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Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are two ancient cities located on the banks of the Indus and its tributary the Ravi River in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent.

Chandragupta Maurya founded the Mauryan Empire in 326 b.c.e. in northern India. His son Bindusara and grandson Ashoka (Asoka) continued his conquest that unified the entire subcontinent, with the exception of the southern tip, and part of Afghanistan into India’s first great empire.

The Mahabharata is an enormous epic poem that now plays a central role in the Hindu religion. It tells the story of the great Bharata family and its war of succession.

When news came to Sparta that the Persians were advancing for the second time in 10 years into the Greek heartland, only King Leonidas and his hand-picked band of 300 were dispatched to stop them.

One of the earliest political thinkers of ancient India, Kautilya (Chanakaya), the celebrated author of the Arthasastra, was prime minister of the emperor Chandragupta (r. 326–301 b.c.e.) of the Mauryan Empire (326–200 b.c.e.).

The greatest of the emperors of the Kushan Empire, which stretched through modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of northern India, Kanishka reigned for 20 years from about 127 c.e.

Jainism is one of the world’s great religions. It was started in India during the Axial Age by the religious reformer Nataputta Vardhamana Mahavira. Like Gautama Buddha, with whom he was a contemporary, he was from a noble warrior family and also rejected the Vedas and the formalism of Vedic religion.

Indo-Europeans are representatives of a language family now widely distributed all over the world, with primary concentration in Europe, the Middle East, and northern Asia.

Between the years 264 and 146 b.c.e., the Romans and Carthaginians fought three wars known as the Punic Wars that eventually led to the destruction of Carthage.

Northern India was reunified in 320 c.e. under the Gupta dynasty. For more than 200 years under the Guptas, India achieved great heights in culture and the arts. While Buddhism still prospered, popular Hinduism was emerging in a trend that persisted to modern times.

Beginning in 324 b.c.e. three northern Chinese states with nomadic neighbors—Qin (Ch’in), Zhao (Chao), and Yan (Yen)—began to build defensive walls. After Qin unified China in 221 b.c.e. the first emperor ordered his most able general, Meng Tian (Meng T’ien), to connect these existing walls and extend them to form a unified system of defense.

Gautama Buddha is the historical personage referred to when people speak of Lord Buddha or simply the Buddha.

This term has traditionally been applied to groups from the Indian subcontinent that speak Dravidian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Brahui, and Tulu. Most of these linguistic groups live in the southern portion of the subcontinent.

The Dharma Sutras are manuals on correct behavior inspired by the Vedas and which exist in a number of different formats and styles.

The designation “Desert Fathers and Mothers” refers to sources of ascetic literature from late antiquity that are associated with monasticism principally in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Arabia.