PREHISTORY
India was inhabited since the most remote prehistoric times: this is demonstrated by the coarse lithic finds – mostly massive splinters of freshly roughed quartzite – which can be traced back to the second Himalayan glacial period, found in the valleys of the northern regions and which are assigned to a culture called pre-Soanian, which preceded the Soanian cultural complex proper, widespread especially in Kashmir and of which various phases are distinguished. Evidence of Paleolithictimes, consisting of both freshly retouched pebbles and double-sided artifacts and the so-called hachereaux, have also been found in numerous other locations, including Chauntra in Punjab, the terraces of the Beas and Banganga rivers north of Delhi, the valleys of the Gambhin, Shivna, Narmada rivers in the Chennai area. Among the Acheulean sitesof greater importance we can remember that of Attirampakkam, near Chennai, that of Singi Talav in Rajasthan, with industry attributed to the lower Acheulean and dating between approximately 300,000 and 200,000 years, that of Chirki near the Pravara river, that of Gangapur near Nasik and Lalitpur in the Jhansi district. North of Bombay (Mumbai) and in other areas, the remains of settlements of populations of hunters and fishermen, with microlithic industry, referable to the end of the Pleistocene times, have been brought to light. A series of shelters, in the Adamgarh hill, has returned a sequence between the Middle Pleistocene, with Acheulean industries, and the Holocene, with microlithic and geometric industries; several domestic animals are attested in the levels datable between 6000 and 5000 BC. C. Some lithic workshops found in Birbhanpur, in Bengal, date back to the early Holocene. There are also numerous remains that date back to the Neolithic, in which smooth axes and hoes appear alongside the ceramic products, indicating the appearance of people dedicated to agriculture. At the same time as the more developed cultural manifestations of the Indus civilization, non-urban facies characterized by lithic technology and copper metallurgy are documented in various parts of India.
CULTURE: RELIGIONS. GENERALITY
According to localbusinessexplorer.com, the religious history of India includes: Vedic religion, heterodox religions with respect to the Vedic core and Hinduism. By Vedic religion we mean the most ancient phase, oriented by the Vedas, sacred writings dating back at least to the century. X a. C., and their interpretative commentaries, which are the Brāhmaṇa (10th-7th century BC) and the Upaniṣads (from the 6th century BC). Heterodox religions arise following the crisis of the Vedic religion (after the 6th century BC); the most important are Buddhism and Jainism, both of which originated in northern India. For Hinduism we mean the religion, formally orthodox, which continues the Vedic religion after the crisis of the century. YOU; however, it is essentially a distortion and a reinterpretation of Vedic polytheism; and it is not even a unitary continuation, but a quantity of religious formations identified, for the most part, with their respective teachers and founders and distinguished by the specific divinity assumed as a fundamental principle.
CULTURE: LANGUAGES
The main languages of the states that are found in the Indian subcontinent are: l ‘ Hindi in the Indian Union, the’ Urdu in Pakistan, Bengali and Bengali in Bangladesh, Nepali and Nepali in Nepal, Tibet in Sikkim and Bhutan, Sinhala and Tamil on the island of Ceylon. But alongside these languages, in addition to English which was the colonization language of the whole territory, many other languages and dialects are also spoken which can be grouped into four main language families: Tibetan-Burmese, in the northern and north-eastern part (where there is also a penetration of the Monkhmer language family with the Khasi language spoken in some regions of Assam); munda, which forms small groups scattered in central-eastern India; Dravidian in southern India, in the northern part of the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), in the Laccadive islands, with an isolated offshoot in central-eastern Baluchistan; Indo-European, which covers most of the remaining territory. The latter is the most important language family because it boasts the largest number of speakers and the most prestigious literary traditions. The languages of this family spoken in the Indian subcontinent belong to the branch Aryan or Indo-Iranianconstituted by the group Iranian, of which only the dialect Baloch interested in the southwestern part of Pakistan, and the group Indo-Aryan, which includes all other Indo-European languages and dialects spoken in India. Chronologically, the Indoarian can be divided into three periods: that of the ancient Indian, in which we distinguish a more archaic phase represented by the Vedic and a more recent one represented by the classical Sanskrit; that of Middle Indian, which includes Pāli, epigraphic Prakrit and other Prakrit dialects, mixed Sanskrit, that is, a hybrid language composed of Sanskrit and Prakrite forms in which the stanzas of legendary biographies of the Buddha are written; the Neo-Indian period, which includes numerous languages and dialects that can be grouped into four groups: northwestern, which embraces the extreme mountainous regions bordering the Pamir in which kāfirī, kāshmīrī, shinā, kohistānī are spoken (from this Indo- Aryan group also the dialects derive gypsies); western, which includes the western puñjābī or lahnda spoken along the upper reaches of the Indus, the sindhī spoken along the lower reaches of the Indus, the Gujarati south-east of sindhī (it is the language of the Parsi, a Zoroastrian community emigrated from Persia, which has undergone a significant influence from Persian and Arabic), further south the marāṭhī which borders on the Dravidian linguistic domain, the rājasthānī east of sindhī, bhīlī east of gujarati; the central group includes the various dialects of Hindi, the Punjabi properly speaking east of Western Punjabi, the Nepali which is the official language of Nepal, and in the Western Pahari; the eastern group includes the bihārī to southeast Nepal, the Assamese or āsāmī, Bengali and oriyā further south. Separate from all other Indic languages is Sinhala, spoken in the southern part of the island of Ceylon.
