NCERT 6 HISTORY CHAPTER 4

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 4. WHAT BOOKS AND BURIALS TELL US


   ONE OF THE OLDEST BOOKS IN THE WORLD
  • Vedas - the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda
  • Rigveda - the oldest Veda (3500 years ago)
  • includes more than thousand hymns (suktas / well said)praise gods and goddesses 
  • important gods - Agni(the god of fire), Indra(warrior god) and Soma(plant used to prepare special drink)
  • in old or Vedic Sanskrit, composed mostly by men and few by women
  • recited and heard rather than read and written
  • Historians also study Rigveda through written sources
  • Rigveda in dialogue form between Vishvamitra and two rivers (Beas and Sutlej) showed that sage lived in a society where horses and cows were valued animals
  • A Rigveda manuscript on birch bark found in Kashmir( about 150 years ago) used to prepare earliest printed texts of Rigveda (now preserved in library in Pune, Maharashtra)
    LANGUAGE FAMILIES
  • called as family (have words in common)
  • Indo- European language family : 
  • Indian languages - Sanskrit, Assamese, Gujarathi, Hindi, Kashmiri, Sindhi
  • Asian language - Persian
  • European languages - English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish
  • Eg : matr(Sanskrit), ma (Hindi), mother (English)
  • other families : 
  • Tibeto-Burman family - north-east languages
  • Dravidian family - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam
  • Austro-Asiatic family - languages in Jharkhand and Central India
    WORDS TO DESCRIBE PEOPLE
  • Based on the work they do, they called as
  • the priests(Brahmins) - who perform rituals
  • the rajas - not like the ones have capital, palaces or armies nor they collect taxes, sons not succeed fathers as rajas
  • Words for people - Jana and Vish (Vaishya comes from Vish)
  • Aryans - people who composed hymns
  • Dasa/ Dasyus - slave, treated as the property of their owners
    THE STORY OF THE MEGALITHS 
  • Megaliths - stone boulders
  • About 3000 years ago, the practice of erecting megaliths began
  • Some were buried on surface others underground
  • indications(signposts) of burials - circle of stone boulders or a single large stone 
  • buried with pots, tools, ornaments and with animals
  • sometime same family members buried in the same place, bodies of later brought through portholes
  • Important Megalithic sites - Brahmagiri and Adichanallur
  • In Brahmagiri, one skeleton found with 33 gold beads, 2 stone beads, 4 copper bangles and a conch shell and some other skeletons were only with few pots
  • This showed the differences in status amongst the people who were buried(rich, poor, chiefs, followers) 
     A SPECIAL BURIAL AT INAMGAON
  • between 3600 and 2700 years ago
  • adults buried in ground, laid down straight, with the head towards north
  • one burial found - a man buried in a large, four legged clay jar within a five roomed house (one of the largest house at that site)
  • also found grains, animal skeletons  and evidence for collection of fruits
    WHAT SKELETAL STUDIES TELL US
  • About 2000 years ago - Charaka wrote book on medicine 'Charaka Samhita', he states that human body has 360 bones (he counted teeth, joints and cartilage)
     MODERN SKELETAL STUDIES
  • skeleton of a child - small size (no differences - girl/ boy)
  • skeleton of adult - sex of a adult skeleton can be figured out by bone structure (hip/ pelvic area is larger in women to enable child bearing)

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