UPSC GK Questions 2026

Firoz Shah Tughlaq founded Jaunpur in 1359 and named it after his cousin and predecessor Muhammad bin Tughlaq, whose earlier name was Juna Khan.

Chandawar lies on the Yamuna near present day Firozabad, and the battle fought there in 1194 ended the power of the Gahadavala ruler Jaichand, who was killed.

The deposits around Didwana in Nagaur district, especially at Singi Talav, have produced a long sequence of Palaeolithic tools including hand axes and cleavers, and the area is one of the key localities for the study of the Stone Age in western India.

On the hill called Bijak ki Pahadi at Bairath in Jaipur district, excavations begun by Daya Ram Sahni brought to light a round shrine built of brick and timber with a small stupa at its centre and a circular passage for circumambulation, counted among the earliest circular Buddhist structures known…

Balathal in Udaipur district and Gilund in Rajsamand district stand in the Banas basin of southern Rajasthan and share the Black and Red Ware, the copper working and the stone and mud brick houses of the Ahar culture, named after its type site at Ahar in Udaipur.

Rairh produced one of the largest hoards of punch marked silver coins reported from Rajasthan, along with Malava coins and great heaps of iron slag that show smelting was carried on there over a long period.

Ganeshwar lies on the Kantli river in Sikar district in the Shekhawati region, close to the copper bearing rocks of the Khetri belt.

Bairath, also called Viratnagar, in Jaipur district is the chief Mauryan site of Rajasthan.

Bagor stands on the Kothari river in Bhilwara district and was excavated by V. N. Misra. The site produced thousands of tiny stone tools called microliths, along with human burials and large numbers of animal bones, among them sheep and goat, which are read as evidence for early herding.

Ahar lies on the Ayad river within present day Udaipur and was called Tambavati, which means the place of copper, because so much copper was smelted and worked there.

In the pre Harappan level at Kalibangan the excavators found a field with furrows running in two directions and crossing at right angles, exactly the pattern of mixed cropping still used in the region, where one crop is sown in the wider spaced furrows and another in the closer ones.

Kalibangan lies in Hanumangarh district on the left bank of the now dry bed of the Ghaggar, the river that many scholars identify with the Saraswati of the Vedic texts.

The archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara in Bihar was added to the World Heritage List in 2016, in recognition of a monastic and scholastic institution that functioned without a break from the third century before the Common Era to the thirteenth century.

Ikhtiyaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a commander in the service of the Ghurids, overran the middle Ganga plain at the end of the twelfth century, sacking Odantapuri and Vikramshila and laying Nalanda waste soon after.

The library complex of Nalanda was called Dharmaganja, the treasury of truth, and later accounts say it stood in three buildings, Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka, of which Ratnodadhi is described as nine storeys high.

Gopala, the first king of the Pala dynasty, founded Odantapuri at the place now called Biharsharif in Nalanda district. The word vihara, meaning a Buddhist monastery, gave the region and then the state its name, and Odantapuri is the monastery most often named in that explanation.

Atisha was the most famous head of Vikramshila and left for Tibet in the eleventh century at the invitation of its western kings.

Vikramshila stood at Antichak village in Bhagalpur district, on raised ground overlooking the Ganga, and excavation has revealed a great cruciform stupa at the centre with monastic cells arranged in a square around it, a plan very different from the rows of monasteries at Nalanda.

The Pala king Dharmapala founded Vikramshila in the late eighth century at Antichak in what is now Bhagalpur district, on a height above the Ganga, as a rival and a complement to Nalanda.

Hiuen Tsang reached Nalanda in the seventh century during the reign of Harshavardhana and spent several years there studying the Yogachara philosophy under Shilabhadra, who was then the abbot.