Kings, Farmers And Towns Early States and Ecoonomies (C 600 BCCE-600 CE) Summary of The Chapter
After the end of the Harappan Civilization within the long span of 1500 years a varity of developments in different parts of Indian sub-continent took place. The following were the main developments:
(i) Rigveda was compose along the Indus and its trubutaries.
(ii) Agricultural settlement emerged in several parts of the sub-continent.
(iii) In Deccan and further south some agricultural settlements emerged but pastoral population also use to live in some parts of the Deccan Plateau. In central and south Indian new modes of disposal of the deads were adopted.
By C.6th century BCE the growth of new cities and kingdoms was noticed.
(iv) Historians had attempted to understand these new developments using several sources such as inscriptions, texts, coins and visual material.
Towns, Trade and Crafts:
(a) During this period some towns developed. The main among them were Rajgir, Pataliputea, Vaishali, Ujjayini, Puhar, Mathura, Varanasi, Sarnath and Sopara etc..
During this period India had trade relation with Central Asia, China and Roman empire. We find certain words in texts of this period for example the words or the terms the Periplus of the Erythraen Sea. One of most valuable sources for reconstructing histories of long distance exchange is a work known as the Periplus of the Erythraen Sea composed by an anonymous Greek sailor (C. First century CE). He describes ports along the coast of the subcontinent. Periplus is a Greek name of the Red Sea.
Virtually all major towns were located along routes of communication. The towns of this period use to play different role such as trade centre, as a centre of some crafts and small scale industry or as a religious place.
In the towns different types of people use to live such as washing folk, weavers, seribes, carpenters, potters, smiths, including goldsmiths and blacksmiths, artists, religous teachers, merchants and as a religious place.
(b) Trade: India use to export pepper, fine pearls, ivory, silk cloth, transparent stones of all kinds, diamonds and saphires and tortoise shell. The main items of import were coin, topaz-antimony, coral, crude glass, copper, tin and lead.
To some extent, exchanges were facilitated by the introduction of coinage. Punch marked coins made of silver and copper were amongst the earliest to be minted and used.
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(c) Crafts: The major carft of this peroid were the metal work, mining of the coins, jewellery making, glass work, textile work, timber work, salt preparation, medicinal preparation.
New Technologies in Agriculture:
1. Agriculture in the subcontinent has a long and richly diverse history, evident in the archaeolohical record. One was growing spread of plough agriculture in fertile alluvial river valleys such as those of the Ganga and the Kaveri. The iron tipped ploughshare in particular led to a growth in productivity as it allowed the farmer to trun the soil more effectively. Moreover, in some parts of the Ganga valley, production of paddy was dramatically increased by the introduction of transplantation, although this meant back breaking work for the producer.
2. During the first millennium CE plough agricultural spread to other parts of the subcontinent as well. In some causes, archaeologists find iron agricultural tools in excavation- an obious indication that new technologies were being adopted.
3. Another strategy adopted to increase agricultural production was the use of irrigation, using wells and tanks, and less commonly, canals.
The Earliest States: Some of the developments traced in the previous sections were almost inextricably related with another major change the emergence of several early states in north and central India. Some of the more important ones were those of Vajji, Magadha, Kuru, Panchala, Gandhara and Avanti.
Some of these states, known as Janapadas, became very powerful and were known as the Mahajanpadas. Many were ruled by kings. Some known as ganas or sanghas, were oligarchies, where power was shared by a number of men, after collectively called rajas. In some instances, as in the case of the Vajji sangha they probably controlled resources such as land collectively.
Many of the towns mentioned earlier were also capital of Mahajandas. What distinguished the ruling elites living in these cities was their welth, acquired through a variety of strategies. Taxes and tribute were probably claimed from cultivators, traders and artisans. So, while trade flourished and agricultural production increased, rules desired ways and means of tapping into the resources that were generated.
