Class 6 Social Science Chapter 4: Timeline and Sources of History

What history studies

History is the study of what human beings did before our own time. Start with something close: the earliest thing you can remember, and how old you were then. Those memories are your own past, reaching back perhaps five or six years. History does the same thing on an enormous scale, and for the same reason. We understand the present far better once we know what came before it.

A very long story, and our small part in it

You will learn in Science that the Earth has an extremely long history. Human beings occupy only a tiny slice of it, and that slice is right at the end. Life appeared, changed and spread across an unimaginable stretch of time before anybody was there to notice. Keeping that proportion in mind is useful, because it stops us mistaking human history for the whole story.

Four kinds of specialist

Several kinds of expert help us reach the past. Geologists study the physical features of the Earth: soil, stones, hills, mountains, rivers and seas. Palaeontologists study fossils, which are what is left of plants, animals and people who died millions of years ago, or the marks they pressed into rock. Anthropologists study how communities have lived and what they believed, from the earliest times right up to today. Archaeologists dig, and we shall come to what they find.

What an archaeologist digs up

Archaeology studies the past through what people, plants and animals left behind in the ground. The list is wonderfully ordinary. Tools and pots. Beads, figurines and toys. The bones and teeth of animals and of people. Grains that were burnt and so survived. Parts of houses, or just the bricks. None of these was meant to tell us anything, which is part of why they are so useful.

Every society counts its own years

Measuring time is not one fixed thing. Every society has worked it out for itself. Very often a new era began at a major event. It might mark somebody important being born, or a ruler taking the throne. The years were then counted from there. An era simply means a stretch of time marked off as its own period.

The calendar in common use

Today the Gregorian calendar is used across the world. It has twelve months totalling 365 days, and one leap year in every four. There is one extra rule worth knowing. A century year is a leap year only if it divides by 400. That is why 1800 and 1900 were ordinary years while 2000 was a leap year.

And the calendars used beside it

The Gregorian calendar has not replaced the others. Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Chinese calendars all remain in use beside it, and others besides. They fix the dates of festivals, and of occasions counted as auspicious, which means favourable or lucky. So a family may use one calendar for school and office and another for a wedding date.

CE and BCE

In the West, the conventional year of Jesus Christ's birth became the starting point of the count. Years after it are counted forward. They used to carry the mark AD, short for a Latin phrase, but the world now writes CE instead, for Common Era. So 1947, the year India became independent, is 1947 CE. Years before that starting point are counted backwards, once marked BC and now marked BCE, for Before Common Era.

The missing year

Here is the catch that trips almost everybody. The Gregorian calendar has no year zero. The year 1 CE follows immediately after the year 1 BCE, with nothing in between. Draw a short line marking 2 BCE, 1 BCE, 1 CE and 2 CE and count the gaps. You will find only three years have passed, not four.

Doing the arithmetic

So to measure across a BCE date and a CE date, add the two figures and then subtract one. Take the Buddha, whose birth is placed at about 560 BCE. If we are in 2024 CE, then 560 + 2024 − 1 = 2,583 years ago. Forget the subtraction and every answer of this kind comes out one year too large.

What a timeline is for

A timeline is a line marked with dates and events in the order they occurred. It does two jobs. It shows how long ago something happened. It also shows the sequence. You can see at a glance that the Buddha was born before Jesus, without doing any sum at all. A full timeline of humanity drawn to an even scale would run about three metres, which is why parts are usually skipped.

Decades, centuries, millenniums

Longer stretches have their own names. A decade is ten years. A century is a hundred years, and in history the centuries are counted from the year 1 CE onward. So the 21st century CE runs from 2001 to 2100. The centuries BCE count backwards from 1 BCE, which makes the 3rd century BCE the years from 300 BCE to 201 BCE.

A thousand at a time

A millennium is a thousand years, counted the same way. We are in the 3rd millennium CE, which began in 2001 and will end in 3000 CE. Going backwards, the 1st millennium BCE covers the years from 1 BCE to 1000 BCE. Both millenniums and millennia are correct as the plural.

Reading the sky for a calendar

Many Indian calendars set their months by watching the sun and the moon. Built on that observation is the pañchānga, a book of tables. It lists the days of each month with the astronomical detail that goes with them. It predicts solar and lunar eclipses, and sunrise and sunset times. It gives festival dates and timings, and often the year's weather. Pañchāngas are still widely used.

