From the Indus cities to the classical empires — the period where the evidence is thinnest and the argument is therefore sharpest.
The Indus Valley civilisation, the Vedic corpus, the rise of the mahajanapadas, the Mauryan and Gupta empires, and the long southern history that runs alongside all of it.
Ancient history leans heavily on archaeology, numismatics, inscriptions and texts whose dates are themselves contested. Conclusions are held more loosely here than in Modern history, and knowing why a claim is uncertain matters as much as the claim.
These notes begin with the Indus Valley material, the clearest case of evidence-led reasoning in the period: a civilisation reconstructed almost entirely from material remains, with an undeciphered script setting a hard limit on what can be claimed.