NOTES OF NCERT BOOK FROM BASIC FOR UPSC (CLASS 6 HISTORY, CHAPTER: 1 - WHAT, WHERE, HOW AND WHEN?)

 NCERT is that book which has been identified as the base for all competitive exams in India and is also full of knowledge for the students of that particular class. In this article we will be discussing the important terms and points from the first chapter of History subject of class 6.

Hanuman STUDIES

Chapter: 1 (What, where, how and when?)

1. What History tells us?

🔴History tells us various things like what people ate, the kinds of clothes they wore and even the houses in which they lived.

🔴We can find out about the lives of hunters, herders, farmers, rulers, merchants, priests, crafts persons, artists, musician and scientists. We can also find out about the games children played, the stories they heard, the plays they saw, the songs they sang.

2. Settlement of peoples

🔴Peoples have lived along the bank of Narmada River for several hundred thousand years. Some of the peoples who lived here were skilled gatherers and hunters. They know about the vast wealth of plants in the surrounding forests and collected roots, fruits and other forest produce for their food.

🔴There are some regions around the Sulaiman and Kirthar hills to the northwest of India where woman and men began to grow crops such as wheat and barley about 8,000 years ago. here people also began to rear animals like sheep, goat and cattle and they also lived in villages. Garo hills to the northeast and the Vindhyas in central India were some of the other areas where agriculture developed.

🔴About 4,700 years ago, some of the earliest cities flourished on the bank of river Indus and its tributaries and later about 2,500 years ago, cities developed on the banks of the Ganga and its tributaries and along the seacoasts.

3. Movement of peoples

🔴In earlier times peoples travelled from one part of the subcontinent to another in search of livelihood, sometimes also to escape from natural disasters like floods and droughts. The hills and high mountains including the Himalayas, deserts, rivers and seas made journeys dangerous but never impossible.
Sometimes men marched in armies conquering others' land.
Merchants travelled with caravans or ships carrying valuable goods.
Religious teachers walked from village to village, town to town, stopping to offer instructions and advice on the way.
Some people travelled for adventure, wanting to discover new and exciting places.
All the above discussed travelling by the peoples led to the sharing of ideas between peoples.

🔴Hills, mountains and seas form the natural frontiers of the subcontinent. People from across the frontiers crossed them and came into the subcontinent and settled here. These movements of people enriched our cultural traditions. People have shared new ways of carving stone, composing music, and even cooking food over several hundreds of years.

4. Origin of terms Bharata and India

🔴India and Bharat, these two words, which we often use for our country came from Indus, called Sindhu in Sanskrit. The Iranians and the Greeks who came through the northwest about 2,500 years ago and were familiar with the Indus, called it Hindos or the Indos and the land to the east of the river Indus was called India.
The term Bharata was used for a group of people who lived in the north-west, and they are also mentioned in the Rigveda. Rigveda is the earliest composition in the Sanskrit (dated to about 3,500 years ago). Later the term Bharata was used for the country.

5. Origin or sources of information about past

🔴We can know about the past from various sources. One is to search for and read books that were written long ago. These are called manuscripts, because they were written by hand (manu is latin word meaning hand). These manuscripts were usually written on palm leaf or on the especially prepared bark of a tree known as the birch, which grows in the Himalayas. Over the years many manuscripts were eaten by insects, some were destroyed but many were survived, often preserved in temples and monasteries.

🔴These manuscripts dealt with all kinds of information like religious beliefs and practices, the lives of kings, medicine and science. Besides there were epics, poems, plays. Many of them were written in Sanskrit, others were in Prakrit and Tamil.

🔴There were also other sources called inscriptions. Inscriptions are writings on relatively hard surfaces such as stone or metal. Kigs got their orders inscribed so that people could see, read and obey them. There were other kinds of inscriptions also where men and women recorded what they did. For example, kings often kept records of victories of battle.

6. Archaeologists and Historians

🔴Those who study the objects which were made and used in past are called archaeologists. They study the remains of buildings made of stone and brick, paintings and sculpture. They also explore and excavate to find tools, weapons, pots, pans, ornaments and coins. Objects that are made of hard, imperishable substances usually survive for a long time.
Archaeologists also look for bones - of animals, birds and fish - to find out what people ate in the past.

🔴Scholars who study the past called Historians. They often use the word source to refer to the information found from manuscripts, inscriptions and archaeology.

7. Need of study of history

🔴Past was different for different groups of people. For example, the lives of herders or farmers were different from those of kings and queens, the lives of merchants were different from those of crafts persons and so on. This is also true even today people follow different practices and customs in different parts of the country.

9. Misc. Points

🔴BC stands for 'Before Christ'.
AD stands for 'Anno Domini'.
CE stands for 'Common Era'.
BCE stands for 'Before Common Era'.

10. Warning

Beware of Cyber-fraudulent.

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