Question

What type of society and polity did the Iron age have?

Answer 1

1. The Iron age society had farming communities, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers.
2. Craft specialists, potters, and the blacksmith had emerged.
3. The society had several tribes.
4. The size of the burials and the variations found in the burial goods suggests numerous social groups.
5. Some of them seem to have had organized chiefdoms.
6. Cattle lifting leading to wars and encroachment and expansion of territories had also started taking place in this period.
7. The Ashokan inscriptions datable to the third century B.C.E. refers to the Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas, and Satyaputras outside his empire in Tamizhagam.
8.  If the Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas, and Satyaputras had been powerful political powers in the Mauryan period, they must have commenced their rule in the Iron age.