Chapter 5 India 153Ministers codified the law. Priests pondered the old myths and rites, raising
new philosophical questions; they gazed at the stars and developed astrology
and astronomy. Mathematics grew out of useful practices like engineering and
astronomy. Royal courts sponsored new forms of art: theater, music, dance,
and poetry. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the development of new uses for
religion: the power of the state needed to be legitimated somehow; new forms
of religion emerged in the service of the state.
Note that a civilization is something more than a state. States are political
formations of strongmen or warriors that can come and go rather quickly, and
most will not form a true civilization around them. A civilization includes
enduring cultural traditions that can be maintained and passed on from genera-
tion to generation even when political centralization has lapsed, whereas a
state is a centralized social system that is much more vulnerable to spinning
into disorder at the death of a powerful leader or collapsing into bitterly con-
tested struggles for leadership that end in fragmentation. So civilizations can
outlast particular states. Civilizations can also support several competing
regional states simultaneously. Indian civilization has survived through eras
when no state could be said to be functioning, or when only small regional
states existed. Similarly Chinese civilization has stretched across eras when the
state itself disappeared in periodic chaos.
Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.)
The first urban society in India flourished in the Indus Valley from 2500 to
1500 B.C.E. This was the world’s third civilization, a thousand years later than
the founding of Egypt and Sumer. Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was in con-
tact with Sumer via a land route stretching from oasis to oasis across the Ira-
nian Plateau and via a much easier coastal route in the shallow waters of the
Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf. For the civilizations to the west, India
was the fabled source of peacocks and monkeys, ivory and gems, spices and
incense. The villages, towns, and two great cities of IVC were dependent on the
Indus River for a water source and for transportation. Farmers in the region
grew wheat and cotton, which they shipped by river to Mohenjo Daro and
Harappa, where cotton was woven into cloth.
However, IVC is the mystery civilization of Asia. While its two major cit-
ies, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, have been extensively excavated and now lie
exposed once again to the blistering sun of Pakistan (more than a thousand set-
tlements are known) only 10 percent of these sites have been excavated. In the
1970s a third large city was discovered near the border of India and Pakistan,
but because of political tensions, it has not been excavated.
Almost everything we would want to know about the people and their cul-
ture remains unexplained. Who were the people who lived there? Were they
ancestors of the Dravidians, who are now the vast populations of the southern
Indian states of Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Mysore? There are a few tiny telltale
pockets of Dravidian-speakers stranded in the Indus Valley region of Baluch-