 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) north of the district headquarters Bhiwani and 249 kilometres (155 mi) from the state capital Chandigarh. As of the 2011 Census of India, the village had 1,448 households with a total population of 7,434 of which 4,002 were male and 3,432 female.
Kunal is a pre-Harappan Indus Valley civilisation settlement located, just 30 km from Fatehabad City in Fatehabad district of Haryana state in India. Compared to other IVC sites, such as cities like Rakhigarhi and towns like Kalibangan, Kunal site was a village. Excavation at Kunal show 3 successive phases of Pre-Harappan indigenous culture on the Saraswati river who also traded with Kalibangan and Lothal. Kunal, along with its other contemporary sites Bhirrana and Rakhigarhi on Sarasvati-Ghaggar river system, is recognised as the oldest Pre-Harappan settlement, with Kunal being an older cultural ancestor to Rehman Dheri in Pakistan, which is on the Tentative List for future World Heritage Sites.
