Timeline of Hinduism

Date	Event
2500-1500 BCE	Indus Valley Civilization An advanced, urban society emerged from the Agrarian village culture of the Indus River Valley and declined, for unknown reasons, within a thousand years. The remains of the two cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa reveal aspects of the religion of the Indus Valley Civilization that may have influenced the later Hindu tradition: bathing tanks, “goddess” worship, yoga-like meditation, and a Shiva-like figure.
1400-900 BCE	Composition of the Vedas The earliest sacred literature of Hinduism, the four Vedas were composed orally in Sanskrit, the language of the Indo-European Aryans. The oldest of the Vedas, the Rig Veda, is a collection of hymns to the Vedic deities. The Sama Veda and Yajur Veda contain melodies for chanting the hymns and sacrificial formulas. The Atharva Veda is a more miscellaneous compilation, a large part of which is magical charms.
1000-600 BCE	Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Early Upanishads Composed Each of the four Vedas accumulated a tradition of secondary scriptures: the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads. The Brahmanas elaborated on the sacrificial rites, while the Aranyakas and the Upanishads took up the philosophical questioning first seen in the Vedas. The world-renouncer ideal also emerged in these texts.
600-200 BCE	Composition of the Later Upanishads The later Upanishads continued to mine the philosophical vein, but emphasized devotion to a personal god (theism) and the practice of yoga rather than renunciation and knowledge of the Brahman-Atman identity.
500 BCE-500 CE	The Consolidation of the Hindu Tradition As empires alternately rose and fell in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, Buddhism and Jainism emerged and Hindu traditions of thought, ethics, ritual, and theism became more distinctly formulated. The epics, early puranas, law codes, and philosophical systems such as Vedanta all stem from this period.
500 BCE-400 CE	Mahabharata Composed India’s great epic began as a mythico-historical poem of a great war. Over centuries of oral retellings and elaborations, the Sanskrit poem grew into a vast, encyclopedic work, said to be 100,000 verses long and encompassing all of Hindu religious law. The poem is generally attributed to Vyasa, and as the Mahabharata says of itself, “Whatever is written here, may also be found elsewhere; but what is not found here, will not be found anywhere.”
400 BCE-200 BCE	Ramayana Composed Although much shorter and more unified than the Mahabharata, India’s second epic, the Ramayana, underwent the same process of a lengthy period of composition in which it was reworked several times. Therefore, like the Mahabharata, it contains a wealth of Hindu lore. It is generally attributed to Valmiki. Immensely popular, it has received numerous vernacular retellings over the centuries.
300-100 BCE	First Evidence of Temple Worship Inscriptions and literary sources dating from the third to first centuries BCE indicate that temples to Krishna, Vishnu, and other deities existed by this time.
200 BCE-100 CE	Composition of the Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita was composed as a synthesis of all the different strands of Hindu religiosity that existed by the time of the era of consolidation–brahmanic ritual, upanishadic wisdom, yoga, and devotionalism–uniting them all under the rubric of devotion to God (bhakti).
100-500 CE	Expansion to Southeast Asia  The Hindu tradition spread to Southeast Asia through trade, conquest, and colonization. Hindu communities began to develop in the areas that are today Java, Sumatra, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand.
320-550 CE	Gupta Dynasty—India’s Golden Age The last period of Hindu empire in North India was a golden age of Indian civilization. By the beginning of this period, temple building in North India got underway. This was also the age of Kalidasa, India’s great Sanskrit dramatist, and the period when many significant scholarly advances were made under the auspices of the empire.
400 CE	The Spread of Vaishnavism Vaishnavism, especially the Krishna cult, began to spread throughout India. Tantrism began to emerge in Bengal, Assam, Andhra, and the Northwest.
500-900 CE	Nayanmars: Tamil Shaiva Poets of South India The bhakti movement began in South India with the Tamil poet-saints the Nayanmars, who addressed their devotions to Shiva. The poems of the sixty-three saints, plus those of Manikkavacakar, were later collected and included in the Shaiva Siddhanta canon, particularly in the twelve-volume devotional text known as the Tirumurai.
500-1300 CE	Temple Building in South India Contemporary with the rise and spread of the bhakti movement in South India, temples became important as religious centers, conceived of as the dwelling places of the gods on earth. A wave of temple construction took place over several centuries.
600-930 CE	Alvars: Tamil Vaishnava Poets of South India The twelve alvars offered poetry of praise to Vishnu in all the particular forms he takes in the great South Indian temples. Their poems were collected in the ninth century and entered the liturgy of the Shri Vaishnava community, in a collection of hymns known as the Divya Prabhandha.
788-820 CE	Shankara Shankara sought to unify and revive Hinduism in the face of challenges from Buddhism and Jainism from without and divisiveness from within. Propounding the Advaita (nondualist) interpretation of the Vedanta, Shankara traveled throughout India setting up monasteries at the four compass points and establishing the lineage of Shankaracharyas at each location.
848-1279 CE	Chola Dynasty in Tamilnadu The Cholas emerged from a long history of feudal status to establish a kingdom in Tamilnadu, which was later extended to Kerala and Sri Lanka. The Chola period saw the art of bronze casting reach its peak, leaving many beautiful temple images as a legacy. Many monuments of temple architecture were built under the Cholas.
1056-1137 CE	Ramanuja Ramanuja developed the Vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualist/monist) Vedanta as a theistic repudiation of Shankara’s Advaita philosophy. A Shri Vaishnava acharya and resident head of the temple and monastery at Srirangam in South India, Ramanuja was the greatest of the Vaishnava philosophers.
1150 CE	Tamil Ramavataram Written by Kamban  Kamban, a disciple of the Sri Vaisnava saint Nammalvar, wrote a Tamil version of the Rama story, in which the bhakti motif predominates. This version of the Ramayana influenced later Telugu and Malayalam Ramayanas, as well as Tulsidas’s Hindi Ramcharitmanas and Southeast Asian versions of the epic.
1200s-1600s	Indo-Muslim Kingdoms and Culture Muslim dynasties of kings ruled much of North India from Delhi beginning in the early 1200s. The most extensive and influential kings were the Mughals in the 1500s and 1600s, whose court became synonymous with the refinement of Indo-Muslim art and architecture.
1336-1646 CE	Vijayanagara Empire The last Hindu empire in India had its capital at today’s Hampi in northern Karnataka. Its holdings extended as far as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. After a major defeat in 1565 to the Deccan sultanates, the empire declined until 1646.