A short meta-path on how this archive separates myth, tradition, and history — and how to read any source here with a clear eye.
This is the path to read first if you care about how the archive knows what it claims. Every other page rests on a set of habits — separating story from evidence, text from interpretation, tradition from history. This short route makes those habits explicit by walking through pages that each illustrate one of them.
Everyone, really — but especially readers who want to use the archive for study or research and need to trust its categories. It's the shortest path in the pack and assumes nothing.
We begin with the note on keeping mythology and history apart, the editorial principle behind the whole project. Then a series of pages that each embody it: the Vedic Period, where dates are reconstructed and contested rather than given; the Rigveda, a text that survived as sound long before it was written and whose age is inferred, not documented; Vyasa, a figure of tradition rather than verified biography; and Adi Shankara, whose life is known mostly through much later accounts and whose famous "reading" of the sources is exactly that — a reading, not the plain meaning of the text.
By the end you should be able to look at any page here and ask the right questions: Is this primary text or a later interpretation? Historical evidence or tradition? A date we know, or a date we estimate? That habit — attribution over assertion — is the single most useful thing the archive can teach, and it travels well beyond these pages.