Vedic Period of India

                     ✲ Vedic Period of India✲

                  

                   Indo-Aryan tribes moved into the Punjab from Central Asia in several waves of migration. The Vedic period is when the Vedas were composed of liturgical hymns from the Indo-Aryan people. The Vedic culture was located in part of north-west India, while other parts of India had a distinct cultural identity. Many regions of the Indian subcontinent transitioned from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age in this period.

                    The Vedic culture is described in the texts of Vedas, still sacred to Hindus, which were orally composed and transmitted in Vedic Sanskrit. The Vedas are some of the oldest extant texts in India. The Vedic period, lasting from about 1500 to 500 BCE, contributed to the foundations of several cultural aspects of the Indian subcontinent.

✤ Vedic society :

 →    An early 19th century manuscript in the Devanagari script of the Rigveda, originally transmitted             orally

→    Historians have analysed the Vedas to posit a Vedic culture in the Punjab, and the upper Gangetic            Plain. The Peepal tree and cow were sanctified by the time of the Atharva Veda. Many of the                concepts of Indian philosophy espoused later, like dharma, trace their roots to Vedic antecedents.

→    Early Vedic society is described in the Rigveda, the oldest Vedic text, believed to have been                    compiled during the 2nd millennium BCE,in the north-western region of the Indian subcontinent.             At this time, Aryan society consisted of predominantly tribal and pastoral groups, distinct from the         Harappan urbanisation which had been abandoned. The early Indo-Aryan presence probably                    corresponds, in part, to the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture in archaeological contexts.

→    At the end of the Rigvedic period, the Aryan society expanded from the north-western region of            the Indian subcontinent into the western Ganges plain. It became increasingly agricultural and was         socially organised around the hierarchy of the four varnas, or social classes. This social structure            was characterised both by syncretising with the native cultures of northern India but also                        eventually by the exclusion of some indigenous peoples by labelling their occupations impure.                During this period, many of the previous small tribal units and chiefdoms began to coalesce into            Janapadas (monarchical, state-level polities).

❁ Sanskrit epics :

                    The Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were composed during this period. The Mahabharata remains the longest single poem in the world. Historians formerly postulated an "epic age" as the milieu of these two epic poems, but now recognise that the texts went through multiple stages of development over centuries. The existing texts of these epics are believed to belong to the post-Vedic age, between c. 400 BCE and 400 CE.

MAHABHARAT

                                                                RAMAYAN

❃ First Urbanization 

                    The Kuru Kingdom was the first state-level society of the Vedic period, corresponding to the beginning of the Iron Age in north-western India, around 1200–800 BCE, as well as with the composition of the Atharvaveda. The Kuru state organised the Vedic hymns into collections and developed the srauta ritual to uphold the social order. Two key figures of the Kuru state were king Parikshit and his successor Janamejaya, who transformed this real into the dominant political, social, and cultural power of northern India. When the Kuru kingdom declined, the centre of Vedic culture shifted to their eastern neighbours, the Panchala kingdom. The archaeological PGW (Painted Grey Ware) culture, which flourished in north-eastern India's Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh regions from about 1100 to 600 BCE, is believed to correspond to the Kuru and Panchala kingdoms.

                    During the Late Vedic Period, the kingdom of Videha emerged as a new centre of Vedic culture, situated even farther to the East (in what is today Nepal and Bihar state); reaching its prominence under the king Janaka, whose court provided patronage for Brahmin sages and philosophers such as Yajnavalkya, Aruni, and Gārgī Vāchaknavī. The later part of this period corresponds with a consolidation of increasingly large states and kingdoms, called Mahajanapadas, across Northern India.

❃ Second urbanisation 

                    City of Kushinagar in the 5th century BCE according to a 1st-century BCE frieze in Sanchi Stupa 1 Southern Gate

                    The period between 800 and 200 BCE saw the formation of the Śramaṇa movement, from which Jainism and Buddhism originated. The first Upanishads were written during this period. After 500 BCE, the so-called "second urbanisation" started, with new urban settlements arising at the Ganges plain. The foundations for the "second urbanisation" were laid prior to 600 BCE, in the Painted Grey Ware culture of the Ghaggar-Hakra and Upper Ganges Plain; although most PGW sites were small farming villages, "several dozen" PGW sites eventually emerged as relatively large settlements that can be characterised as towns, the largest of which were fortified by ditches or moats and embankments made of piled earth with wooden palisades.

                    The Central Ganges Plain, where Magadha gained prominence, forming the base of the Maurya Empire, was a distinct cultural area, with new states arising after 500 BCE. It was influenced by the Vedic culture, but differed markedly from the Kuru-Panchala region. "It was the area of the earliest known cultivation of rice in South Asia and by 1800 BCE was the location of an advanced Neolithic population associated with the sites of Chirand and Chechar". In this region, the Sramaṇic movements flourished, and Jainism and Buddhism originated.