This is Part 18 of HorizonDesk's chronological series on Indian history, from the Stone Age to Independence in 1947. It follows Part 17: The Gupta Empire: India's Classical Golden Age.
The last part told the political story of the Guptas, who ruled much of northern India from the early 4th to the mid-6th century CE. This part looks at what the period is best remembered for: astronomy, mathematics, medicine, Sanskrit literature, and its temples, sculpture, painting and metalwork.
Two cautions. Not everything credited to "the Guptas" was made at their court: Ajanta was painted under the Vakatakas, and much learning built on earlier centuries. And many dates, especially for texts, are disputed; where scholars disagree, we say so.
Aryabhata and the Aryabhatiya
The best-dated scientific work of the age is the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata. In one verse he says he was 23 years old when 3,600 years of the current age (the Kali Yuga) had passed, which works out to 499 CE, so he was probably born in 476. He worked at Kusumapura, usually identified with Pataliputra (Patna).
The Aryabhatiya is short, about 120 verses in four sections, and was written to be memorised. Among its ideas:
- Place value: Aryabhata wrote numbers with a syllable code rather than digits, but his rules for square and cube roots assume a decimal place-value system, where each place is "ten times" the one before.
- Pi: he gave the circumference of a circle of diameter 20,000 as 62,832, which is 3.1416, and called the value "approximate".
- Trigonometry: he gave a table of sine differences, building on earlier Indian and Hellenistic work.
- A rotating Earth: he explained the daily motion of the stars by the Earth turning on its axis, comparing it to a man in a boat who sees the bank moving backwards. Most later Indian astronomers, including Brahmagupta, rejected the idea.
- Eclipses: he explained them by the shadows of the Earth and Moon, not by the demon Rahu.
His work spread widely, especially in the south, where Kerala astronomers wrote commentaries on it for a thousand years.
Varahamihira and the astronomers of Ujjain
Varahamihira (about 505 to 587 CE) worked at Ujjain a generation after the Gupta peak. His Pancha-siddhantika, "Five Treatises", summarised five astronomical systems then in use, two of which, the Romaka and Paulisha, drew on Greek and Roman astronomy that had reached India through trade. His Brihat Samhita is an encyclopaedia covering omens, weather, gems, architecture, plants and much else. He was above all an astrologer: "science" in this period was closely bound up with prediction. Later legend made him and Kalidasa two of the "nine gems" of a King Vikramaditya's court, but that tradition is late and unreliable.
Place value and zero: what we can and cannot say
The decimal place-value system with a zero, the ancestor of the numbers used worldwide today, developed in India. When exactly that happened is debated.
- Aryabhata's rules show that place value was in use by 499 CE. A Jain text, the Lokavibhaga, uses place-value number words and gives a date equal to 458 CE, though it survives only in later copies.
- The Bakhshali manuscript, a birch-bark mathematical text found near Peshawar in 1881 and now in Oxford's Bodleian Library, uses a dot for zero. In 2017 the Bodleian announced radiocarbon dates suggesting that one leaf came from the 3rd or 4th century CE, which made headlines as the "oldest zero". Historians of mathematics such as Kim Plofker and Takao Hayashi disputed the reading, and a 2024 Oxford report on new samples dates the folios to roughly the 8th to 10th centuries and says the early measurement was inaccurate.
- The earliest securely dated inscriptions with a zero symbol are later still: one from Cambodia dated 683 CE, and the well-known inscription at the Chaturbhuj temple in Gwalior dated 876 CE.
The fair summary: place-value thinking was established by the Gupta age, but the written zero as a full number, with rules for adding and multiplying by it, is clearly set out only in Brahmagupta's work of 628 CE.
Medicine: Charaka and Sushruta
Ayurveda's two classic texts, the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, are often listed among Gupta achievements. Their history is more layered. Both contain material that may go back to the centuries BCE, and both were revised over a long time. Scholars such as Dominik Wujastyk and G. J. Meulenbeld date the forms we have to roughly the early centuries CE; the Charaka Samhita was completed by a later editor, Dridhabala, often placed around the 4th or 5th century. The Sushruta Samhita is famous for its surgery, including a description of rebuilding a nose. The Bower manuscript, a birch-bark medical text in a late Gupta script found at Kucha in Central Asia in 1890, shows how far Indian medicine travelled.
