The Significance of Ancient Indian History

The study of ancient Indian history is important for several reasons. It tells us how, when, and where people developed the earliest cultures in India, how they began undertaking agriculture and stock raising which made life secure and settled. It shows how the ancient Indians discovered and utilized natural resources, and how they created the means for their livelihood. We get an idea of how the ancient inhabitants made arrangements for food, shelter, and transport, and learn how they took to farming, spinning, weaving, metalworking, and the like, how they cleared forests, founded villages, cities, and eventually large kingdoms.

People are not considered civilized unless they know how to write. The different forms of writing prevalent in India today are all derived from the ancient scripts. This is also true of the languages that we speak today. The languages we use have roots in ancient times, and have developed through the ages.

Unity in Diversity

Ancient Indian history is interesting because many races and tribes intermingled in early India. The pre-Aryans, the Indo-Aryans, the Greek, the Scythians, the Hunas, the Turks, and others made India their home. Each ethnic group contributed its mite to the evolution of the Indian social system, art and architecture, language and literature. All these-peoples and their cultural traits commingled so inextricably that currently they can be dearly identified in their original form.

A remarkable feature of ancient Indian culture has been the comming­ling of cultural elements from the north and south, and from the east and west. The Aryan elements are equated with the Vedic and Puranic culture of the north and "the pre-Aryan with the Dravidian and Tamil culture of the south. However, many Munda, Dravidian and other non-Sanskritic terms occur in the Vedic texts ascribed to 1500-500 Be. They indicate ideas, institutions, products, and settlements associated with peninsular and non-Vedic India. Similarly, many Pali and Sanskrit terms, signifying ideas and institutions, developed in the Gangetic plains, appear in the earliest Tamil texts called the Sangam literature which is roughly used for the period 300 Be-AD 600. The eastern region inhabited by the pre-Aryan tribals made its own contribution. The people of this area spoke the Munda or Kolarian languages. Several terms that signify the use of cotton, navigation, digging stick, etc., in the Indo-Aryan languages have been traced to the Munda languages by linguists. Although there are many Munda pockets in Chhotanagpur plateau, the remnants of Munda culture in the Indo-Aryan culture are fairly strong. Many Dravidian terms too are to be found in the Indo-Aryan languages. It is held that changes in the phonetics and vocabulary of the Vedic language can be explained as much on the basis of the Dravidian influence as that of the Munda.