Chapter Notes and Summary
• There are several things we can find out about our past, like what people ate, kinds of clothes they wore and types of houses in which they lived.
• People have lived along banks of rivers for several hundred thousand years. Some of earliest people who lived there were skilled gatherers, that is, people who gathered food.
• Sulaiman and Kirthar Hills to North-West were some of areas where women and men first began to grow crops such as wheat and barley about 8000 years ago.
• People also began rearing animals like sheep, goat, and cattle and started living in villages.
• places where rice was first grown were situated in North Vindhyas.
• Men and women moved in search of livelihood, as well as to escape from natural disasters like floods or droughts.
Sometimes, men marched in armies, conquering other’s lands.
• Besides, merchants travelled in caravans or ships, carrying valuable goods from place to place, and religious teachers walked from village to village and town to town, stopping to offer instruction, and advice on way.
All this led to sharing of ideas between people.
• People have shared new ways of carving stones, composing music, and even cooking food over several hundreds of years.
• word ‘India’ comes from ‘Indus’, which means ‘Sindhu’, in Sanskrit.
• Manuscripts were usually written on palm leaves or on specially prepared bark of a tree known as birch, which grows in Himalayas.
• These books dealt with all kinds of subjects: religious beliefs and practices, lives of kings as well as medicine and science.
• Inscriptions are writings on relatively hard surfaces such as stone or metal.
• Archaeologists study remains of buildings made of stones and bricks, paintings and sculpture. They also explore and excavate to find tools, weapons, pots, pans, ornaments and coins.
• Archaeologists also look for bones of animals, birds, and fishes in order to find out what people ate in past.
• All dates before birth of Christ are counted backwards and usually have letters BC or BCE (Before Christ) added on