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The dawn of Indian civilization
By Willy | September 22, 2009
The ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt have been known and remembered by human history since they first arose some 5000 years ago. Egypt left its pyramids, whose sheer bulk prevented them from being swallowed by desert sands. Ur and other city-states between the Tigris and the Euphrates appear in the first book of the Hebrew scriptures. It was only in the 19th and early 20th centuries that another civilization, almost as old as Egypt’s and Mesopotamia’s, came to light in the Indus Valley of western India. This Indus Valley Civilization had been forgotten for thousands of years.
The most prominent remains of the Indus Valley Civilization are the ruins of two large cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both in present-day Pakistan. Both cities were built of brick on roughly the same plan, with streets laid out on a grid. Besides houses, there were public granaries and baths prefiguring bathing tanks in later Hindu temples. Cultural artifacts found at these and other Harappan sites include cylinder seals featuring hump-backed Indian cows and a fews words in a script that has yet to be deciphered.
An impressive feature of the Indus Valley Civilization is the level of sophistication it represents. As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his book The Discovery of India, “It is interesting to note that at this dawn of India’s story, she does not appear as a puling infant, but already grown up in many ways.” Indeed, it is one thing for a village to grow haphazardly into a city; it is another thing for a city to be laid out carefully from the start. This hints at a powerful central government, but for want of substantial written records, we can only guess who ruled and how.
Possibly due to the vagaries of the Indus river’s course, the Indus Valley Civilization declined at the beginning of the second millenium BC. At around this time, Aryan invaders from the northwest swept across the country. It is here that India’s prehistory ends and its recorded history really begins.
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