Geography of Ancient India
A seasonal wind pattern that causes wet and dry seasons.
What are monsoons?
Belief that souls are born and reborn many times, each time into a new body.
What is reincarnation?
Two ancient cities on the Indus River approximately 300 miles apart.
What are Harrapa & Mohenjo Daro?
The main religion of India; it teaches that everything is part of a universal spirit called Brahman.
What is Hinduism?
The most important language of Ancient India.
What is Sanskrit?
A river that flooded, leaving a layer of silt, creating fertile soil, just like the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the Nile in Egypt.
What is the Indus River?
Sacred texts of the Aryans
What are the Vedas.
The division of Indian society into groups based on rank, wealth, or occupation.
What is the caste system?
A religion based on the teachings of Buddha.
What is Buddhism?
The medical practice of injecting a person with a small dose of a virus to help the body build up defenses to the disease.
What is inoculation.
A large landmass that is smaller than a continent, such as India.
What is a subcontinent?
In Buddhism, the state of perfect peace.
What is nirvana.
The number of Varnas, or social divisions in Aryan society.
What is four?
Someone who works to spread religious beliefs.
Who are missionaries?
Founder of India's Maurya empire in 321 BC. He unified most of India under one ruler.
Who is Chandragupta?
The highest mountains in the world separating India from the rest of Asia.
What are the Himalayas?
The effects that good and bad actions have on a person's soul.
karma
Scientist's discovery of the ruins in Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro indicate most houses had this advanced technology.
What is indoor plumbing?
A member of the warrior class, who sought enlightenment and changed his name to reflect his pursuit during the 500's BC in northern India.
Siddhartha Gautama
How did Asoka change how he ruled his empire after he converted to Buddhism?
He no longer fought wars of conquest.
A great river of the plains of the northern Indian subcontinent, which is the holy river of Hinduism.
What is the Ganges River?
In Hinduism, the set of spiritual duties assigned to a person depending on their varna.
What is dharma.
A group from around the Caspian Sea in Central Asia that settled in Ancient India and became the dominant group.
Who are the Aryans?
Buddha's middle way between human desires and denying oneself of any pleasure.
The Eightfold Path
The Gupta Empire reached its most powerful during the rule of which emperor?
Who is Chandra Gupta II.