Haryana Quiz: Ancient Haryana: Rakhigarhi, Kurukshetra and the Vedic Age

The Jhelum is called Vitasta in the Rigveda, and it is one of the seven rivers of the Sapta Sindhu, the land in which the hymns were composed.

The Gayatri Mantra first appears in the third mandala of the Rigveda and is ascribed to the sage Vishvamitra. It is addressed to Savitr, the sun, and it is composed in the Gayatri metre, from which it takes its popular name.

The Shatapatha Brahmana belongs to the Shukla or White Yajurveda and the Taittiriya Brahmana to the Krishna or Black Yajurveda, so both are Brahmana texts of the Yajurveda.

These three receive the largest number of hymns in the Rigveda. Indra, the war god and breaker of forts, has the greatest number; Agni, the fire that carries the offering to the gods, comes next; and Soma, both a plant and a god, has the whole of the ninth mandala…

Rakhigarhi lies in Hisar district and covers the land of two villages, Rakhi Khas and Rakhi Shahpur, on a dried channel of the Drishadvati, today called the Chautang.

Banawali in Fatehabad district, excavated by R. S. Bisht, gave a terracotta model of a plough, which is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for ploughed fields in the Harappan world; the other famous evidence is the ploughed field surface found at Kalibangan in Rajasthan.

The Manusmriti describes Brahmavarta as the holy land created by the gods between the Saraswati and the Drishadvati, and that strip of country is the plain of present-day Haryana.

Jyotisar, a short distance from the town of Kurukshetra, is held by tradition to be the spot where Krishna spoke the Gita to Arjuna before the Mahabharata war, and an old banyan tree there is shown as a witness to it.

The pillar was brought from Topra in Yamunanagar district to Delhi by Firoz Shah Tughlaq in the fourteenth century and set up at his new city of Firozabad, where it still stands at Firoz Shah Kotla.

Thanesar, the ancient Sthanvishvara in Kurukshetra district, was the capital of the Pushyabhuti dynasty, also called the Vardhana dynasty from the ending of its kings' names.