3. The Foundation of Indian Society, to 300 C.E.

During the centuries when the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were developing urban civilizations, people in India were wrestling with the same challenges — food production, building of cities, political administration, and questions about human life and the cosmos. Like the civilizations of the Nile River Valley and southwestern Asia, the earliest Indian civilization centered on a great river, the Indus. From about 2800 B.C.E. to 1800 B.C.E., the Indus Valley, or Harappan, culture thrived and expanded over a huge area.

A very different Indian society emerged after the decline of this civilization. It was dominated by the Aryans, warriors who spoke an early version of Sanskrit. The Indian caste system and the Hindu religion, key features of Indian society that continued into modern times, had their origins in early Aryan society. By the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the Aryans had set up numerous small kingdoms throughout north India. This was the great age of Indian religious creativity, when Buddhism and Jainism were founded and the early Brahmanic religion of the Aryans developed into Hinduism.

The first major Indian empire, the Mauryan Dynasty, emerged in the wake of the Greek invasion of north India in 326 B.C.E. This dynasty reached its peak under King Ashoka, who actively promoted Buddhism both within his realm and beyond it. Not long after his reign, however, the empire broke up, and for several centuries India was politically divided. Although India never had a single language and only periodically had a centralized government, cultural elements dating back to the ancient period — the core ideas of Brahmanism, the caste system, and the early epics — spread through trade and other contact, even when the subcontinent was divided into competing kingdoms.