The First Civilization in India

• Harappan civilization existed from 3300 BCE to around 1300 BCE and prospered between 2600-1900 BCE.
• Harappan civilization covered an area of one million square kilometers, larger than Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China.
• The Ghaggar-Hakra river may have been the ancient lost Saraswati river of Hindu literature.
• Harappan civilization was one of the earliest urban civilizations in human history, completely absent in the historical record.
• Harappans did not have a strict hierarchy of classes, state monopolized use of violence, power focused on individual leaders, or centralized state-controlled economies.
• There was no evidence for kings, priests, or priest-kings for Harappans, and there were no royal tombs or palaces.
• There was no evidence for a state religion, temples, pyramids, or ziggurats, and no signs of an army, weapons, slaves, or a powerful political capital.
• All Harappan citizens lived relatively equal lives, and it seems that there were no natural enemies and they themselves seemed more interested in trade than conquest.
• Harappan cities were planned and had a focus on water, drainage, and bathing.
• Every Harappan home had a dedicated bathing room, used daily, built with watertight brick floors and sloped towards a small drain usually cut into the house wall.
• Harappans had multi-storied buildings and used drains to bring water and waste from higher floors down to street level drains.
• The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro was an impressive building with a 2.4m deep bathing pool in the center, and it was the only Harappan building with some sort of religious significance.
• Main streets of Harappan cities were usually oriented north–south and east–west, which divided Harappan settlements into blocks.
• Walls usually surrounded Harappan settlements, and there was usually a separately walled area built on a man-made mound known as a “citadel”.
• Harappan cities were usually hundreds of km apart, and the Harappan state maintained almost complete uniformity over these massive distances.
• Harappan writing remains undeciphered to this day, and all we have to work with is the short inscriptions they left behind on these tiny stone seals.
• Harappans traded with the Arabian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and Iran.
• Harappan sailors acted a lot like sailors of later times, since we’ve discovered ivory dice for games and gambling at sites they visited.
• After 700 years of prosperity, the Harappan civilization went into a sudden decline around 1900 BCE.
• Cities stopped following strict plans, drains were no longer maintained, and the art of writing was forgotten.
• There is no evidence for massacres, battles, or sieges at any Harappan sites.
• Factors such as a reduction in trade, climate change, disease, and civil strife all probably played a role in their collapse.
• The Saraswati river played the biggest role in their collapse, as it began to dry up for reasons still being studied.
• By 1300 BCE, the entire Harappan system was gone.