About

Telugu History, part of Open Telugu, is a non-commercial project telling the history of the Telugu land: the region of the unified Andhra Pradesh (Coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana) from prehistory to 2014. It covers rulers and kingdoms, but just as much the monuments, languages, faiths, crafts, trade, songs and daily lives of the people who lived here, including the Deccani, Urdu, Persian and tribal histories that are part of the same story.

What you'll find

• Timeline: who held each region when. Colours mark the kind of power (kingdoms and empires, sultanates, colonial powers, Indian states); a dashed outline means the dates are uncertain; a dotted line shows a power that already held another region first. Select a bar for its dates, length and sources.
• Eras and dynasties, each with a zoomed timeline. The reform, freedom and statehood movements (1858–2014) are charted on the two modern-era pages. Dynasty pages also have a reign chart of the rulers and a family tree, in which every link between two people is cited and disputed links are shown as versions.
• People, places, monuments and inscriptions.
• Maps redrawn from old surveys and books, with borders kept faint as guidance.
• Every map, timeline, reign chart and family tree can be opened full screen and saved as a PNG or SVG file, with its title, our credit line and the page address.
• Learn to read inscriptions: lessons on the old scripts, a glyph table and a year converter.
• Gallery: old photographs, book plates, plans, drawings, coins and inscription rubbings, mostly published before 1990. Recent photographs are used sparingly, usually one per subject for reference.
• Sources and attributions, grouped by licence.
• Updates & corrections: what is added in each batch, and every correction to a fact on a page, with what it said before and the source that settled it.

How we source

• Every page lists its sources. A claim without a source does not go on the site.
• We write in our own words. We quote directly only from public-domain works.
• Every image and video is credited with its author, source and licence. Videos are embedded from their original host, not re-uploaded.
• Where dates or facts are debated, we say so and give the main positions.

How this site is made

This site is researched and written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic). The assistant searches the scanned books in our library, drafts text and Telugu translations, and redraws old maps. A person edits the project and decides what is published. The rule is the same for everything: each fact must have a source, cited with its page, so you can check it yourself. AI can make mistakes; if a citation does not support what we say, or a Telugu sentence reads wrongly, please tell us.

Editorial policy

• Neutral and inclusive. The history of this region belongs equally to the people of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. We do not take sides in present-day regional politics.
• Communities, not hierarchies. We describe the history of castes and communities from scholarly sources. We do not publish pages promoting the glory or superiority of any group.
• Corrections welcome. If you find an error, tell us with a source and we will fix it, or email corrections@teluguhistory.org. Every correction to a fact is listed on the Updates & corrections page.

Licence

Our text, maps, family trees and timelines are published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0: you may reuse them with credit and under the same licence. Files saved from the site carry this licence and the page address. Historical images and media keep their own licences, shown beside each one.

Friends

For the Kakatiya dynasty in depth, see kakatiya.info, a source-first site that inspired this one.