History
Food
The earliest Indians, The Harrapans, probaly ate wheat and rice, occasionally cows, pigs, sheeps, goats and chickens. Rice and chicken seem to have come from Thailand, and wheat and sheep from West Asia. Some of the wheat was made into stews or soups, and some into flat breads called chapatis. Indian people also ate sugar cane, which grew naturally in India. After the arrival of the Aryans, Indian people still ate almost the same as before, but with the addition of lentils, which the Aryans brought with them from the north.
Harrapans
The first people seem to have reached India from Africa around 40,000 BC. At first they were hunters and gatherers, like other people around the world at this time. But by around 4000 BC, these people had begun farming and by 2500 BC settled in the Indus river valley, where they began to live in cities and use irrigation to water their fields. This began a little later in India than in West Asia, probably because India was not as crowded as West Asia at this time. A lot of people think that the reason they began to farm, and then build cities was that the changing weather (it was getting warmer) was making it harder to get water, and harder to find wild plants to eat, every year. So every year more and more people moved into the Indus river valley, cause there was still a lot of water. When it got really crowded there, people began to build cities.
There were two main cities that we know of, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) away from eachother.The people of these cities lived in houses of stone. They used bronze tools. They may have learned to make bronze from the Sumerians.
The Harappa people used an form of writing based on hieroglyphs, like the Egyptians had. But we can't read it, because there isn't very much left of it.
By around 2000 BC, though, the Harappan civilization fell apart. We don't know what caused this tragedy. Most people think that the weather was gettin warmer and warmer until there wasn't enough water in the Indus river valley to provided these cities from water to drink and to farm so they didn't had food or water. Some people probably starved to death, while others moved up into the hills, where it was cooler and some rain fell.
Guptan Empire
In 319 AD, the king Chandragupta II (the second) managed to unite all of northern India into a great empire again. (He was not related to the first Chandragupta, but he wanted people to think he was). Even some of the south was brought under Guptan power. The Gupta kings were not Buddhists but Hindus, following the older Indian religion.
Under the Guptan kings, India was very rich and powerful. Peace allowed traders to travel safely, and there was more trade between India and China, passing through Sogdiana in Central Asia. Buddhist pilgrims and Indian and Chinese scientists also traveled between China and India. This travel may have helped Indian mathematicians to make important advances in mathematics at this time, like inventing the number zero.
But in 455 AD the Huns invaded India from the north and destroyed the Guptan Empire. After that, India was split into small kingdoms again until the Muslim invasions around 1000 AD.
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