DISCOVERY AND ORIGIN OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION ➡

 ⚫DISCOVERY AND ORIGIN OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION ➡

It was a hot sunny afternoon in the year 1920. The British were ruling India at that time. Workers were all tired and sweaty as they were digging the ground for construction of a new railway station at a small town called Harappa, Punjab. Suddenly, something very surprising happened. They stumbled upon a large pile of bricks buried under the ground. It was as if they have discovered a treasure. “Where did these bricks came from?” they wondered, “Who made all these bricks?” and the weirdest thing was the bricks were really, really old. The news of this mystery spread far and wide and archaeologists from all over the world set out to Harappa to unfold its mystery. In the years to follow, two archaeologists, Dayaram Sahni and R.D. Banerjee let the excavations at Harappa and MohenjoDaro respectively. After excavations, a lot of exciting things were found. There was a whole city buried there. There were seals and artefacts and amazing buildings all buried in that forgotten town. They were standing over the ruins of a great civilization. They realized it and rushed to inform their bosses. Thus, under the guidance of Sir John Marshal, about 1,500 sites were excavated. These excavations confirmed that an entire civilization existed around the river Indus and its tributaries about 4,500 years ago. Now, since it was a civilization along the valley of the river Indus, they named it the Indus Valley Civilization and since Harappa was the first and the biggest site to be excavated, it is also called the Harappan civilization. Studying the remains historians have predicted that this civilization started around about 3250 BCE and flourished between 2500 BCE and 1500 BCE. It is known to be the first civilization that ever existed in India. Suddenly, India’s history had some proper pedigree, richness, depth and archaeologically verified is ancientness. More than 250 centres of the Harappan culture have been discovered in different areas. Based on these discovery we now know that this civilization was huge and must have extended from the Jammu in the North to Gujrat in the South and from Meerut in the East to the sea coast of North – Western part of India to the West basically covering the entire North – Western region of the Indian subcontinent. Out of all these sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro both presently in Pakistan are the most important ones. We have plenty of sites from the Indian part of the subcontinent as well, such as Lothal and Dholavira in Gujrat, Kalibangan in Rajasthan, Alamgirpur in Uttar Pradesh and Mithal in Haryana. The artefacts and remains obtained from all these sites show that our ancestors were quite cool. They had an awesome lifestyle. In fact, in some aspects, I would say they are even better than us.