Scenario:

A class draws the Earth's history as a line four metres long across the playground. They are asked to mark where humans begin. Imran puts his mark a full metre from the end. Their teacher asks the class to work it out from the figures instead. Modern humans go back roughly 300,000 years against the Earth's 4.5 billion. The children divide and find the human stretch is less than a third of a millimetre on their line. Imran's mark was thousands of times too generous. Sana sees that the sense of a long human past comes from living inside it rather than from its true share.

Analysis:

Imran's instinct put humans on a metre of a four-metre line. The division puts them under a third of a millimetre, which is why the scale has to be calculated rather than felt.

Activity:

Draw a timeline four metres long for the Earth. Mark humans to scale, then write what surprised you about the length.

Title:

Build a family timeline

What You Notice:

Two things usually surprise people. The first is how much of the strip a single lifetime takes up, and how little of history that is. The second is the century labels: a grandparent born in 1948 belongs to the 20th century, and so does someone born in 2000.

Modern humans have been on the planet for roughly 300,000 years, which sounds enormous until you set it beside the age of the Earth itself.

A century year is a leap year only when it divides by 400. So 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but 2000 was.

A pañchānga is a book of tables long used in India. It predicts solar and lunar eclipses, sunrise and sunset times, festival dates and even the year's weather.

Crossing from BCE to CE — Add them, then take one away — There is no year zero, so the two counts touch directly. 560 BCE to 2024 CE is 560 + 2024 - 1 = 2,583 years.

Which century a year belongs to — Centuries end on the round number — The 21st century CE runs 2001 to 2100, not 2000 to 2099. Counting began at the year 1, so each hundred finishes on a round figure.

Start with your own family

Try a small experiment. Find out about three generations on each side of your family: your parents, your grandparents and your great-grandparents. What were their names? What did they do for a living? Where were they born? Now ask yourself a second question, which is the important one. How did you find each answer out? That second question is what this topic is about.

What counts as a source

You will have used photographs, perhaps a diary, an old identity card, or simply what an older relative remembers. Each of these is a source of history: a place, a person, a text or an object that tells us something about a past event or period. Notice how wide that is. A coin is a source. So is a song. So is a wall.

The jigsaw, and the missing pieces

Every object or structure tells part of a story, rather like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Old coins, books, clothes, jewellery and utensils around a house say something about the family that kept them. Old houses and buildings say something about a town. But history's jigsaw differs from the one in a box at home. A good many pieces are simply missing, and no amount of looking will bring them back.

Sources that come out of the ground

The archaeological sources are the ones recovered by digging or by studying what still stands. Excavation turns up tools and weapons, pottery and toys, figurines and ornaments, the bones of people and of animals, and the outlines of houses and of burials. Standing structures count too: monuments, and the mounds that mark buried settlements. Inscriptions belong here as well, cut into stone, stamped on coins, or engraved on copper plates.

Sources that were written down

The literary sources are the written ones. Indian literature is rich in them, from the Vedas and the Itihasas to poems and plays, historical texts, collections of stories, and works on science and technology. Written sources have an advantage and a catch. The advantage is that somebody meant to say something. The catch is the same thing: they meant to, and may have had reasons of their own.

Sources that were spoken

Not all evidence was ever written down. Oral sources are the ones passed from mouth to mouth. Folklore is one kind, carrying stories, songs and sayings across generations. Genealogical accounts are another, keeping a record of who descended from whom. These can reach into periods and communities that left very little writing, which is exactly why they matter.

Sources that were made to be seen

Artistic sources tell us through images rather than words. Paintings show what people wore, how they sat, what they did. Carved panels and sculptures show the same, and in more durable material. An artist may flatter a patron, of course, but even a flattering picture reveals what counted as flattering, which is itself a fact about the time.

Sources written by visitors

Then there are foreign accounts, left by people who came from elsewhere and wrote about what they found. Travelogues record journeys, and historical chronicles record events. A visitor notices things a local would never bother to mention, because the ordinary is invisible to the person living in it. A visitor also misunderstands things, so these accounts are used with care.

How a historian actually works

Suppose a historian is studying a ruler from 1,500 years ago, or an ancient monument, or a war, or items of trade. The method is the same in each case. Gather information from as many sources as can be found and consulted. Then compare. Sometimes the sources confirm one another, and the jigsaw pieces fit. Sometimes they contradict one another, and they do not.

