In 1856, British colonial officials in India were busy supervising the construction of a railway along the Indus River valley that would connect the towns of Lahore and Karachi modern-day Pakistan.
Some of the laborers noticed many fire-baked bricks wedged in the parched landscape as they proceeded to work. Hundreds of thousands of rather uniform bricks, all of which appeared to be quite old, littered the area. Despite this, the workers used some of them to build the road bed, oblivious to the fact that they were working with ancient artefacts. They quickly discovered soapstone objects with rich artistic marks among the bricks. Though they didn’t realize it at the time, and the first major excavations didn’t begin until the 1920s, these railway workers had stumbled across the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappan Civilization after Harappa, the first of its sites to be excavated, in what was then British India’s Punjab province and is now Pakistan. Many archaeologists initially believed they had discovered ruins of the Mauryan Empire, a major empire that ruled ancient India between 322 and 185 BCE.
Scholars are still piecing together details about this fascinating culture, but since its rediscovery, they have learned a lot. Its origins are considered to be in the town of Mehrgarh in modern-day Baluchistan, Pakistan, which is nestled in the foothills of a mountain pass. There is evidence of settlement in this area dating back to 7000 BCE.
The Indus Valley Civilization is divided into three periods: the Early Harappan Phase, which lasted from 3300 to 2600 BCE, the Mature Harappan Phase, which lasted from 2600 to 1900 BCE, and the Late Harappan Phase, which lasted from 1900 to 1300 BCE.
Urban planning, which is a technical and political process dealing with land use and urban design, is well-known in Indus cities. Baked brick residences, complex drainage and water supply systems, and clusters of large, non-residential structures are also noteworthy.
Mohenjo-Daro is thought to have been founded in the 26th century BCE, and it was not only the Indus Valley Civilization’s greatest city, but also one of the world’s earliest major urban centres. Mohenjo-Daro, located west of the Indus River in the Larkana District, was one of the most advanced cities of its time, with advanced engineering and urban planning.
Harappa was a walled city in modern-day Pakistan with a population of up to 23,500 people living in sculpted buildings with flat roofs constructed of red sand and clay. The city was 150 hectares (370 acres) in size, with fortified governmental and religious complexes similar to those found at Mohenjo-Daro.
The world’s first known urban sanitation systems can be found in Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and the recently largely excavated Rakhigarhi. The ancient Indus sewage and drainage systems created and used in towns across the Indus valley were significantly more advanced than those found in modern Middle Eastern cities, and even more efficient than those found in many parts of Pakistan and India today. Individual dwellings obtained water from wells, while wastewater was channeled through covered drains on main streets. Houses only opened to inner courtyards and smaller alleyways, and even the tiniest residences on the fringes of the city were thought to be connected to the system, reinforcing the conclusion that cleanliness was very important.
Aishwarya Says:
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