Timeline and Sources of History

Why This Matters

Think about your own life for a moment.

Can you remember your first day at school? Maybe you cried. Maybe you made a friend. That was your past.

Now look at a photo of yourself as a baby. You have changed a lot, right? But that baby is still you. Your past made you who you are today.

A country has a past too. India has a very, very long past. Kings ruled. Cities rose and fell. People built temples, made tools, and told stories. All of this is history.

History is the study of the human past. It is the story of people who lived long before us.

But here is a puzzle. Those people are gone. There are no photos from 2000 years ago. There were no phones, no cameras, no videos. So how do we know what happened?

In this chapter, we will solve two big puzzles. First, how do we measure time that is so far back? Second, how do we find out what happened when nobody is alive to tell us? Let us become history detectives together.

The Big Idea

History is the study of the human past. To make sense of the past, we do two things. First, we put events in order on a timeline — a line that shows when things happened, from long ago up to today. Second, we gather sources — the clues the past left behind. Some clues are objects, like coins, pots, tools and old buildings. Other clues are written texts. And some are stories passed from mouth to mouth. A historian is like a detective. They collect every clue, fit the pieces together, and slowly build the story of what really happened.

Let’s Break It Down

Why study the past?

You might think, “The past is over. Why should I care?”

Here is why. The present did not just appear out of nowhere. It grew out of the past.

Think about the food you eat. People long ago first learned to grow crops. That is why we have rice and wheat today. Think about the language you speak. It came from people who spoke it before you.

A famous historian named E. H. Carr said it well. He said we can only understand today fully if we understand yesterday.

So studying history helps us understand our own world. It tells us where we came from. It helps us see why things are the way they are.

Here is something amazing to keep in mind. The Earth is very, very old — about 4.5 billion years old. Modern humans (people like us) have been around for only about 300,000 years. That sounds like a lot. But compared to the age of the Earth, it is just a tiny, tiny slice. We are the newest part of a very long story.

Measuring time — timelines, BCE and CE (and how to read them)

History covers thousands of years. To keep all those years in order, we use a timeline.

A timeline is a line that shows events in the order they happened. The oldest events are on one side. The newest events are on the other side. It is like a measuring tape for time.

But to put a year on a timeline, we need a way to name years. We need a starting point to count from.

Most of the world today uses the Gregorian calendar. This is the calendar with 12 months and 365 days that you use at home and school. (India also uses many other calendars, like the Hindu and Muslim ones, mostly to fix the dates of festivals.)

In the Gregorian calendar, there is one special starting point. Long ago, people chose the birth of Jesus Christ as the point to count from. Think of it like the number zero on a ruler. Years after this point and years before this point are counted in two different directions.

• Years after the starting point are called CE. CE means Common Era. For example, India became free in 1947 CE. (You may have seen the old name “AD” for these years. CE means the same thing.)
• Years before the starting point are called BCE. BCE means Before Common Era. For example, Gautama Buddha was born around 560 BCE. (The old name for this was “BC”.)

So here is the simple rule. CE years are recent, near our time. BCE years are old, far back in the past.

Now comes the tricky part — and we will explain it slowly, because this is where most students get confused.

Why do BCE numbers get BIGGER as we go further back?

This feels strange at first. Normally, bigger means later. But with BCE, bigger means earlier. Why?

Think of it like a countdown. BCE years count down towards the starting point, the way a rocket counts down: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, blast off. So 500 BCE comes before 200 BCE. The year 500 BCE is further back in time, and its number is bigger. Then the count reaches 1 BCE, the starting point arrives, and CE begins counting up: 1 CE, 2 CE, and so on.

So as you walk back into the past, BCE numbers grow. As you walk forward towards today, first BCE numbers shrink down to 1, then CE numbers grow. The picture below shows exactly this.

The next figure is the most important one in this chapter. Look at it carefully. Figure 4.1 shows a timeline with the starting point in the middle. BCE is on the left, CE is on the right.

Tap to zoom

There is one more surprise hiding in this timeline. There is no year zero.

The year 1 BCE is followed straight away by the year 1 CE. We jump from 1 BCE to 1 CE with nothing in between. This sounds like a small detail, but it matters when we count years, as we will see next.

This relies on simple counting, which you already know, so here is a quick reminder before we use it.

So how do we find how many years are between a BCE date and a CE date? We add the two numbers, then subtract 1 (because there is no year zero). Let us see this in action.

We use Buddha’s birth (560 BCE) and the year today (let us say 2024 CE). Figure 4.2 below sets it up as a number line.

Tap to zoom

A timeline does one more useful thing. Even without doing any maths, it shows us the order of events. Look back at Figure 4.1. You can see at a glance that the Buddha was born before Jesus, because the Buddha is further to the left. The order is clear from the picture alone.

Decade, century, millennium

A single year is a small unit of time. For history, we often talk about much longer stretches. So we group years together. Three groupings are very common.

• A decade is 10 years. (For example, the years 2010 to 2019 are one decade.)
• A century is 100 years. That is ten decades.
• A millennium is 1000 years. That is ten centuries. (The plural can be “millenniums” or “millennia” — both are fine.)

Each bigger unit simply holds ten of the smaller one. Figure 4.3 shows this clearly.

Tap to zoom

How do we count centuries? We start from the year 1 CE. The 1st century CE runs from the year 1 to the year 100. The 2nd century runs from 101 to 200. And so on.

