[c. 7000 BCE - 1500 BCE] Prehistory and the Indus Valley Civilization

Before the pharaohs raised their pyramids against the Egyptian sky, and long before Rome was anything more than a whisper on a hill, a civilization was stirring in the vast, fertile plains of the Indian subcontinent. Our story begins not with a bang, but with a seed. Around 7000 BCE, in the foothills of what is now Pakistan, a settlement we call Mehrgarh took root. Here, the first whispers of a settled life began. Nomads, who for millennia had followed the herds, started to build homes of mud-brick. They learned to cultivate wheat and barley, and they tamed the wild Zebu cattle, whose descendants still roam the fields of India today. Life was simple, but it was a revolution. Astonishingly, archaeologists at Mehrgarh have even found human molars from this period that were drilled, a form of primitive dentistry nine thousand years in the past. For millennia, this slow, steady rhythm of life continued. Villages grew, pottery techniques improved, and trade networks slowly spiderwebbed across the land. Then, around 2600 BCE, something extraordinary happened. The rhythm quickened. The scattered villages and towns coalesced, and out of the dust of the Indus River floodplains rose some of the most spectacular cities of the ancient world. This was the dawn of the Indus Valley Civilization, or the Harappan Civilization, named for Harappa, one of the first of its great cities to be rediscovered. Imagine not a chaotic jumble of huts, but a metropolis born of a single, brilliant idea. Mohenjo-Daro, the "Mound of the Dead," was a masterpiece of urban planning. It may have been home to 40,000 people, a staggering number for the time, living in a city laid out on a precise grid. The streets ran straight, crossing at perfect right angles. The buildings were constructed from standardized, fire-baked bricks, all made in a uniform size ratio of 4:2:1. This uniformity speaks not of primitive builders, but of a powerful, central authority capable of organizing and commanding vast resources across a civilization that sprawled over a million square kilometers—larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The cities were typically divided into two parts: a lower town, where the populace lived and worked, and a raised, fortified citadel. In the citadel of Mohenjo-Daro sat the Great Bath, a watertight pool of stunning brickwork, possibly used for public ritual bathing. There were no grand palaces for kings, no opulent royal tombs stuffed with gold, no monumental statues of warrior-gods. This is one of the civilization’s greatest mysteries. Who ruled them? Was it a council of elite merchants? A priestly class? The most famous sculpture we have is a small, serene figure of a bearded man in an embroidered robe, dubbed the "Priest-King," but his true identity is a guess. Their society appears remarkably egalitarian, focused more on public good than on royal glory. What was life like for an ordinary person in Mohenjo-Daro? You might wake in a multi-story brick house, with your own well for water and, in a feat of engineering not seen again for thousands of years, a bathroom connected to a sophisticated, city-wide covered drainage system. The air would be thick with the sounds of commerce. The Indus people were master traders. You would see ox-carts creaking down the main street, laden with cotton—which they were the first in the world to cultivate and weave into cloth—and pottery painted with geometric designs. In the workshops, artisans would be busy. They were masters of their craft, producing exquisite, long carnelian beads through a complex heating and drilling process. They created intricate gold jewelry and copper tools. Their most iconic products, however, were their seals. Thousands of these small, square soapstone seals have been found, each intricately carved with an animal—a unicorn-like creature is the most common—and a line of enigmatic symbols. These seals were likely used like signatures, pressed into clay to mark ownership of goods. But the symbols themselves are a language we cannot read. This script, with its 400 unique signs, remains one of the world's great undeciphered codes. What stories, what laws, what poems are locked away in these silent characters? Their world was wide. Indus seals have been found as far away as Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. They sailed down the Indus River, out into the Arabian Sea, trading their cotton, timber, and beads for the copper and lapis lazuli of their neighbours. They had a standardized system of weights and measures, based on a unit of 13.63 grams, ensuring fair trade across their vast domain. Then, around 1900 BCE, the rhythm began to slow once more. The great cities began to decline. There was no single, dramatic collapse, no evidence of a massive invasion that burned the cities to the ground. Instead, it was a slow fading. The meticulous urban planning faltered. Drains fell into disrepair. Houses were built shoddily in the middle of once-grand streets. People began to abandon the cities, drifting back towards a more rural life. Why? The truth is likely a combination of devastating factors. The climate was changing. The monsoon patterns may have shifted, weakening the agricultural base. The legendary Sarasvati River, mentioned in later Hindu texts and thought to be a lifeblood of the civilization, appears to have dried up, turning fertile lands into desert. Tectonic shifts may have caused catastrophic floods in some areas while starving others of water. The great engine of their civilization simply ran out of steam. By 1500 BCE, the cities were silent, their bricks slowly being buried by sand and time, their script forgotten. For over 3,000 years, one of the world's first great urban cultures vanished from human memory, a ghost on the subcontinent. Yet, they did not disappear without a trace. Their legacy endured in subtle ways. The reverence for water, seen in the Great Bath, remains central to later Indian religions. The horned figure on one seal, seated in a yoga-like posture and surrounded by animals, is seen by some as a prototype of the Hindu god Shiva. The practice of adornment with bangles, the use of the swastika as a symbol of good fortune—these threads connect modern India back to its mysterious, magnificent, and silent ancestors.