When the sources disagree

That is where the real work begins. If two sources say different things, the historian has to decide which one can be trusted more, and be able to say why. A coin struck at the time may outweigh a story written three centuries later. A visitor's account may be vivid and also mistaken. Out of that weighing, the history of a period is re-created. It is not simply read off.

Who supplies the sources

Many people contribute. Historians themselves, of course. Archaeologists, who excavate. Epigraphists, whose speciality is ancient inscriptions. Anthropologists, whose subject is how communities lived and what they believed. Experts in literature and in languages, who can read what has survived. Between them they turn raw material into evidence somebody can use.

Science joins in

Over the last fifty years or so, scientific study has added a great deal. Ancient climates can be reconstructed, which tells us what people were living through. Excavated materials can be analysed chemically, which can show where something was made or what a pot once held. The genetics of ancient people can be studied, which has given fresh insight into how populations moved and mixed. None of this replaces the older sources; it supplements them.

The sources of recent history

For recent history, usually meaning the last two or three centuries, there is another source entirely: newspapers. They record events almost as they happen, in great quantity. And for the last few decades, electronic media can be consulted too, including television and the internet. Each new kind of source brings its own question about how far it can be trusted, which returns us to the historian's central task.

Scenario:

A village claims that a ruined gateway at its edge was built by a local chief four hundred years ago. Three pieces of evidence exist. A stone set into the gateway carries an inscription with a name and a date, but it is worn and only part of it can be read. An old song, sung at a village festival, names a different chief and a different reign. And a traveller from another country passed through two hundred years ago and wrote in his journal that the gateway was already old and much repaired. The state museum sends a historian to settle the question. She does not decide on the first day.

Analysis:

Each source here is real evidence, and each has a weakness. The inscription is the strongest kind of source, because it was cut into stone at the time and nobody wrote it to please a later audience. But it is damaged, so it cannot be read in full, and an epigraphist will be needed to get what remains right. The song is an oral source and it reaches back where no writing survives, but songs change in the telling over generations and names can be swapped for more famous ones. The traveller's journal is a foreign account. A visitor notices what a local takes for granted, which is useful, but he arrived two centuries after the event and could only report what he was told. So the historian does what her method requires. She gathers all three, compares them, and where they disagree she weighs them. The inscription, if it can be read, will carry the most weight, because of when and how it was made. She will not simply discard the song, because it may preserve a memory of an earlier structure on the same spot.

Activity:

Make a table with three columns: Source, What it tells us, Why it might be wrong. Fill in a row for each of the three pieces of evidence. Then write one sentence saying which you would trust most, and why.

An epigraphist is a specialist in ancient inscriptions. Reading a worn stone correctly can settle a question that no other source can answer.

The genetics of ancient people is now studied as a source of history in their own right, alongside studies of ancient climates.

For recent history, meaning roughly the last two or three centuries, newspapers are a major source. For the last few decades, so are television and the internet.

The families of sources — Dug, written, spoken, made, visiting — Archaeological is dug up. Literary is written. Oral is spoken or sung. Artistic is made to be seen. Foreign accounts are what visitors wrote.

What a historian does with sources — Gather, compare, judge — Gather as many as possible. Compare what they say. Where they disagree, judge which is more trustworthy.

How long we have been here

Modern humans — Homo sapiens, to give the scientific name — have been on this planet for roughly 300,000 years. Written as an Indian figure that is three lakh years, and it sounds like an enormous stretch of time. Set it against the age of the Earth, though, and it becomes a sliver at the very end. Almost everything that happened on this planet happened before anybody was there to see it.

Living in groups

Early humans faced a great deal from nature and could not face it alone. They lived in bands or groups, and the members of a band helped one another. Two needs governed everything. They had to find shelter, and they had to find food. Both had to be found again and again, because neither stayed where it was.

Hunting and gathering

They were mainly hunters and gatherers. That means they lived by hunting animals and by collecting plants and fruits they could eat. It is a way of life that decides a great deal else. You cannot stay in one place for long, because the food runs out. You cannot own much, because everything must be carried. And you must know your surroundings extremely well.

What they believed

We cannot read their minds, but there are traces. Our early ancestors seem to have held certain beliefs about the natural elements around them. There are also signs that they may have had some notion of an afterlife, meaning a life that begins after death. These are careful statements rather than certainties, and that caution is itself part of doing history honestly.

