Indus Valley in the context of "Chandragupta Maurya"

Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread to every continent except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Soon afterward, the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia brought the first systematic husbandry of plants and animals, and saw many humans transition from nomadic lives to sedentary existences as farmers in permanent settlements. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.

These developments paved the way for the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, the Indus Valley, and China, marking the beginning of the ancient period in the 4th millenium BCE. These civilizations enabled the establishment of regional empires and provided fertile ground for the advent of transformative philosophical and religious ideas. Hinduism originated during the late Bronze Age and was followed by the many seminal belief systems of the Axial Age: Buddhism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Christianity began later as an offshoot of Judaism. The subsequent post-classical period, from about 500 to 1500 CE, witnessed the rise of Islam and China's flourishing under the Tang and Song dynasties while civilization expanded to new parts of the world and trade between societies increased. The political landscape was shaped by the rise and fall of major empires, such as the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic caliphates, and the Mongol Empire. This period's invention of gunpowder and the printing press greatly affected later history.

The wars of Alexander the Great were a series of conquests and military campaigns carried out by Alexander III of Macedon from 336 to 323 BC. They began with his conquest of the Achaemenid Empire, which was ruled by Darius III. After a series of victories over the Persians and the defeat Darius, he began a campaign against local chieftains and warlords that stretched from Greece to as far as the Indus Valley. At the time of his death, Alexander ruled over most regions of Greece and the conquered Achaemenid Empire, including much of Achaemenid Egypt.

Despite his military accomplishments, Alexander did not establish a stable empire, and his untimely death threw the vast territories he conquered into a series of civil wars known as the Wars of the Diadochi.

Cyrus II of Persia (c. 600 – 530 BC), commonly known as Cyrus the Great, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Hailing from Persis, he brought the Achaemenid dynasty to power by defeating the Median Empire and embracing all of the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanding vastly across most of West Asia and much of Central Asia to create what would soon become the largest empire in history at the time. The Achaemenid Empire's greatest territorial extent was achieved under Darius the Great, whose rule stretched from Southeast Europe in the west to the Indus Valley in the east.

After absorbing the Median Empire, Cyrus conquered Lydia and eventually the Neo-Babylonian Empire, granting him control of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, respectively. He also led a major expedition into Central Asia, where his army brought "into subjection every nation without exception" before he allegedly died in battle with the Massagetae, a nomadic Eastern Iranian people, along the Syr Darya in December 530 BC. However, according to Xenophon of Athens, Cyrus did not die fighting and had instead returned to the capital city of Pasargadae. Regardless of the date of his death, he was succeeded by his son Cambyses II, whose campaigns into North Africa led to the conquests of Egypt, Nubia, and Cyrenaica during his short rule.

The History of Iran (also known as Persia) is intertwined with Greater Iran, which is a region encompassing all of the areas that have witnessed significant settlement or influence by the Iranian peoples and the Iranian languages – chiefly the Persians and the Persian language. Central to this region is the Iranian plateau, now largely covered by modern Iran. The most pronounced impact of Iranian history can be seen stretching from Anatolia in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and parts of Central Asia. It also overlaps or mingles with the histories of many other major civilizations, such as India, China, Greece, Rome, and Egypt.

Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to the 5th millennium BC. The Iranian plateau's western regions integrated into the rest of the ancient Near East with the Elamites (in Ilam and Khuzestan), the Kassites (in Kuhdesht), the Gutians (in Luristan), and later with other peoples like the Urartians (in Oshnavieh and Sardasht) near Lake Urmia and the Mannaeans (in Piranshahr, Saqqez and Bukan) in Kurdistan. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the Persians the "first Historical People" in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. The sustained Iranian empire is understood to have begun with the rise of the Medes during the Iron Age, when Iran was unified as a nation under the Median kingdom in the 7th century BC. By 550 BC, the Medes were sidelined by the conquests of Cyrus the Great, who brought the Persians to power with the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire. Cyrus' ensuing campaigns enabled the Persian realm's expansion across most of West Asia and much of Central Asia, and his successors would eventually conquer parts of Southeast Europe and North Africa to preside over the largest empire the world had yet seen. In the 4th century BC, the Achaemenid Empire was conquered by the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, whose death led to the establishment of the Seleucid Empire over the bulk of former Achaemenid territory. In the following century, Greek rule of the Iranian plateau came to an end with the rise of the Parthian Empire, which also conquered large parts of the Seleucids' Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Central Asian holdings. While the Parthians were succeeded by the Sasanian Empire in the 2nd century, Iran remained a leading power for the next millennium, although the majority of this period was marked by the Roman–Persian Wars.

The Ghaznavid dynasty (Persian: غزنویان Ġaznaviyān) was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Turkic mamluk origin. It ruled the Ghaznavid Empire or the Empire of Ghazni from 977 to 1186, which at its greatest extent, extended from the Oxus to the Indus Valley. The dynasty was founded by Sabuktigin upon his succession to the rule of Ghazna after the death of his father-in-law, Alp Tigin, who was an ex-general of the Samanid Empire from Balkh.

Sabuktigin's son, Mahmud of Ghazni, expanded the Ghaznavid Empire to the Amu Darya, the Indus River and the Indian Ocean in the east and to Rey and Hamadan in the west. Under the reign of Mas'ud I, the Ghaznavid dynasty began losing control over its western territories to the Seljuk Empire after the Battle of Dandanaqan in 1040, resulting in a restriction of its holdings to modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India.

The Chalcolithic or Copper Age is the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. It is taken to begin around the mid-5th millennium BC, and ends with the beginning of the Bronze Age proper, in the late 4th to 3rd millennium BC, depending on the region.

The Chalcolithic is part of prehistory, but based on archaeological evidence, the emergence of the first state societies can be inferred, notably in the Fertile Crescent (notably Sumer) Predynastic Egypt, and Proto-Minoan Crete, with late Neolithic societies of comparable complexity emerging in the Indus Valley (Mehrgarh), China, and along the north-western shores of the Black Sea.