India: A History

by John Keay

Save for a few Stone Age productions, south India’s history has to wait until jump-started by a remarkable literary outpouring at the very end of the first millennium BC.

Some historians have dated the Flood very precisely to 3102 BC, this being the year when, by elaborate computation, they conclude that our current era, the Kali Yug in Indian cosmology, began and when Manu became the progenitor of a new people as well as their first great king and law-giver.

Clearly Harappan settlements were not just India’s first cities and townships but its first, indeed the world’s first, planned cities and townships.

With Mohenjo-daro and Harappa nearly six hundred kilometres apart, it was immediately obvious that the ‘Indus valley’ civilisation was more extensive than its contemporaries – Egypt’s Old Kingdom and Mesopotamia’s Sumeria.

From Lothal, a small but important settlement in Gujarat which may have been a port, to Shortughai in the mountains of Badakshan, where the Harappans probably obtained supplies of lapis lazuli, is a distance of over sixteen hundred kilometres; and east–west from Alamgirpur on the upper Ganga to Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast is hardly less.

The spinning and weaving of cotton, for instance, in which the Harappans seem to have been the world’s pioneers, must have been gradually disseminated throughout India, since by the mid-first millennium BC it was commonplace.

Again, the Harappans may have been the first in the world to use wheeled transport.

ancient Persians had indeed used their arya word in an ethnic sense; they called themselves the ‘Ariana’ (whence derives the modern ‘Iran’).