50 Fun Facts About Ancient India

Which mythical creature is the most common animal on the stamp seals of the Indus Valley Civilisation?

Unicorn seals outnumber every other design, showing a one-horned beast in profile. Small terracotta figures with a single horn suggest the carvers really did mean one horn.

Which board game descends from chaturanga, played in ancient India with pieces for the four divisions of an army?

Chess grew out of chaturanga after the game reached Persia as shatranj and then medieval Europe. Japanese shogi and Thai makruk are thought to share the same ancestor.

Whose army mutinied at the Beas River in 326 BC, refusing to march any deeper into India?

Alexander the Great shut himself in his tent for three days before giving in. He raised twelve huge altars on the bank to mark the limit of his conquests, then turned for home.

The national emblem of modern India copies a pillar top carved for Emperor Ashoka showing four of which animal?

Lions sit back to back on the capital, and the wheel carved beneath them became the model for the one at the centre of India's flag.

Which modern country holds the two best-known ruined cities of the Indus Valley, one in Sindh and one in Punjab?

Pakistan holds both ruins, though the civilisation also spread into north-west India and Afghanistan. Scholars only recognised it after excavations in the 1920s.

Which spice from India's Malabar Coast was so prized in Rome that Gothic besiegers demanded 3,000 pounds of it?

Pepper was part of the ransom Rome paid the Goths to lift their siege, along with gold, silver and silk tunics. Ancient poems describe foreign ships reaching the port of Muziris with gold and leaving with pepper.

Until deposits were found in Brazil in the 1700s, India was the world's main source of which gemstone?

Diamonds from India's Golconda mines include the Koh-i-Noor and the blue Hope Diamond. Early written references to the stones come from Sanskrit texts.

Which mountain range along ancient India's northern edge has a Sanskrit name meaning 'abode of snow'?

Himalayas joins the Sanskrit hima, 'frost' or 'cold', with alaya, 'dwelling'. Hindu tradition also treats the range as a god, Himavat, king of all mountains.

Wootz steel from ancient southern India was forged into famous patterned sword blades that bear the name of which city?

Damascus became a centre for turning the Indian crucible steel into weapons. The finished blades show wavy bands that look like flowing water.

Which ruined Indus Valley city, whose name is read as 'Mound of the Dead', is home to the brick-lined Great Bath?

Mohenjo-daro sealed the Great Bath with a thick layer of bitumen tar to keep it watertight. The pool has been called the earliest public water tank of the ancient world.

Which fibre, woven in the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago, did Herodotus describe as wool growing on trees in India?

Cotton threads and spindle whorls survive at Indus sites from the 3rd millennium BCE. German keeps the old Greek picture alive: its word for the fibre, Baumwolle, means 'tree wool'.

Indus Valley seals have turned up in the ruins of which civilisation, whose scribes wrote of a land called Meluhha?

Mesopotamia has yielded about twenty Indus seals, at cities including Ur, Babylon and Kish. Most scholars think Meluhha, a trading partner named in Sumerian texts, was the Indus region.

Which Sanskrit epic of over 100,000 couplets, one of the longest poems ever composed, centres on the Kurukshetra War?

Mahabharata runs to about 1.8 million words, roughly ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Its core is a fight between royal cousins for the throne of Hastinapura.

Which Hindu scripture is a battlefield dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna?

Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna dismayed to see relatives, friends and teachers in the enemy ranks. Krishna's reply on duty and devotion fills about 700 verses.

Which of the four varnas of ancient Indian society was the class of priests, teachers and Vedic scholars?

Brahmins held the highest ritual status of the four classes and also served as spiritual teachers, or gurus. Kshatriyas, the rulers and warriors, ranked second.

Which Sanskrit word for 'action' or 'deed' names the idea that a person's acts shape their future lives?

Karma covers both a deed and its consequences, so good intent and good acts are said to bring happier rebirths. The idea is shared by several Indian religions.

What was the given name of the man, born into the Shakya clan, who left home and became known as the Buddha?

