Achievements of ancient Indian civilization

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Archaeological site of Lothal. Dating back to 2400BC

The civilization of ancient India is one of the oldest in recorded human history. Some of the achievements of the ancient Indian civilization are given below.

• The origins of the Indus valley civilization can be traced to Mehrgarh, which is dated to 7000BC. [3][4][5][6]
• The Indus script can be dated to 3500 BC.^[1]
• At the peak of the Indus valley civilization, around 2300–2000 BC, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa housed some 40,000 inhabitants who enjoyed a high standard of living; for example, this developed, urban culture was sophisticated enough to have organized municipal waste management, drainage and well planned roads.^[2]
• The Rigveda, the oldest religious textbook in Sanskrit is dated to before 1500 BCE. ^{[3][4][5][6][7]} Some writers have traced astronomical references ^[8] in the Rigveda dating it to as early as 4000 BC, ^[9] a date well within the late Mehrgarh culture.
• India is the birthplace of one the two major schools of religions in the world, the Dharmic religions, the other school being that of the Abrahamic religions. The Dharmic religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. India is also the present home of the current Dalai Lama, his holiness Lama Tenzin Gyatso, the equivalent of the Pope in Tibetan Buddhism. Bodhidharma, legendary^[10] founder of Zen, is described as South Indian in most primary sources.

In Hinduism, Yoga is considered to be the ultimate way of attaining Enlightenment. This 5000-year-old sculpture, from the Indus Valley, is of a yogi.

• Hinduism is the oldest living religious tradition.^[11]
• India is widely seen as an important bastion of the Abrahamic religions with Jews and Christians having lived continuously in India since 200 B.C. and 52 A.D respectively. India is home to the Bnei Menashe community, which claims to be a lost tribe of Israel. According to the Acts of Thomas, India is also the final resting place of Jude Thomas Didymus, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. Islam came to India as the early as the 7th century CE with the advent of Arab traders.
• Around 300 BC, the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft which prefigures Machiavelli's Prince by 1800 years, is written by Kautilya.^[12] [7]
• The ancient practice of Yoga, which includes practices for spiritual enlightenment, martial traditions, exercise and conditioning, curing diseases and ailments, learning and concentration originated in India.
• Chess originated in ancient India and was known as "Chaturanga", which translated to four bodied.
• Indian martial arts have been influential in the development of several other martial arts. Brazillian Jiu Jitsu credits India as it's origin. ^[13]
• Kama Sutra, an ancient Indian text on human sexual behavior is considered to be the standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra, the science of love.
• Kanada, who founded the Vaisesika school of philosophy in 600 BC, was one of the (or perhaps the) earliest exponents of atomism.^[14]
• Aryabhatta referred to Algebra (as Bijaganitam) in his treatise on mathematics named Aryabhattiya.
• The history of education in India goes back to the establishment of the first university in the world at the Gandhāran city of Takshashila.^{[15][16][17][18][19][20]}
• India is credited with the development of the modern form of zero.^[21]
• Most of the positional base 10 numeral systems in the world have originated from India. The Indian numeral system is commonly referred to in the West as Hindu-Arabic numeral system, since it reached Europe through the Arabs.
• In Ancient India, the knowledge of theoretical and applied aspects of square and square root dates back to the Sulbasutras, [8] dated around 800–500 BC.^[22] The Baudhayana Sulbasutra contains an approximation procedure for obtaining the square root of 2 to five decimal places.^[23] Aryabhata in the Aryabhatiya (section 2.4), has given a method for finding the square root of numbers having many digits.
• The second section of earlier portion of Narada Vishnu Purana (written by Veda Vyas) describes "mathematics" in the context of Triskandh Jyotish. Numbers are listed in antilogarithmic order (10 to the power n). In addition, different methods of mathematics have been elaborately discussed, most importantly the method of finding cube roots.[9].
• A 12th century mathematician, Bháskara, authored several mathematical treatises; one of them, Siddantha Shiromani, has a chapter on algebra. "The origin of the fallacy that any number divided by zero is equal to infinity goes back to the work of Bháskara."[10] In 1816, James Taylor translated Bhaskaracharya's Leelavati into English.
• Subhash Kak credits ancient India with the knowledge of calculation of occurrences of eclipses.[11]
• India is home to the ethnic Nicobari tribes which are the remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia.^[24]
• In India, from anthropometric studies, one used to find traces of seven races of humans who intermixed to create the Indian race.^[25]

The belief that the Indian state embodies a grand civilization is one possible factor that leads Indians to believe that India has a destiny and obligation in world affairs today. [12].

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 178. ISBN 0-19-51 3777-9.
2. ^ Flood 1996:24–25
3. ^ India: What Can It Teach Us: A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Cambridge by F. Max Müller
4. ^ Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History by Edwin F. Bryant, Laurie L. Patton
5. ^ Gods, Sages and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization by Dr. David Frawley
6. ^ The Supreme Wisdom of the Upanisads: (An Introduction) by Klaus G. Witz
7. ^ World Treasures of the Library of Congress Beginnings by Irene U. Chambers, Michael S. Roth
8. ^ [1]
9. ^ summarized by Klaus Klostermaier in a 1998 presentation
10. ^ Dumoulin, Heinrich (2005). Zen Buddhism: A History, India and China, Translated by James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 85. ISBN 0-941532-89-5. “it is legend we are dealing with here, not only because of the total lack of reliable historical data but also because of the very evident motives that lie behind the story.”
11. ^ Klostermaier, Klaus K. (1994). A Survey of Hinduism (2nd ed.), Second Edition, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1. ISBN 0-7914-2109-0.
12. ^ Boesche, Roger (2002). The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His Arthashastra. Lanham: Lexington Books, 17. ISBN 0-7391-0401-2.
13. ^ [2] History of Brazillian Jiu Jitsu
14. ^ Teresi, Dick (2002). Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science—from the Babylonians to the Maya.. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York.
15. ^ Pakistani Heritage
16. ^ Google Scholar
17. ^ Monash University
18. ^ Hinduism.com
19. ^ Google Scholar
20. ^ IndiaOz Amazing Science
21. ^ Ifrah, Georges [1994] (2000). The Universal History of Numbers, Trans. David Bellos, E.F. Harding, Sophie Wood and Ian Monk, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., xxii. “as soon as the rule of position became the basis for a numbering system, a zero was needed. All the same, only three of the four (the Babylonians, the Mayans and the Indians) managed to develop this final abstraction of number: the Chinese only acquired it through Indian influences. However, the Babylonian and Mayan zeros were not conceived of as numbers, and only the Indian zero had roughly the same potential as the one we use nowadays.”
22. ^ Joseph, George G. (2000). The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, 2nd edition, London: Penguin Books, 228. ISBN 0-14-021118-1.
23. ^ Joseph 2000:228
24. ^ The Times of India, as quoted by Armand Leroi http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Leroi
25. ^ http://members.tripod.com/~tanmoy/bengal/races.html

[edit] See also

Science and technology in ancient India