Kalidasa and Sanskrit literature
The age's literary giant is Kalidasa. Six works are generally accepted as his: the plays Abhijnanashakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala), Vikramorvashiyam and Malavikagnimitram; the long poems Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava; and the Meghaduta (Cloud Messenger), in which an exiled yaksha sends a message to his wife by a monsoon cloud.
His dates are not known. As Britannica notes, he must have lived after the Shunga king Agnimitra (2nd century BCE), the hero of one of his plays, and before 634 CE, when the Aihole inscription praises him. Many scholars, but not all, link him to Chandragupta II, partly because his work fits the polished court culture of the 5th century. William Jones's English Shakuntala of 1789 caused a sensation in Europe.
Other works often placed in or near the period, all with uncertain dates:
- Drama: Shudraka's Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart); Vishakhadatta's political drama Mudrarakshasa.
- Stories: the Panchatantra, animal fables attributed to Vishnusharman to teach princes practical wisdom. Britannica places the lost original somewhere between 100 BCE and 500 CE. A Persian physician, Burzoe, translated it into Middle Persian in the 6th century; through Arabic (Kalila wa Dimna) and later versions it reached Europe.
- Reference: Amarasimha's Amarakosha, a Sanskrit thesaurus in verse; it is usually dated between the 4th and 6th centuries.
- Religious texts: many Puranas, such as the Vishnu, Vayu and Matsya Puranas, took much of their surviving shape in these centuries, as did law books such as the Yajnavalkya Smriti, though Puranas kept growing for centuries afterwards.
The age was not only Brahmanical. Buddhist philosophers such as Asanga, Vasubandhu and Dignaga worked in the 4th to 6th centuries, and a Jain council at Valabhi in Gujarat, in the 5th century, wrote down the Svetambara canon.
Nalanda: the beginnings of a great monastery
Nalanda in Bihar grew into Asia's most famous centre of Buddhist learning. Its beginnings belong to this period: the 7th-century pilgrim Xuanzang credits its first buildings to a King Shakraditya, often identified with Kumaragupta I, and UNESCO dates the monastic institution from the 5th century CE. Its greatest fame came later (see our Nalanda Mahavihara guide).
Sculpture: Mathura and Sarnath
Gupta sculpture set ideals of calm, rounded, inward-looking figures that shaped Indian and Southeast Asian art for centuries. Two workshops stand out:
- Mathura, already a great centre under the Kushans, carved standing Buddhas in mottled red sandstone, with robes shown as fine, string-like folds.
- Sarnath, near Varanasi, used pale Chunar sandstone and an almost transparent, smooth robe. Its seated Buddha teaching the first sermon, now in the Sarnath Museum and usually dated to the late 5th century, is one of the best-known images in Indian art.
Hindu sculpture flourished too. At Udayagiri near Vidisha, the great rock-cut panel of Vishnu as the boar Varaha rescuing the Earth goddess dates from around 401 CE, the date of a Chandragupta II inscription at the site. Michael Willis has argued that the site was laid out with the summer solstice in mind.
Early temples: Sanchi, Deogarh and Bhitargaon
North India's first free-standing stone temples appear in this period, starting small: Temple 17 at Sanchi, from the early 5th century, is a flat-roofed square shrine with a pillared porch (see our Sanchi Stupa guide). By about 500 CE, builders were adding towers. The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh in Uttar Pradesh, usually dated to the early 6th century, stands on a terrace with carved panels of Vishnu sleeping on the serpent Ananta, the rescue of the elephant Gajendra and the sages Nara and Narayana; it once had a tower over the sanctum, now partly lost. At Bhitargaon near Kanpur a brick temple with terracotta panels still stands.
Ajanta: painting under the Vakatakas
The most famous paintings of the age are at Ajanta in Maharashtra, outside the Gupta Empire. The site has two phases: a few caves from about the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, and a much larger second phase in the 5th century. Inscriptions in Caves 16 and 17 name patrons connected with the Vakataka king Harishena, including his minister Varahadeva. The murals tell Jataka stories of the Buddha's past lives in crowded, glowing scenes.
