Eras & Timeline
The long arc of the tradition in time: its ages, its turning points, and the people and movements that shaped what came after them.
A timeline of Hindu history has to begin without a founding date, and that absence shapes every era after it. There is no equivalent of the Hijra or the Crucifixion to count from, and the tradition’s own chronology runs in cosmic ages rather than years.
What the documentary record gives instead is a sequence of transformations. A Vedic society that left almost no ruins. The Gupta centuries, when the temple, the Puranas and classical Sanskrit culture assumed the shapes still recognisable today. The Chola age, when a temple became an economic institution as much as a religious one. The bhakti movement, which put devotional poetry into every regional language and, in doing so, reached people Sanskrit never had.
These pages give the arc with dates attached where the evidence supports them, and say plainly where it does not. Where a traditional date and the archaeological record disagree, both are given.