Siddhartha Gautama gave up his royal home to live as a wandering ascetic. The title Buddha, meaning 'awakened one', is first attested in the 3rd century BCE.

Which Buddhist goal, a word that literally means 'blowing out', is release from the cycle of rebirth?

Nirvana is pictured as the going out of three fires: greed, hatred and delusion. Hinduism uses the same word for final liberation.

Remorse over conquering which kingdom, in his only major war as ruler, led Emperor Ashoka to renounce further conquest?

Kalinga, in what is now Odisha, fell to the Mauryan army around 261 BCE. Ashoka recorded his regret in rock edicts, and more than 40 years of relative peace followed.

Which ancient Indian religion follows the teaching of 24 tirthankaras, or 'ford-makers', the last of them Mahavira?

Jainism counts Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha, as the final ford-maker. Its followers hold that the faith is eternal and name Rishabhanatha as the first of the 24.

Which ancient Indian principle of doing no harm to any living being became state policy under Emperor Ashoka?

Ahimsa joins a negating prefix to himsa, the Sanskrit for injury or harm. In modern times its best-known champion was Mohandas Gandhi.

What name is given to the dome-shaped Buddhist monuments built to hold sacred relics, like the great one at Sanchi?

Stupa comes from a Sanskrit word for 'heap'. Worshippers honour one by walking around it clockwise, so every example has a path circling its base.

Which capital of the Maurya Empire, in what is now Bihar, grew into one of the largest cities in the ancient world?

Pataliputra began as a small fort around 490 BCE. The Greek envoy Megasthenes later described its highly efficient city government.

Which Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, known as Kautilya's, vanished in the 12th century and resurfaced in 1905?

Arthashastra covers politics, economic policy and military strategy. Tradition identifies its author with Chanakya, counsellor to Chandragupta Maurya, though modern scholars doubt it.

What did Chandragupta Maurya give the Greek king Seleucus, reportedly 500 of them, in return for land along the Indus?

War elephants went west under a treaty that also sealed a marriage alliance between the two courts. The geographer Strabo is the source for the figure of five hundred.

Which 5th-century astronomer taught that the Earth spins on its axis and gave his name to India's first satellite?

Aryabhata argued that the stars only seem to move because the Earth rotates, against the accepted view that the sky turned. He also gave pi as 3.1416.

The Iron Pillar of Delhi, raised under the Gupta king Chandragupta II, is famous for resisting what for 1,600 years?

Rusting has barely affected the pillar because a thin protective film formed on its phosphorus-rich metal. It weighs more than six tonnes and is thought to have been moved to Delhi in the 11th century.

Which painted Buddhist caves in Maharashtra did a British officer come upon while hunting tigers in 1819?

Ajanta has 30 rock-cut halls, and four of them hold the largest surviving body of ancient Indian wall painting. Jungle hid the site until a shepherd boy showed the officer a way in.

Which river, worshipped by Hindus as a goddess, flows past Varanasi and Patna on its way to the Bay of Bengal?

Ganges water is the holiest in Hinduism, and the river is personified as the goddess Ganga. Many imperial capitals of ancient India stood on its banks.

Which mountain pass on the old Silk Road, leading down to the Peshawar valley, was a gateway for invasions of India?

Khyber was the road taken by the Persian king Darius I and, centuries later, by Mongol raiders. British engineers even lined it with concrete tank traps during the Second World War.

Which wind system carried Greek and Roman ships from a Red Sea port to India in about forty days?

Monsoon sailing let ships leave the slow coastal route, and trade boomed after Rome annexed Egypt. Roman writers called the south-west wind Hippalus, the name of a Greek navigator.

From which country did the Buddhist monk Faxian reportedly walk to Gupta India to collect sacred texts?

China gained a large haul of Sanskrit scriptures when Faxian came home, and he helped translate them. He was about 60 when he set out across desert and mountain.

Which ancient Buddhist monastery in Bihar is often called the world's first residential university?

Nalanda kept a renowned library whose Sanskrit texts pilgrims carried home to East Asia. Raiders burnt the monastery around 1200, yet teaching went on there for decades.