How long the second phase lasted is debated. The art historian Walter Spink argued for a "short chronology", with almost all the work done between about 460 and 480 CE and cut short by Harishena's death. Others, including Hans Bakker and Karl Khandalavala, favour a longer chronology into the 6th century, and the Archaeological Survey of India's account also places the paintings over a longer span. Either way, Ajanta shows the Vakatakas, allies and in-laws of the Guptas, as major patrons (see our Ajanta and Ellora guide).
The iron pillar and metalwork
The iron pillar now in the Qutb complex in Delhi (see our Qutub Minar guide) is about 7.2 metres tall and weighs around six tonnes. Its inscription praises a King Chandra, widely identified with Chandragupta II, and says it was set up as a standard of Vishnu on a hill called Vishnupada. Where that hill was, and when the pillar reached Delhi, is uncertain.
The pillar is famous for not rusting away. Studies by R. Balasubramaniam of IIT Kanpur found that the iron, made by forge-welding lumps of hot metal, is unusually rich in phosphorus. Over time this helped form a thin, protective layer of iron oxyhydroxide and iron hydrogen phosphate on the surface, helped by Delhi's cycles of wet and dry weather. Its survival owes more to skilled smithing than to any lost "secret alloy".
Coins as art
Gupta gold coins, called dinara, are small works of art. They show kings as archers, horsemen, lion-slayers and musicians, Samudragupta performing the horse sacrifice, and Kumaragupta feeding a peacock, the mount of the war god Kartikeya. Their later debasement is one sign of the empire's strain.
Meanwhile in the south
The same centuries were productive in the Tamil country too. The Tamil epics Silappathikaram and Manimekalai are often placed in roughly the 5th or 6th century, though their dates are debated (see Tamil History Part 12). Kanchipuram was a centre of Sanskrit and Buddhist learning.
Key takeaways
- Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya (499 CE) used place value, gave pi as 3.1416 and argued that the Earth rotates.
- The early history of zero is debated: a 2024 Oxford report revised the Bakhshali manuscript's dates to roughly the 8th to 10th centuries, and full rules for zero appear in Brahmagupta (628 CE).
- Kalidasa is probably of the 5th century, but his dates are not certain; the Panchatantra, Amarakosha and many Puranas also took shape around this time.
- Sarnath and Mathura sculpture, Udayagiri's Varaha, and the temples of Sanchi and Deogarh defined a classical style.
- Ajanta's great paintings were made under the Vakatakas; Spink's short chronology dates most of them to about 460 to 480 CE, but others argue for a longer span.
Next part
In Part 19, we meet Harshavardhana and Xuanzang's India: the last great emperor of the north before the medieval kingdoms, and the Chinese pilgrim who described his court, Nalanda and the roads of 7th-century India.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Kalidasa and Panchatantra
- Plofker, K. (2009), Mathematics in India, Princeton University Press
- Plofker, K., Keller, A., Hayashi, T., Montelle, C. and Wujastyk, D. (2017), "The Bakhshali Manuscript: A Response to the Bodleian Library's Radiocarbon Dating", History of Science in South Asia 5
- Chivall, D., Llado-Buisan, V., Howell, D. and Evison, G. (2024), Radiocarbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript, University of Oxford
- Wujastyk, D. (2003), The Roots of Ayurveda, Penguin; Meulenbeld, G. J. (1999-2002), A History of Indian Medical Literature, Egbert Forsten
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Ajanta Caves and Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara
- Archaeological Survey of India, Ajanta Caves
- Spink, W. M. (2005-2017), Ajanta: History and Development, Brill
- Bakker, H. (1997), The Vakatakas: An Essay in Hindu Iconology, Egbert Forsten
- Balasubramaniam, R. (2000), "On the corrosion resistance of the Delhi iron pillar", Corrosion Science 42
- Williams, J. G. (1982), The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province, Princeton University Press
- Harle, J. C. (1974), Gupta Sculpture, Clarendon Press
- Willis, M. (2009), The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods, Cambridge University Press
- Altekar, A. S. (1957), The Coinage of the Gupta Empire, Numismatic Society of India
- Thapar, R. (2002), Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, University of California Press
- Singh, U. (2008), A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, Pearson