This is why we are now in the 21st century. The 21st century runs from 2001 to 2100. (Notice the number is one ahead of the year — the years in the 2000s are the 21st century. We will explain this in Common Mistakes.)

Centuries BCE work backwards from 1 BCE. The 1st century BCE is 100 BCE to 1 BCE. The 3rd century BCE is 300 BCE to 201 BCE.

Millenniums work the same way, just in steps of 1000. We are in the 3rd millennium CE, which began in 2001 CE and runs to 3000 CE.

Sources of history — archaeological sources

Now we come to the second big puzzle. How do we actually find out what happened in the past?

We use sources. A source of history is anything — an object, a building, a text, or even a person’s memory — that gives us information about the past. Sources are the clues.

There are different kinds of sources. The first kind is archaeological sources.

Archaeology is the study of the past by digging up the things people left behind. The people who do this are called archaeologists. They dig carefully into the ground and find objects buried long ago.

What kind of objects? Here are the main ones, shown in Figure 4.4.

• Coins. Old coins tell us about kings, money, and trade. The pictures and words on a coin can name a ruler.
• Pots and pottery. Broken pots tell us how people cooked, stored food, and lived.
• Tools and weapons. Stone tools, axes and arrowheads tell us how people hunted and worked.
• Inscriptions. An inscription is writing carved onto stone, metal or other hard surfaces. It can record a king’s order or an important event.
• Buildings and monuments. Old temples, forts and houses show us how people built and what they valued.

Let us look at these clues together.

Tap to zoom

These objects are special because nobody made them to fool us. A buried coin or a broken pot is honest. It simply is what it is. That makes archaeological sources very valuable.

Sometimes archaeologists also find fossils. A fossil is the preserved mark or remains of a plant or animal from very long ago, found inside layers of rock or soil. Fossils help us learn about life from millions of years back.

Sources — literary and oral

The second kind of source is the literary source. “Literary” simply means to do with written texts.

A literary source is anything that people wrote down. This includes:

• Old books and manuscripts (a manuscript is a book or document written by hand, before printing existed).
• Religious texts, like the Vedas.
• Poems, plays and collections of stories.
• Records kept by rulers, and even notes written by foreign travellers who visited India.

Written sources are powerful because they can tell us people’s actual thoughts, beliefs and decisions in their own words.

But there is a third kind too, and it is easy to forget. It is the oral source.

“Oral” means spoken, by mouth. An oral source is information passed from person to person by speaking, not by writing.

Think about it. Long before writing was common, people remembered things and told them to their children. Those children told their children. Songs, stories, and family memories travelled down the generations this way. This is called folklore — the stories and traditions of a community, passed down by word of mouth.

Even today, when you ask your grandmother about your family, she is an oral source. Figure 4.5 shows the difference between a written source and a spoken one.

Tap to zoom

Here is a neat way to compare archaeological and literary sources side by side.

What to compare	Archaeological sources	Literary sources
What they are	Objects and remains people left behind	Things people wrote down
Examples	Coins, pots, tools, inscriptions, buildings	Manuscripts, the Vedas, poems, records
How we get them	Dug up by archaeologists	Read and studied by experts
What they tell us best	How people lived and made things	What people thought and believed
A weakness	An object cannot speak; we must guess its use	A writer may give only their own side

How historians use sources together

So we have three kinds of clues: archaeological, literary and oral. Who puts them all together?

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past. A historian works just like a detective.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. Each source is one piece. A coin is a piece. A poem is a piece. A grandmother’s story is a piece. No single piece shows the whole picture. But when you fit many pieces together, a picture starts to appear.

Historians never trust just one source. They gather as many as they can. Then they compare them.

• Sometimes the sources agree with each other. A coin and a written record both name the same king. Then the historian feels confident — the pieces match.
• Sometimes the sources disagree. Two texts give different dates. Then the historian must think hard. Which source is more trustworthy? Why might one be wrong?

Many experts help in this work. Some study old inscriptions. Some study languages. In the last 50 years, science has helped too — for example, by studying ancient bones and the chemistry of dug-up objects.

And here is an honest truth about history. Some puzzle pieces are simply lost forever. Many things from the past were never written down, or have rotted away, or were destroyed. So the picture of the past always has a few gaps. Historians do their best with the clues that survive.

Common Mistakes

Quick Check

Let us test the key ideas with a few quick questions.

Practice Problems

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Summary

• History is the study of the human past. We study it to understand how our present world came to be.
• A timeline shows events in the order they happened, from oldest to newest, so we can see when things took place.
• CE (Common Era) years are recent and count forwards. BCE (Before Common Era) years are older and count backwards — so a bigger BCE number means further back in the past.
• There is no year zero. To find the years between a BCE date and a CE date, add the two numbers and then subtract 1.
• A decade is 10 years, a century is 100 years, and a millennium is 1000 years. Centuries are counted from the year 1, so we now live in the 21st century and 3rd millennium CE.
• Sources are the clues the past left behind. Archaeological sources are objects (coins, pots, tools, inscriptions, buildings). Literary sources are written texts. Oral sources are stories passed on by mouth.
• A historian works like a detective, gathering many sources and fitting them together like a jigsaw — though some pieces of the puzzle are lost forever.

What’s Next

You now know how to measure historical time and how to find clues about the past. You are ready to use these tools on a real story — the story of our own land.

In Chapter 5, “India, That Is Bharat”, we will explore the many names of our country, where those names came from, and how India’s long journey began. Bring your timeline and your detective hat — you will need both.