Because of the lack of authentic records very little is known of the development of ancient Hindu mathematics. The earliest history is preserved in the 5000 year old ruins of a city at Mohenjo Daro. Evidence of wide streets, brick dwelling and apartment house with tiled bathroom, covered city drains, and community swimming pools, indicates a civilization as advanced as that found anywhere else in the ancient orient. These early peoples had systems of writing, counting, weighing, and measuring and they dug canals for irrigation. All this required considerable basic mathematics and engineering. It is not known what became of these peoples.
It was about 4000 years ago that wandering band crossed the Himalaya pass into India from the great plains of central Asia. These people were called Aryans, from a Sanskrit word meaning “noblemen” or “owners of land”. Many of there remained and other wandered into Europe and formed the root of the Indo-European stock. The influence of the Aryans gradually extended over all India. During their first 1000 years they perfected both caste systems. In the sixth century B.C., the Persian armies under Darius great early Indians, the grammarian Panini and the religious teacher Buddha. This probably is also the approximate time of the Sulvasutras (“the rules of cord”), some religious writing of interest in the history of mathematics because they embody geometrical rules for the construction of altars by rope stretching and show an acquaintance with Pythagorean numbers.