Ancient india: Did you mean...?

The First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-6) was a short and bloody conflict won by the British East India Company (EIC) against the Sikh Empire. The EIC was keen to expand into northern India, but the Sikh army was a well-trained, well-equipped, and...

The Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-9) once again saw the British East India Company defeat the Sikh Empire in northern India. The war, which started off as a rebellion against British colonial rule, included the high-casualty Battle of Chillianwala...

In ancient India from the 6th century BCE onwards, the kingdom of Magadha (6th century BCE to 4th century BCE) made a mark for itself. Located in the eastern part of India in what is today the state of Bihar, it outshone other kingdoms and...

An early 17th-century illustration of Kollam (Quilon) in southern India which became a colony of the Portuguese empire in 1505. Part of the Portuguese Estado da India, a fort was built at Kollam in 1515.

Samudragupta (r. 335/350 - 370/380 CE) was the first significant ruler of the Gupta Dynasty. Having come to the throne, he decided to extend the boundaries of his empire to cover the multiple kingdoms and republics that existed outside its...

A map illustrating the evolution of the cultures on the northern Indian subcontinent with the arrival of the Aryan nomads during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age known as the Vedic age (c. 1500 – c. 500 BCE), when the Vedic literature...

A sepoy was an Indian soldier in the armies of various states and European trading companies in the Indian subcontinent and then, from the second half of the 19th century, in the British Indian Army. Recruited from many different population...

Shihab al-Din (also Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam), popularly known as Muhammad Ghori (r. 1173-1206 CE), was the Muslim ruler who laid the foundation for the subsequent Islamic ruling dynasties of India which saw its pinnacle later in the...

A c. 1665 illustration of the British East India Company's fort at Bombay (now Mumbai). (National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague)

The rarity of the appearance of Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms in ancient literature is one of the reasons why those states are so little-known today. Indo-Greek literature did exist, but none has been found that speaks about the...