Timeline and Sources of History

About this chapter

This Class 6 History chapter is the foundation for studying the past. It opens with the National Museum and three big questions: how we measure historical time, how sources help us understand history, and how early humans lived. Students meet the people who study the past — geologists, palaeontologists, anthropologists and archaeologists — and learn key time tools: the Gregorian calendar, CE and BCE (replacing AD and BC), the fact that there is no 'year zero', and how to count years across the BCE–CE boundary by adding and subtracting one. Decade, century and millennium are explained with examples. A timeline (Fig. 4.3) places events from the end of the Ice Age and the first crops to the Buddha and beyond. The chapter then maps the sources of history — inscriptions, oral, literary, archaeological, artistic sources and foreign accounts — and traces early human life from hunter-gatherers to farming villages. CTET tests definitions, era-counting, source-classification and early-human facts. The four tests cover: Practice — single-fact recall; Quiz — concept application; Hard — PYQ-style items; Mastery — a full-chapter mixed mock with no overlap.