Indus Valley Civilisation & the Vedic Age

The civilisation is dated in three phases, but the one the paper cares about is the Mature (Urban) Phase, c. 2600–1900 BCE. This is when the planned cities, seals, standardised bricks and long-distance trade all appear together. It belongs to the Bronze Age — the Harappans used copper, bronze, gold and silver, but not iron.

• Westernmost site: Sutkagendor (Balochistan, Pakistan). Easternmost: Alamgirpur (Uttar Pradesh).
• Northernmost: Manda (Jammu, on the Chenab). Southernmost: Daimabad (Maharashtra, on the Pravara).
• It spread over roughly 1.3 million sq km — a triangle covering parts of today’s Pakistan, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, western UP and Jammu.
• It was contemporary with Mesopotamia and Egypt, but far larger in area than any other Bronze Age civilisation.

The real genius of the Harappans was civic planning. Their cities were not built haphazardly; they were laid out on a plan, with public works that no other Bronze Age people matched. Learn the features as a list — questions come straight from it.

• Grid pattern: streets and lanes cut each other at right angles, dividing the city into rectangular blocks — the "chessboard" plan.
• Two-part layout: a raised citadel to the west (public buildings, elite) and a lower residential town to the east.
• Standardised burnt bricks in the fixed ratio 1 : 2 : 4 (thickness : width : length) — the same ratio across a thousand kilometres.
• An underground covered drainage system with manholes for cleaning — the most advanced of the ancient world; every house drain joined the street drain.
• Houses of baked brick with courtyards, private wells and bathrooms; doors usually opened onto side lanes, not the main street.

Harappan wealth came from three things: farming on flood plains, craft production, and trade. Their trade reached Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians appear to have called their land Meluha. Trade seems to have been by barter — no coins have been found.

• Crops: wheat, barley, peas, sesame, mustard; cotton was grown here first in the world (the Greeks later called cotton "Sindon" after Sindh).
• Animals: humped bull, buffalo, sheep, goat, pig, dog, elephant, camel. The horse and the lion do not appear on the seals.
• Weights were cubical, mostly of chert, and followed a binary system in multiples of 16 (16, 32, 64, 128, 256…) — remember the number 16.
• Thousands of seals, mostly of steatite (soft stone), squarish, showing an animal and a short inscription. They were probably used to stamp trade goods.
• Art: the bronze Dancing Girl (made by the lost-wax method) and the steatite "Priest-King" bust, both from Mohenjodaro; countless terracotta figurines.

The Harappan script remains undeciphered. It is pictographic (around 400 signs), too short to give long texts, and was written boustrophedon — that is, right to left in one line and left to right in the next, like an ox turning at the end of a furrow. Because we cannot read it, we know Harappan drains but not Harappan kings.

• Decline theory 1 — Floods / river changes: repeated flooding at Mohenjodaro (Marshall, S. R. Rao) and the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra ruined the settlements along it.
• Decline theory 2 — Climate change: growing aridity and falling rainfall reduced farm surpluses, and cities cannot survive without surplus.
• Decline theory 3 — Aryan invasion: proposed by Mortimer Wheeler on the basis of some unburied skeletons; now largely rejected by scholars.
• Decline theory 4 — End of trade, deforestation, epidemics, tectonic shifts. The safest exam answer: the decline was gradual and had many causes, not a single catastrophe.

The Early Vedic Age (c. 1500–1000 BCE) is known almost entirely from one text — the Rigveda. The people lived in the Sapta Sindhu, the "land of seven rivers", covering eastern Afghanistan, Punjab and the fringes of western UP. They were pastoral and mobile: their wealth was cattle, not land.

• Rivers: Sindhu (mentioned most often), Saraswati (called naditame, "the best of rivers"), Vitasta (Jhelum), Asikni (Chenab), Parushni (Ravi), Vipasha (Beas), Shutudri (Sutlej).
• Society was tribal, not territorial: the units ran kula (family) → grama → vis → jana (tribe). Varna divisions existed but were fluid, based mostly on occupation.
• The chief was the rajan — a tribal war-leader, not a king with a fixed kingdom. He took bali, a voluntary offering, not a regular tax. There was no standing army.
• Key helpers: purohita (priest), senani (army leader), gramani (village head), vrajapati (officer of pastures).
• Cattle were so central that the word for war was gavishti — literally "search for cows". A rich man was a gomat.

Between c. 1000 and 600 BCE the Vedic people moved east, out of Punjab and into the Ganga–Yamuna doab and then further into the middle Ganga plain. Two things made this possible: iron, called krishna ayas or shyama ayas ("black metal") in the later texts, and the iron ploughshare, which could break the heavy, forested soil of the Ganga valley. Their pottery of this age is the Painted Grey Ware (PGW).

• Rajasuya — the royal consecration sacrifice, believed to confer supreme power on the king.
• Ashvamedha — the horse sacrifice; the horse roamed free, and all the land it crossed unchallenged was claimed by the king.
• Vajapeya — a chariot-race ritual by which the king established superiority over his own kinsmen.
• New officers appear: bhagadugha (tax collector), sangrahitri (treasurer), suta (charioteer/chronicler) — signs of a real state taking shape.

The Vedas are shruti — "that which was heard" — and were passed on orally for centuries with astonishing accuracy. Each Veda has a layered structure: the Samhita (the hymns themselves), then the Brahmanas (prose explaining the rituals), then the Aranyakas ("forest books", moving from ritual to symbolism), and finally the Upanishads (pure philosophy). Learn the ladder: Samhita → Brahmana → Aranyaka → Upanishad.

• The six Vedangas ("limbs of the Veda"): Shiksha (phonetics), Kalpa (ritual), Vyakarana (grammar), Nirukta (etymology), Chhanda (metre), Jyotisha (astronomy).
• The four Purusharthas (aims of life): Dharma (righteous duty), Artha (wealth), Kama (desire), Moksha (liberation).
• The four Ashramas (stages of life): Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (forest-dweller), Sannyasa (renouncer). The full four-stage scheme is clearly laid out only in the later Vedic and post-Vedic texts.