The mysteries and major accomplishments of Ancient India, for kids, are explored here, with an emphasis on their advances in city-building and the contributions of Vedic Aryans to modern Indian culture and society.
Unlike the great dynasties of ancient Egypt and China, the civilization of Ancient India is still somewhat of a mystery. The cities of this vast empire – which flourished in the Indus River valley thousands of years ago – did not leave much behind: no weapons, temples, or artwork that we could use to tell their story. But what we do know about Ancient India is fascinating. Kids studying world history will be spellbound by accounts of the two major cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. These huge urban trading hubs were carefully planned and seem uncannily modern, with their advanced plumbing systems (they even had toilets!), communal granaries, and graceful public buildings.
In this unit, an overview of what was happening elsewhere in the world besides Ancient India, for kids, helps put this civilization into a global context, but while we know what happened to the Egyptian and Chinese empires, we still don’t have a clue about what caused the mighty Indus Valley civilization to vanish around 1500 B.C. However, this was also when the Vedic Aryans began migrating to the region, bringing with them an early form of Hinduism and a social structure that became the modern Indian caste system. Two of the world’s greatest epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, also came out of the Aryan/Hindu culture of Ancient India; for kids studying this era, simplified versions of these masterpieces would be perfect accompaniments to this unit.
7 Topics in this unit
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Mysterious Ancient India
No one knows for sure how people lived thousands of years ago in India. Compared to other ...
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India’s First Cities
The villages that began to develop along the Indus River over 5,000 years ago are among th ...
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Inside Mohenjo-Daro
Mohenjo-Daro was once the largest city on the Indian subcontinent, holding as many as 50,0 ...
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Other Civilizations in the Ancient World
Like the ancient Indian cities, the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China a ...
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The Indo-European Migration
As the earliest Indus Valley cities were declining around 1500 B.C., a group of people kno ...
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The Caste System
From the Vedas, we know that Aryan society was strictly divided into four classes, or varn ...
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Roots of Hinduism
The most long-lasting legacy of the Aryans is Hinduism, one of the world’s major rel ...
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