Indus cities, Vedic culture and the great empires.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
Faxian (Fa-Hien) · 400
A Chinese Buddhist monk's travel diary of Gupta-era India around 400 CE is the fullest outside eyewitness account of daily life and Buddhist practice…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World
Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsiang) · 646
A seventh-century Chinese pilgrim's firsthand account of Buddhist monasteries, relics and doctrinal schools across India and Central Asia, written…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata
Aryabhata · 499
A fifth-century treatise sets out a place-value number system, an approximation of pi, and a model of a rotating Earth centuries before these ideas…
+4 more at this level
9 works
Faxian (Fa-Hien)
A Chinese Buddhist monk's travel diary of Gupta-era India around 400 CE is the fullest outside eyewitness account of daily life and Buddhist practice under Chandragupta II's rule.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsiang)
A seventh-century Chinese pilgrim's firsthand account of Buddhist monasteries, relics and doctrinal schools across India and Central Asia, written just as Buddhism there was entering its long decline.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Sewell
Reconstructs the Vijayanagara Empire from Portuguese travellers' accounts and inscriptions, recovering a major South Indian kingdom that had almost dropped out of historical memory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Marshall (Archaeological Survey of India)
The Archaeological Survey's own first published account of the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, announcing the discovery of a previously unknown Bronze Age urban civilization on the Indus.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Aryabhata
A fifth-century treatise sets out a place-value number system, an approximation of pi, and a model of a rotating Earth centuries before these ideas were established elsewhere.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026J. W. McCrindle
Compiles the surviving fragments of the Greek ambassador Megasthenes's lost account of the Mauryan court, the closest thing to an outside eyewitness record of Chandragupta Maurya's empire.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Alexander Cunningham
The founding critical edition of Ashoka's rock and pillar edicts — the emperor's own words renouncing conquest by war for 'conquest by Dhamma' after witnessing the Kalinga war's carnage.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arthur Anthony Macdonell
Argues that Vedic hymns and the Sanskrit literature that followed them are the primary window onto the world of the Vedic period, since no other written record of that culture survives.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vincent A. Smith
One of the founding academic histories of ancient India, still cited for its command of epigraphic and numismatic evidence, and long since criticised for reading Indian history through a colonial administrator's assumptions.
link checked 17 Sept 2026