Invasions by which Central Asian people in the 5th and 6th centuries helped bring down the Gupta Empire?

Huns of the Alchon branch, called Hunas in Indian sources, struck from the north-west. The empire was also being hollowed out by its own vassals, who broke away.

Which classical language of southern India, written since about 300 BCE, is the tongue of over 2,000 Sangam poems?

Tamil is one of the world's longest-surviving classical languages. In 2004 it became the first language that India's government formally recognised as classical.

At which pilgrimage site is the Buddha said to have attained enlightenment while sitting beneath a fig tree?

Bodh Gaya is now marked by the Mahabodhi Temple, a World Heritage Site since 2002. The original tree is long gone, but its descendants have been revered for over 2,000 years.

Which collection of 1,028 Sanskrit hymns is the oldest of the four Vedas?

Rigveda hymns were memorised and passed on by word of mouth for centuries before anyone wrote them down. Its early layers are among the oldest texts in any Indo-European language.

Which plateau covering most of southern India takes its name from a Sanskrit word meaning 'south'?

Deccan is an anglicised form of the Prakrit dakkhana, itself from the Sanskrit dakshina. The plateau stretches south from the Satpura and Vindhya ranges.

Which Indus Valley city, plundered for railway ballast in the 1850s, gives the whole civilisation its other name?

Harappa lost its bricks to engineers who used them as track ballast for a new railway in 1857. As the first Indus site to be excavated, it lent its name to the culture as a whole.

Which Sanskrit playwright, whose Shakuntala fascinated Goethe, is often considered ancient India's greatest poet?

Kalidasa means 'servant of Kali'. His play reached Goethe at second hand, in a German version made from an English translation.

Which ancient Indian physician, called the father of plastic surgery, described rebuilding a nose from cheek skin?

Sushruta is credited with a compendium that explains how to cut a flap of skin to replace a nose that has been cut off. Surgeons later called the technique the Indian method.

Which Sanskrit texts, whose name suggests sitting near a teacher, moved Vedic thought from ritual toward philosophy?

Upanishads centre on the self and ultimate reality rather than sacrifice. The German philosopher Schopenhauer rated them the most rewarding reading in the world.

Which thunderbolt-wielding king of the gods, slayer of the demon Vritra, is named most often in the oldest Vedic hymns?

Indra kills the demon to release rain and sunshine for mankind. His importance diminishes in the literature that followed the Vedas.

Which language is the sacred tongue of Theravada Buddhism and of its scriptures, the Tipitaka or 'three baskets'?

Pali is never named in the canon it preserves. Later commentators believed it was the very language the Buddha had spoken.

Which kingdom in what is now southern Bihar, one of sixteen mahajanapadas, formed the core of the Maurya Empire?

Magadha conquered and absorbed its rival states one by one. Two of its early kings, Bimbisara and Ajatashatru, are remembered as contemporaries of the Buddha.

Which script, best known from Emperor Ashoka's rock edicts, was deciphered by James Prinsep in the 1830s?

Brahmi is the ancestor of dozens of scripts used across South and South East Asia. Prinsep published his decipherment in the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

Which region centred on the Peshawar valley gave its name to Buddhist art shaped by classical Greek styles?

Gandhara workshops produced some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form. Earlier Buddhist art had shown him only through symbols such as an empty throne or footprints.

Which Gupta emperor, hailed for his conquests on the Allahabad Pillar, issued gold coins suggesting he played the veena?

Samudragupta is credited with sweeping conquests in the eulogy, composed by his courtier Harisena. It says his father chose him as heir while rivals of equal birth looked on glumly.

Which Hindu god, the preserver in the Trimurti, is said to descend to earth in ten main avatars, including Rama?

Vishnu is said to take a new form whenever the world is threatened by chaos. Some lists of his ten avatars include the Buddha.

Which Indian system of medicine, whose Sanskrit name means 'knowledge of life', seeks to balance three doshas?

Ayurveda joins ayus, 'life' or 'longevity', to veda, 'knowledge'. It names the three humours vata, pitta and kapha, and treats illness as an imbalance among them.