Where they lived, and what they made

These groups stayed in temporary camps, in rock shelters and in caves. They spoke to one another in languages that are now completely lost. They used fire. And they began making objects that made life easier: better axes and blades of stone, arrowheads, and tools of other kinds. Each improvement is small in itself and enormous in what it makes possible.

Paintings on rock

Some of their life is still visible, because they painted it. Rock paintings survive in caves by the hundred, on every continent people reached. Some are simple, no more than a figure or a few symbols. Others are detailed, showing whole scenes with animals or people in them. They are evidence of the sort discussed in the last topic: nobody left them as a message to us, and that is part of why they are so valuable.

The first ornaments

In time these people began making simple ornaments. Beads were cut from stone or from shell. Pendants were made from animal teeth. What happened next is more interesting still. Sometimes these ornaments were exchanged with other groups, which means groups were meeting one another, and that something like trade had begun long before anyone farmed or built a town.

When the world was cold

The Earth's climate has changed many times over long ages. At certain periods it turned very cold and much of the planet lay under ice. Such a period is called an Ice Age, and you will study the causes in Science. The last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years back, having begun over 100,000 years before that. Human beings lived through the whole of it.

The great thaw

Then the climate warmed. The ice partly melted, and the water it released swelled the existing rivers and eventually drained away into the oceans. Living conditions improved. What people did next changed everything that came after, and it happened in many parts of the world rather than in only one.

Growing food instead of finding it

People began to stay in one place and raise cereals and grains. They also brought animals such as cattle and goats into their keeping. The effect was immediate. With more food available, communities grew in size and in number. They also chose where to live more deliberately, and very often that meant beside a river.

Why beside a river

There were two reasons, and the second is easy to overlook. Water was available, which matters for people and for animals alike. But the soil near a river was also more fertile, which made growing crops easier. So a riverbank offered both the water and the ground, and settlements gathered there.

Chieftains and common work

As communities grew, they became more complex. Leaders appeared, often called chieftains, and their responsibility was the welfare of the people, meaning their health and well-being. Everyone worked together for the good of the community. There was no sense of individual ownership at this stage. The land was sowed and harvested collectively rather than divided between families.

From hamlet to town

Time did the rest. Hamlets, which are very small settlements, grew into sizeable villages. Those villages exchanged goods with one another, mostly food, clothing and tools. Networks of communication and exchange grew up between them, and some villages became small towns. New technologies appeared alongside. Pottery let people shape pots and other clay objects. Metal-working began with copper and turned to iron later, giving lasting tools, everyday objects and ornaments.

Two cautions worth keeping

First, about pictures. Drawings of rock shelters and early farms give men and women particular roles, and those roles may look natural without being accurate. Women may well have prepared colours for rock painting, or done some of the painting. Men may well have cooked or helped care for children. We have limited information, and it is better to say so. Second, about the story itself. This early progress met many hard times, and at certain moments humanity could have disappeared, as other species did.

Scenario:

A class reads that early humans lived in bands and searched constantly for shelter and food. Nita says they must have been poor. Their teacher asks what poor would mean without money, which had not been invented. The class tries another measure and asks how many hours a day the search took. They find that moving in a band spread the work, because several people searching cover more ground than one. The children see that a band was not a hardship but a method. Nita changes her word from poor to organised, because what looked like a lack turns out to be an arrangement that worked.

Analysis:

Poor is a word borrowed from a later world with money in it. Measured by whether the method worked, a band was an efficient answer to searching.

Activity:

List three tasks your family shares. For each, write what would be harder if one person did it alone.

Title:

Pack for a life on the move

What You Notice:

Heavy and fragile things go first, and so does anything you own more than one of. The five things you add at the end are usually storage, furniture or something that takes a long time to build — which is a good part of why settling down changed so much.

Modern humans, whose scientific name is Homo sapiens, have been here roughly 300,000 years — three lakh years — and that is still a tiny fraction of the Earth's history.

The languages early humans spoke to one another are entirely lost. Not one of them survives in any form.

Copper came before iron. Metal-working began with copper, and iron followed later, giving people more durable tools and ornaments.

The great change in how people fed themselves — Follow the food, then grow the food — Hunters and gatherers moved to where the food was. Farmers made the food come to them, and so could stay in one place.

How a settlement grew — Hamlet, village, town — Small settlements became sizeable villages, villages exchanged goods with one another, and a few of those villages became small towns.