Hindus believe that Uttar Pradesh is the birthplace of Rama and Krishna, the heroes of India's two great epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The region is associated with all the religions of India, and it contains important places of worship for Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Muslims.

Buddha preached his first sermon at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and achieved parinirvana (spiritual release from the body) at Kusinagara. Varanasi was one of Uttar Pradesh's most ancient centres. As a great centre of culture, education, commerce and craftwork, the city was already about 1,000 years old when Buddha arrived there in 500 B.C.

From the 200's B.C., Uttar Pradesh was part of the Mauryan Empire. Later, various Hindu dynasties controlled the region. In the late A.D. 1100's, invading Turks established a Muslim empire called the Delhi Sultanate. It extended its influence over Uttar Pradesh.
From the mid-1500's, the Uttar Pradesh area became the political and cultural heart of the Mughal Empire. Varanasi, which had declined during Muslim rule from Delhi, underwent a cultural and religious revival under the emperor Akbar. Agra was for some time an imperial capital. In the 1600's, the emperor Shah Jahan ordered the building of the Taj Mahal there.

In the 1700's, with the decline of Mughal power, several independent kingdoms arose in Uttar Pradesh. Among the most important were Oudh and Varanasi. Lucknow, the capital of Oudh, became an important cultural centre.

From 1765, British rule was extended into both Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. In 1836, the East India Company combined its possessions in Uttar Pradesh with Delhi and renamed the resulting area the Northwestern Province. In 1856, the British annexed the province of Oudh, thereby completing their takeover of Uttar Pradesh.
Resentment of British rule flared into violence in the Indian Revolt of 1857. Uttar Pradesh was the centre of this revolt, which began in Meerut and quickly spread to Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Allahabad, and Jhansi, but did not go far beyond the borders of the state. The British put down this uprising.

After the revolt, control of East India Company territories passed to the British government. In 1877, the British combined the northwestern provinces and Oudh to form what eventually became known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
During the 1900's, Uttar Pradesh was in the vanguard of the national movement for independence. All the nationalist movements-the Non-Cooperation movement, the Civil Disobedience campaign, and the Quit India movement-found enthusiastic support in the region. However, the burning of a police station by a mob in the village of Chauri Chaura, in which several policemen died, led to the suspension of the Non-Cooperation movement.

Prominent nationalist leaders who were active in Uttar Pradesh included Mohandas Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and Purushottamdas Tandon.
Following Indian independence in 1947, Uttar Pradesh emerged in 1950 as the most populous and politically most influential state of the Indian union.