Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 56

The correct answer is B, Pali, the popular speech in which the Buddha is believed to have preached and in which the three baskets of the canon were put together, the Vinaya Pitaka on monastic discipline, the Sutta Pitaka on his discourses and the Abhidhamma Pitaka on philosophy.

The record from Eran in present day Madhya Pradesh, of the time of Bhanugupta at the beginning of the sixth century, says that after a chief named Goparaja fell in battle his wife followed him on the funeral pyre, and this is the earliest epigraphic reference to the custom.

The pillar stands at Rummindei in the Nepal terai, records that the king came in person in the twentieth year of his reign to worship at the spot where the Buddha was born, had a stone wall and a pillar set up, and reduced the tax of the village to…

It gives the number of people killed, who died and who were carried away from Kalinga, says the king felt sorrow and remorse, and announces that he would seek conquest through dhamma rather than through war; it also names the Hellenistic kings to whom he sent envoys.

Tolkappiyam, ascribed to Tolkappiyar, is the oldest extant Tamil work and treats grammar along with the conventions of poetry, so it is the foundation of the whole Sangam corpus.

The Junagadh rock inscription of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman I says that the Sudarshana lake, first built in the Mauryan period and improved under Ashoka, burst in a storm and was rebuilt at the ruler own cost without a levy on his subjects.

The inscription at Aihole, composed in Sanskrit by his court poet Ravikirti, praises his achievements and mentions his success against Harshavardhana, which is the only firm evidence that the ruler of Kanauj was checked on the Narmada.

He was a court poet of Samudragupta, and the prashasti he composed in Sanskrit, partly in prose and partly in verse, lists the kings the emperor uprooted in the north, those he defeated and reinstated in the south, and the rulers who paid him homage, which makes it the main…

The inscription is cut in a cave of the Udayagiri hills near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, is written in Prakrit in the Brahmi script, and records year by year the campaigns, irrigation works and patronage of Jainism of this ruler of the Mahameghavahana line.

The words were adopted as the national motto and are inscribed in Devanagari below the lion capital on the state emblem of India.

He was an officer of the East India Company mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society, and in 1837 he worked out the values of the Brahmi letters, which made the edicts of the king who called himself Devanampiya Piyadassi legible for the first time.

Its name comes from saman, a melody, and it arranges hymns, most of them taken from the Rigveda, in the form in which the priest was to sing them at a sacrifice, so the earliest Indian system of musical notes is traced to it.

Nagabhata I founded the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty in the eighth century in the region of Malwa and Rajasthan and is remembered for checking the Arab advance from Sindh, a success the inscriptions describe in heroic terms.

Pulakeshin I founded the Chalukya dynasty of Badami in the middle of the sixth century, made Vatapi, the modern Badami in Karnataka, his capital, and performed the Ashvamedha sacrifice.

The Satavahanas, who rose in the Deccan after the Mauryas, were founded by Simuka and ruled from Pratishthana, the modern Paithan on the Godavari in Maharashtra; their greatest king, Gautamiputra Satakarni, is praised in the Nashik inscription of his mother Gautami Balashri.

Gopala was elected ruler by the chiefs of Bengal in about 750 CE, ending a long period of disorder known in the sources as matsyanyaya, and founded the Pala dynasty, which became one of the three contenders in the tripartite struggle for Kannauj.

Pushyamitra Shunga, the commander of the Mauryan army, killed the last Mauryan ruler Brihadratha in about 185 BCE and founded the Shunga dynasty, which ruled from Pataliputra and Vidisha and under which the Sanchi and Bharhut stupas were enlarged.

Sri Gupta, who bore the modest title Maharaja, is named in the inscriptions as the founder of the Gupta family, and he was followed by his son Ghatotkacha.

Mahapadma Nanda founded the Nanda dynasty in about the middle of the fourth century BCE after displacing the Shishunagas, and the Puranas call him Ekarat, the sole sovereign, and Sarva-kshatrantaka, the destroyer of all Kshatriyas, because he is described as a ruler of low birth who uprooted the older ruling…

The Buddhist text Mahaparinibbana Sutta and the Jaina tradition credit Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty with two engines used in his long war against the Lichchhavis of Vaishali: the Mahashilakantaka, which hurled great stones, and the Rathamusala, a chariot fitted with a mace that swept down ranks of soldiers.