Ancient India

Lecture Notes

The history of Ancient India began roughly 6,000 years ago, that is, close to 4,000 B.C.E. Around this time, agricultural people settled the lower region of the Indus River Valley. Closely dependent on the river, Ancient India is the third river valley civilization we discuss in this class. Similarly to other river valley civilizations, the original creation of civilization in India, which from now on we will call Harappan Civilization, was built around the creation of the efficient government and social order necessary for formalized agriculture. As we have seen previously, in a cycle of ever-growing complexity, once the population became sedentary and continued to grow, ever larger supplies of food become necessary, requiring the creation of a bureaucracy to organize the production of food, and a defense system to protect the land upon such surplus is produced. Roughly a thousand years after the initial settlement of this area, the existing communities became increasingly sophisticated, as the peoples of Harappan civilization developed advanced technologies, not only in agriculture but in architecture and politics as well. A recent excavation of the area shows that there were two major cities around which Harappan civilization grew. One is called Harappa, for which the whole civilization was named; the other is Mohenjo-Daro. These excavations have allowed scholars a pretty comprehensive picture of how early Indians lived, as you'll see in the slides that follow. From material remains found at these sites, among other things, we have learned that the people of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro spoke the language and had the physical characteristics of the people who live in the Deccan Plateau, that is, on the Northern part of the Indian sub-continent, today. What this means is that the original creators of civilization in India are the direct ancestors of modern people's in the area, making ancient Indian history part of the living culture of India today, something that cannot be said to the same degree of the peoples of Mesopotamia or Egypt whom we have already studied.