1. Why study Ancient Indian History?

• It indicates how people started agriculture which made their life secure and settled, how they discovered and utilised natural resources and created means for their livelihood and took to farming, spinning, weaving, metal-working and so on and how they cleared forests, founded cities and villages and finally large kingdoms.
• People are not considered civilised unless they know writing and the languages that we use today have roots in ancient times and developed through the ages.
• Ancient history is interesting  because India proves to be a crucible of numerous races such as pre-Aryans, Indo-Aryans, Greeks, Scythians, Hunas, Turks etc.
• India has since ancient times been the land of several religions and witnessed the birth of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.
• The idea that India constituted one single geographical unit persisted in the minds of the conquerors and cultural leaders.
• In the 3rd century B.C. Prakrit serves as the lingua franca of the country as most of the Asoka's inscriptions were written in Prakrit language.
• Later Sanskrit acquired the same position and became prominent in Gupta period in 4th century A.D.
• The ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were studied with the same zeal and devotion in the land of Tamils as in the intellectual circles of Banaras and Taxila. were originally composed in Sanskrit and later came to be represented in different local languages.
• India developed a peculiar type of social system, in North India it was the varna/caste system which came to prevail almost all over the country. Even the foreigners who came to India later were absorbed in one caste or the other and even affected the Muslims and the Christians.