Goa History
Ancient And Pre-Colonial Period

The history of Goa, of course, spans for several millennia before the first Portuguese ships arrived. This page offers a concise overview of important periods in Goa's history before the Portuguese colonial rule and subsequent route to independence.

Strangely, Hindu mythology also ties in with this event. According to myth, Parasurama (an incarnation of Vishnu) was rewarded for military success by being given land for his Brahmin caste to live in peacefully. He fired seven arrows from the mountains of south India out over the sea. Wherever they fell, the sea receded and revealed his lands.

Migrants from central India are believed to have populated the land that is now Goa, though discoveries in the hills of Goa's east show that the area was inhabited for centuries before the agricultural, migrant settlers.

Cave art in the area dates from around 100,000BC to 10,000BC and points to an ancient hunter-gatherer population in the region.

From around 600 BC it is believed that signifiant numbers of settlers came to Goa from central India, and the area is referred to in the Mahabharatha (ancient Hindu script) as Gopakapuri, or 'Cowherd Country'. Ancient Greeks traded with the area and referred to it as 'Melinda'.

For a relatively brief period, under the Mauryan empire a Greek Buddhist missionary was sent to the region by the emperor Ashok. Buddhist settlers preached non-violence, and improved literacy and farming methods, but after Ashok's death in 232BC the empire crumbled, and Brahminical Hinduism returned as the main religion.

Despite these attacks, Muslim merchants and their hosts managed to stay on friendly terms. Sadly when the Muslim Bahmanis arrived in 1350 and began a bloody persecution of Hindus in the area, these ties were destroyed.

In 1378, Hindu kings of the Vijayanagar empire (whose capital was Hampi, now in Karnataka) retaliated by massacring the Bahmani settlers in the Goa capital, but the city fell again into Bahmani hands in 1470, when a massive Bahmani force attacked from both sides, with an army from the east and warships off the coast.

The capital had declined by this time, and the Bahmanis moved north to the Mandovi River and erected a prosperous capital known as Ela (10kms from the present day capital of Panaji). It was to become the wealthiest city on the south west coast of India.