An Early Empire: The growth of Magadha culminated in the emergence of the Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the empire (C-321 BCE) extended control as far north-west as Afghanishtan and Baluchistan, and his grandson Asoka, arguably the most famous ruler of early India, conquered Kalinga (present-day coastal Orissa).
How do we reconstruct the history of this period? Historians have used archaeological finds including sculpture. They have also used the account of Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya. Another source that is often used is the Arthashastra, parts of which were probaly composed by Kautilya or Chanakya, traditionally belived to be the minister of Chandragupta.
Asoka is the earliest known ruler to have inscribed his messages to his subjects and officials on stone surfaces-natural rocks as well as polished pillars. He used the inscriptions to proclaim what he understood to be Dhamma.
There were five major political centres in the empire-Pataliputra, the capital, and the provincial centres of Taxila, Ujjayini, Tosali and Suvarnagiri, mentioned in Asokan inscriptions.
New Notions of Kingship:
The new kingdoms that emerged in the Deccan and further south, including the chiefdoms of the Cholas, Charas and Pandyas in Tamlakam (The name of the ancient Tamil country, which included parts of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, in addition to Tamil Nadu), proved to be stable and properous. Many of these states (including those of the Kushanas and Shakas in the northwest and the Satvahanas of western India) desired revenues from their control over long-distance trade networks.
We know about these states from a variety of sources. For instance, the early Tamil Sangam texts contain poems describing chief and the ways in which they acquired and distributed resources. Inscriptions and coins provide us with information about the Shakas and Satvahanas.
The Kushanas (C.Ist century BCE) ruled over a vast kingdom extending from central Asia to northwest India. However, there are no major inscriptions belonging to these rulers. Their history has been reconstructed from coins, textual traditions and sculpture. Infact, their coins and sculpture convery a sense of the notions of kingship they wished to project. By the 4th century there is evidence for longer states, including the Gupta Empire. Many of these depended on samsatas, men maintained themselves through local resources including control over land. They offered homage and provided military support to rulers. Powerful samantas could become kings, covversely weak rulers right find themselves being reduced to positions of subordinates.
Histories of the Gupta rulers have been reconstructed from literature, coins and inscriptions, including prashastis, composed in praise of kings in particular, and patrons in general, by poets.
What did subjects think about their rulers? Historians have tried to solve this problem by examining stories contained in anthologies such as the Jatakas and the Panchatantra.
Land grants and what they tell us: If people indeed fled away from kingdoms due excessive taxe, this would have passed a Serious problem for rulers. Land would have fallen out of cultivation, and revenue would have dropped. From the early centuries of the Comon Era, we find grants of land being made, many of which were rewarded in inscriptions.
Some of these inscritions were on stone, but most were on copper plates which were probably given to those who received the land as a record of the transaction. The records that have survived are generally about grants to religious institutions/individuals. Most inscriptions were in Sanskrit.
Back to basis: how were insciptions deciphered?
So far, we have been studying excerpts from insecriptions. But how do historians find out what is written on them? Almost all scripts used to write modern Indian languages are derived from Brahmi, the script used in most Asokan inscriptions. From the late 18th century. European scholars aided by Indian pandits, devised a system of composing modern scripts, initially using Bengali and Devanagari (the script used to write Hindi) manuscripts, and worked back words from modern versions of the script to older specimens.
Scholars who studied the early insciptions sometimes assumed these were in Sanskrit, although the earliest inscriptions were, in fact in Prakrit. It was only after decades of painstaking investigations by several epigraphists that James Prinsep was able to decipher Asokan Brahmi by 1838.
The Limits of Inscriptional Evidence:
By now it is probaly evident that there are limits to what epigraphy can reveal. Sometimes published and translated. Besides, it is obvious that many more inscriptions most have existed which have not survived the revages of time. So, what is available at present is only a fraction of what was inscribed. There is another, perhaps more fundamental problem-not everything that we may consider politically or economically significant was necessarily recorded in inscriptions.
Source:- Jiwan Publishing House (P) LTD
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