Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon – August 6, 2018

The oldest Veda is the Rigveda, composed about 3500 years ago. The Rigveda includes more than a thousand hymn, called sukta or well-said.

The hymns are in the praise of various gods and goddesses. The three gods are especially important are Agni, the god of fire; Indra, a warrior god; and Soma, a plant from which a special drink was prepared.

The people who composed the hymns described themselves as Aryas and called their opponents Dasa or Dasyus. The Rigveda was being composed in the northwest of the subcontinent.

The Rigveda was recited and heard rather than read. It was written down several centuries after it was first composed, and printed less than 200 years ago.

The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Since man first discovered copper (Around 9000BC), a naturally occurring, relatively pure metal.

Some houses have remains of staircases to reach a second storey or the roof. Many houses had wells, often in a room that could be reached from the outside and perhaps used by passers-by. Scholars have estimated that the total number of wells in Mohenjodaro was about 700.

To some extent, exchanges were facilitated by the introduction of coinage. Punch-marked coins made of silver and copper (c. sixth century BCE onwards) were amongst the earliest to be minted and used. These have been recovered from excavations at a number of sites throughout the subcontinent. Numismatists have studied these and other coins to reconstruct possible commercial networks.

The VinayaPitaka included rules and regulations for those who joined the sangha or monastic order; the Buddha’s teachings were included in the SuttaPitaka ; and the AbhidhammaPitaka dealt with philosophical matters. Each pitaka comprised a number of individual texts. Later, commentaries were written on these texts by Buddhist scholars. As Buddhism travelled to new regions such as Sri Lanka, other texts such as the Dipavamsa (literally, the chronicle of the island) and Mahavamsa (the great chronicle) were written, containing regional histories of Buddhism. Many of these works contained biographies of the Buddha. Some of the oldest texts are in Pali, while later compositions are in Sanskrit

Kanishka was a follower of Buddhism. Thefourth Buddhist council was held during Kanishka’sreign. Kanishka’s court was adorned by the presenceof such scholars as Parsva, Vasumitra,Ashvaghosha, Charaka, and Nagarjuna. During hisreign Taxila and Mathura emerged as great centresof art and culture.

Gaffar Khan, also called Badshah Khan and Frontier Gandhi, had started the first Pushto political monthly Pukhtoon and had organised a volunteer brigade ‘Khudai Khidmatgars’, popularly known as the ‘Red-Shirts’, who were pledged to the freedom struggle and non-violence. They played an extremely active role in the Civil Disobedience Movement. The atmosphere created by their political work contributed to the mass upsurge in Peshawar during which the city was virtually in the hands of the crowd for more than a week.