Indus Harappa Civilization
The story of the Indus valley civilization — one of humanity’s oldest, rivalling Sumer and Egypt.
Humanity’s oldest civilization
Civilization first developed in the Indus river valley, in present-day Pakistan, in the middle of the third millennium B.C. — more than a thousand years before it did in China. Usually called Harappan after its chief city, the civilization of the Indus valley rivals Sumer and Egypt as humanity’s oldest.
Unlike China’s, it did not endure. Unable to survive natural catastrophes and the arrival of new peoples, Harappa vanished from history, and until the mid-19th century it was forgotten even by those who lived beside its sand-covered ruins. Important elements of Harappan society nevertheless passed to the later civilizations of the subcontinent.
A land shaped by the Indus
Torrents of water from the Himalaya carved out the vast Indus river system. As the mountain streams reached the plains they branched into seven great rivers — five of which remain today — before converging to form the Indus, which runs south-west to the Arabian Sea. Fed by snowmelt and monsoon rains, they carried rich soil that made the plains ideal for farming and dense settlement.
In Harappan times the lower Indus plains were green and heavily forested, with plentiful game and pasture. Long before the first Harappan cities, farming villages here grew wheat and barley, made bronze tools and mirrors, and produced fine pottery decorated with bulls and fish. The long-horned bull remained a central image of Harappan culture. Small clay carts with wheels found at early village sites may be some of the earliest children’s toys yet discovered.
Decline and what followed
Between about 1500 and 1000 B.C., as the great cities of the Indus crumbled, new pastoral peoples from Central Asia moved into the plains and on towards the Ganges. Relying on herds of cattle, they had little use for the irrigation works of the Indus valley, and the cities were not rebuilt.
Over the following centuries these groups settled and took up farming, and by the 6th century B.C. a renewed civilization was emerging in South Asia — marked by great world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and by a revival of trade, cities and art.
Rediscovery
In the 1850s the British were building railway lines through the Indus valley, and workers took bricks for the track bed from the mounds of long-abandoned cities. In 1856 General Alexander Cunningham, later head of the Archaeological Survey of India, visited one of these sites and was given soapstone seals carved with a bull and an unknown script.
Convinced the finds were ancient, Cunningham went on to ensure the full-scale excavation of what came to be recognized as one of the earliest and most mysterious of all human civilizations.
Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Granary and Great Hall, Harappa — Muhammad Bin Naveed, CC BY-SA 3.0
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