Jul 30, 2017

A timeline of the Indian Empires

The Empires through the ages.
Link to larger version as Blogspot doesn't let me link the image.

So, over the last few weekends, I went over the various wikipedia articles to figure out the various kingdoms that were , which lead to the mordern day India. Part of this research was instigated due to the fake rehtoric nowadays about how our glorious past has been lost due to the Mughals / British etc.

As I started researching, the timelines kept reaching back. All the way to the time before Christ - the colloquial 0 AD date. We are so much caught up in the hate agendas focusing over the last couple of years that we forget that this land was always very diverse.

Much before the British. Much before the Mughals. Much before the Ashokas and the Akbars. Much before Chandragupta Maurya. Thats when the recorded history starts. Most of this is about the Mahajanapadas - and we owe it to the Buddhist and Jain texts which recorded it for posterity. Before that, most of the history is suspect as it is based on word of mouth. the long lines reaching back to 1500 BC are part of that - we really do not know when those empires started, and so these are best guess dates. More research is needed into them before we can for sure say that these are the actual timelines of these kingdoms.

Before the mahajanapas was the Vedic age. Since there are too many conflicting estimates of that age, I have left it out. Also it does not give any inkling to the various kingdoms that were there.

As you move forwards in time, you see that India was actually very fractured. Mutliple kingdoms existed. Backstabbing each other. Fighting for land. Having various treaties and marriage arrangements.

Fast forward a whole lot of years and you start seeing the first of the Islamic kingdoms - the sultanates. The ones in Green. At the same time, there were healthy and long lived other non-islamic kingdoms. No idea why most of the people forget to mention that, but if you look at the graph, you can see the interleaving of the black and green lines.

Forward a few hundred years more and the red lines - the British start to appear. And yet the black lines do not go away. They exist in different parts of present day India.

Finally, everything merges and we get India ( well, also Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh). The blue blip - that puts into perspective the small amount of time that the Republic of India has existed. Kinda insignificant in the grand scale of things so far.

PS : A lot of time went into preparing this chart. If you do share this - please do with proper attribution.

Link to google drive in case you want to download this https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6LzAV0_xl_2MnIyNUVoV2FTcDQ/view?usp=sharing

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