"HARAPPA TOWN-PLANNING" by Dr. S. SRIKANTA SASTRI

 

Among the great civilizations of the ancient world, India may be said to possess the only surviving Heritage from the remote past as a living force even today. The history of India was supposed by earlier historians to begin only with the alleged Aryan invasion in the middle of the second millennium B.C. But the almost accidental discovery of the Harappa civilisation, definitely assignable to the fourth millennium B.C., if not earlier, compelled the historians to acknowledge that India took its rank as one of the oldest civilised countries in the world.

 

PROTO-INDIC CULTURE

Recent explorations and excavations have revealed the wide diffusion of this Proto- Indic culture. From Rupar and the foothills of the Himalayas to Lothal and the Narmada Valley in the south, from Assam in the east to the borders of Persia in the west, a single homogenous culture prevailed for at least two thousand years continuously. From the supposed affinity with the Sumerian civilization, it was at first styled as Indo-Sumerian. Others called it “The Indus Valley Culture”, the “Indo-Mediterranean Culture”, etc., but now it is called Proto-Indic or Harappa Culture.

 

The two most important sites almost fully excavated are at Harappa in the Punjab and Mohenjo-Daro in Sindh at a distance of about 350 miles from each other. The Indus river and its tributaries and its fluctuations brought about the destruction of the cities. But the sites were reoccupied and new cities were constructed on identical plans.