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outh and Southeast Asia is a vast geographic area comprising, among others, the nations of India, Pak-
istan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia (MAP6-1). Not surpris-
ingly, the region’s inhabitants display tremendous cultural and religious diversity. The people of India alone
speak more than 20 different major languages. Those spoken in the north belong to the Indo-European
language family, whereas those in the south form a completely separate linguistic family called Dravidian.
The art of South and Southeast Asia is equally diverse—and very ancient. When Alexander the Great and
his army reached India in 326 BCE, the civilization they encountered was already more than two millennia
old. The remains of the first cities in the Indus Valley predate the palaces (FIGS. 4-15and 4-19) of Homer’s
Trojan War heroes by a millennium. Covered in this chapter are the art and architecture of South and
Southeast Asia from their beginnings almost five millennia ago through the 12th century. Chapter 26 treats
the later art of the region up to the present day.
India and Pakistan
In the third millennium BCE, a great civilization arose over a wide geographic area along the Indus River
in Pakistan and extended into India as far south as Gujarat and east beyond Delhi. Archaeologists have
dubbed this early South Asian culture the Indus Civilization.
Indus Civilization
The Indus Civilization flourished from about 2600 to 1500 BCE, and evidence indicates there was active
trade during this period between the peoples of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. The most important
excavated Indus sites are Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. These early, fully developed cities featured streets
oriented to compass points and multistoried houses built of carefully formed and precisely laid kiln-
baked bricks. But in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, no
surviving Indus building has yet been identified as a temple or a palace.
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