Indian History · Chronicle I of XI
Harappa · The First Cities
The great brick cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, one of the world's first urban civilisations.
The Mature HarappanCultural
Along the Indus, great planned cities such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro rise, home to tens of thousands.
Across a territory larger than Egypt or Mesopotamia, the Indus people built cities on a scale unmatched for their age. Laid out on grids of baked brick, with citadels, warehouses and residential quarters, these were the centres of a civilisation spanning the plains of what is now Pakistan and north-west India.
The Mature HarappanCultural
Mohenjo-daro boasts a Great Bath, covered sewers and wells — an engineering of water without equal in the ancient world.
Almost every house had a bathroom and drain connected to brick-lined sewers beneath the streets — a concern for cleanliness unmatched until modern times. The Great Bath, a watertight tank atop the citadel, hints at ritual bathing. Yet the Indus people left no great palaces or temples, and no sign of kings.
The Mature HarappanCultural
Carved seals and standardized weights speak of a trading world reaching by sea to Mesopotamia.
Steatite seals bearing animals and a still-undeciphered script were used to stamp goods, and a precise system of cubical stone weights governed trade. Indus merchants exchanged cotton, carnelian and timber for Mesopotamian goods; the Sumerians knew their trading partners across the sea as Meluhha.
The Mature HarappanCultural
Indus craftsmen cast the bronze figure of the "Dancing Girl," a masterpiece of the early metalworker's art.
Barely ten centimetres tall and cast by the lost-wax method, the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro stands with a poised, confident ease. Alongside delicate jewellery, painted pottery and toy carts, she reveals a society of skilled artisans and comfortable townsfolk, remarkably uniform in its culture across a vast land.
The DeclineEvent
Changing rivers and a drying climate begin to unravel the great cities of the Indus.
From about 1900 BC the cities decayed: drains clogged, standards slipped, and the great centres emptied. The likeliest cause was environmental — weakening monsoons and the drying or shifting of rivers such as the Ghaggar-Hakra — which broke the agricultural base and scattered the population into smaller villages to the east.
The LegacyEvent
The urban civilisation fades into village cultures, leaving a legacy still woven into Indian life.
By around 1300 BC the distinctive Indus civilisation had dissolved, its script forgotten and its cities buried. Yet much survived in the countryside — techniques, crops, perhaps beliefs and symbols later echoed in Hinduism. The stage was set for a new age, as Indo-Aryan peoples and their Vedic culture spread across the north.
