2.1Neolithic and Iron Age foundations
The southern Deccan holds one of India's most distinctive Neolithic complexes, dated from roughly the third millennium BCE and characterised by ash mounds, cattle pastoralism and granite-hill habitation sites.[1] Excavations at Brahmagiri, Maski, Piklihal and Hallur in present-day Karnataka established the stratigraphic sequence from Neolithic to Iron Age (megalithic) to early historic occupation that historians still use for the region.[2]
From about 1200 BCE the megalithic tradition — cists, dolmens, stone circles and urn burials with iron implements and black-and-red ware — spread widely through the Kaveri basin, including sites in the Mysore and Chamarajanagar districts. These communities were the first to work the region's iron and to build the small tank-irrigated settlements that later became recognisable villages.[3]
2.2The Mauryan horizon
The presence of Ashokan minor rock edicts at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, Jatinga-Rameshwara (Chitradurga district) and Maski shows that the northern part of Karnataka lay within or adjacent to the Mauryan sphere in the third century BCE, administered from Suvarnagiri.[4] The Mysore country to the south is best understood as a frontier zone between Mauryan influence and the early chiefdoms described in Tamil Sangam literature.
B. L. Rice, who first systematically edited the region's inscriptions in the Epigraphia Carnatica, argued that this epigraphic frontier is where the documented history of Karnataka properly begins.[5]
2.3Satavahanas, Kadambas and the making of a Kannada country
After the Mauryas, the Satavahanas exercised loose suzerainty over much of the Deccan. Their decline in the early third century CE opened space for indigenous dynasties: the Kadambas of Banavasi from about 345 CE, whose Halmidi inscription (c. 450 CE) is the earliest known Kannada-language record, and the Western Gangas in the Mysore–Kolar tract.[6]
By the fourth century the region therefore had all the elements of a settled polity: an agrarian base fed by tanks and river channels, Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanical religious institutions, and a literate administration recording land grants in stone and copper.
References and footnotes
- [1]"South Indian Neolithic" and "Ash mound", Wikipedia. Link
- [2]R. E. M. Wheeler, "Brahmagiri and Chandravalli 1947", Ancient India, No. 4, Archaeological Survey of India, 1948. Link
- [3]"Megalithic monuments of South India", Wikipedia. Link
- [4]"Minor Rock Edicts" / "Maski", Wikipedia. Link
- [5]B. L. Rice, Epigraphia Carnatica (12 vols.), Mysore Government Central Press, 1886–1904; and Mysore: A Gazetteer Compiled for Government, 1897.
- [6]"Kadamba dynasty" and "Halmidi inscription", Wikipedia. Link