The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia.
Tamil is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. It is one of the two longest-surviving classical languages in India, along with Sanskrit, attested since c. 300-200 BCE.
Chandragupta Maurya was Emperor of Magadha from 322 BC to 297 BC and founder of the Maurya dynasty which ruled over a geographically-extensive empire based in Magadha. He reigned from 320 BCE to 298 BCE. The Magadha kingdom expanded to become an empire that reached its peak under the reign of his grandson, Ashoka the Great, from 268 BCE to 231 BCE. The nature of the political formation that existed in Chandragupta's time is not certain. The Mauryan empire was a loose-knit one with large autonomous regions within its limits.
Dasa is a Sanskrit word found in ancient Indian texts such as the Rigveda, Pali canon, and theArthashastra. The term may mean "slave", "enemy" or "servant," but Dasa or Das can also have the following connotations: "servant of god", "devotee," "votary" or "one who has surrendered to God." Dasa may be a suffix of a given name to indicate a "servant" of a revered person or a particular deity.
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and politician. He was the first Prime Minister of the Maurya Empire. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Viṣṇugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century. Around 321 BCE, Chanakya assisted the first Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in his rise to power and is widely credited for having played an important role in the establishment of the Maurya Empire. Chanakya served as the chief advisor and Prime Minister of the both emperors Chandragupta Maurya and his son Bindusara.
The Arthashastra is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. Chanakya, also identified as Vishnugupta and Kautilya, is traditionally credited as the author of the text. Chanakya was a scholar at Taxila, the teacher and guardian of Mauryan emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Some scholars believe the three to be the same person, while a few have questioned this identification. The text is likely the work of several authors over centuries. Composed, expanded and redacted between the 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE, the Arthashastra was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation, also by Shamasastry, was published in 1915.
Robert Caldwell was a British missionary and linguist.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
The Yadava were an ancient Indian people who believed to be descended from Yadu, a legendary king of Chandravamsha lineage.
Sir Herbert Hope Risley was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used anthropometric data to divide Indians into seven races.
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 on 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.
Colin Paul Masica was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, much of his work was on the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic families in the South Asian area and beyond, more broadly on this phenomenon in general, and on possible explanations for it and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.
The early history of slavery in the Indian subcontinent is contested because it depends on the translations of terms such as dasa and dasyu. Greek writer Megasthenes, in his 4th century BCE work Indika, states that slavery was banned within the Maurya Empire, while the multilingual, mid 3rd Century BCE, Edicts of Ashoka independently identify obligations to slaves and hired workers, within the same Empire.
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti was an Indian linguist who specialised in Dravidian languages. He was born in Ongole in the Madras Presidency of British India. He was the vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad from 1986 to 1993, and founded the Department of Linguistics at Osmania University, where he served as a professor from 1962 to 1986. His magnum opus, The Dravidian Languages, is considered a landmark volume in the study of Dravidian linguistics.
The Dravidian peoples are an ethnolinguistic supraethnicity composed of many distinct ethnolinguistic groups native to South Asia. They speak the Dravidian languages, which have a combined total of about 250 million native speakers. Dravidians form the majority of the population of South India and Northern Sri Lanka.
Hindu scriptures are traditionally classified into two parts: śruti, meaning "what has been heard" and Smriti, meaning "what has been retained or remembered". The Vedas are classified under śruti.
The Nanda–Mauryan War was a war fought in ancient India in the late 4th century BCE between the Emperor Dhana Nanda of the Nanda dynasty and forces of Chandragupta Maurya that led to the establishment of the Maurya Empire in Magadha. Little is known from historical sources for certain dating about the conflict.
The early Dravidian religion constituted a non-Vedic, pre-Indo-Aryan, indigenous religion practiced by Dravidian peoples in the Indian subcontinent that they were either historically or are at present Āgamic. The Agamas are non-Vedic in origin, and have been dated either as post-Vedic texts, or as pre-Vedic compositions. The Agamas are a collection of Tamil and Sanskrit scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of murti, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires and four kinds of yoga. The worship of tutelary deities and sacred flora and fauna in Hinduism is also recognized as a survival of the pre-Vedic Dravidian religion. Dravidian linguistic influence on early Vedic religion is evident; many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda, which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. The linguistic evidence for Dravidian impact grows increasingly strong as one moves from the Samhitas down through the later Vedic works and into the classical post-Vedic literature. This represents an early religious and cultural fusion or synthesis between ancient Dravidians and Indo-Aryans that went on to influence Indian civilisation.
The Rajamandala was formulated by the Indian author Chanakya (Kautilya) in his work on politics, the Arthashastra. It describes circles of friendly and enemy states surrounding the king's (raja) state. Also known as Mandala theory of foreign policy or Mandala theory, the theory has been called as one of Kautilya's most important postulations regarding foreign policy.
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family is an 1871 book written by Lewis Henry Morgan and published by the Smithsonian Institution. It is considered foundational for the discipline of anthropology and particularly for the study of human kinship. It was the culmination of decades of research into the variety of kinship terminologies in the world conducted partly through fieldwork and partly through a global survey of kinship terminologies in the languages and cultures of the world.
