1.  From about 500 to 200 B.C.  Magadha (the modern Bihar) was the principal state and the dominions of its great king Asoka were almost the same as British India to-day.

2.  In the immediately succeeding period many invaders entered from the north-west.  Some were Greeks and some Iranians but the most important were the Kushans who ruled over an Empire embracing both north-western India and regions beyond it in Afghanistan and Central Asia.  This Empire came to an end in the third century A.D. but the causes of its collapse are obscure.

3.  The native Hindu dynasty of the Guptas began to rule in 320 A.D.  Its dominions included nearly all northern India but it was destroyed by the invasions of the Huns in the fifth and sixth centuries.

4.  The Hindu Emperor Harsha (606-647 A.D.) practically reconstituted the Gupta Empire but his dominions split up after his death.  At the same time another Empire which extended from Gujarat to Madras was founded by Pulakesin, a prince from the south, a region which though by no means uncivilized had hitherto played a small part in the general history of India.

5.  From 650 to 1000 A.D.  India was divided among numerous independent kingdoms.  There was no central power but Bengal and the Deccan were more prominent than previously.

6.  After 1000 A.D. the conquests of Mohammedan invaders became important and the Hindu states of northern and central India collapsed or grew weak.  But the Hindus held out in Rajputana, Orissa, and above all in Vijayanagar.

7.  In 1526 came the invasion of the Mughals, who founded an Empire which at its zenith (1556-1707) included all India except the extreme south.  In its decadence the Marathas and Sikhs became powerful and Europeans began to intervene.

It is generally agreed that at a period which, though not fixed, was anterior to 1000 B.C.[109] a body of invaders known as Aryans and nearly akin to the ancient Iranians entered India through the north-western mountains.  They found there other tribes not deficient in civilization but unable to offer any effective resistance.  These tribes who retired southwards are commonly known as Dravidians[110] and possibly represent an earlier invasion of central-Asiatic tribes allied to the remote ancestors of the Turks and Mongols[111].  At the time when the earlier hymns of the Rig Veda were composed, the Aryans apparently lived in the Panjab and did not know the sea, the Vindhya mountains or the Narbudda river.  They included several tribes, among whom five are specially mentioned, and we hear that a great battle was fought on the Ravi, in which a confederation of ten kings who wished to force a passage to the east was repulsed by Sudas, chief of the Tritsus.  Still the south-eastern movement, across the modern United Provinces to the borders of Bengal, continued and, so far as our records go, it was in this direction rather than due south or south-west, that the Aryans chiefly advanced[112].  When the Brahmanas and earlier Upanishads were composed (c. 800-600 B.C.) the principal political units were the kingdoms of the Pancalas and Kurus in the region of Delhi.  The city of Ayodhya (Oudh) is also credited with a very ancient but legendary history.