Heinz-Murray 2E.book

(Axel Boer) #1

Indus Valley Civilization
(2500–1500 B.C.E.). [top] Exca-
vated ruins of Mohenjo Daro,
with the later Buddhist stupa
on the citadel and the “great
bath” in the foreground. [left]
Early nineteenth-century man-
uscript page in Sanskrit from
the Rig-Veda (1500–450
B.C.E.). Who were the people
who built the IVC cities? Who
wrote the Vedas? Were they
the same or different people?
The earliest of the four Vedas
was composed around 1200
B.C.E. but not written down for
perhaps another thousand
years. The consensus of schol-
ars is that the Vedas were the
sacred texts of Indo-European-
speaking people who migrated
to India from the northwest
over several centuries after
IVC had fallen into decline.

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