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The Indus Valley and Ancient India

Along the Indus River, people built planned cities such as Mohenjo-daro with straight streets and drains. Later, the emperor Ashoka ruled much of India and carved messages of kindness on stone pillars.

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About 4,500 years ago, on the banks of the Indus River in today's Pakistan and northwest India, people built cities that look surprisingly modern. Streets ran straight, in a grid. Houses were made of baked bricks of the same size, and many had a bathroom with a drain that ran into covered sewers under the street.

Key idea

The Indus Valley civilization, with cities such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, was at its height about 2600 to 1900 BC. Its people traded with Mesopotamia and carved small stone seals with animals and signs. Nobody has yet learned to read their writing.
The Indus cities, and Varanasi on the Ganges, one of the oldest cities still lived in today.

Later, kingdoms grew along the Ganges River. About 2,300 years ago the Maurya family united much of India. Its most famous emperor, Ashoka, won a terrible war, and the suffering he saw changed him. He became a follower of the Buddha and had messages carved on stone pillars across his empire, asking people to be kind, honest and respectful of other faiths.

Ancient India.

Scholars in ancient India also gave the world a great gift: the numerals we use, with a zero and place value. In AD 628 the mathematician Brahmagupta wrote rules for calculating with zero.

Worked example: Read the clues

The Indus script cannot be read. How do we know Indus cities were planned?
  1. Archaeologists dug up the cities and mapped them.
  2. They found straight streets in a grid, same-size bricks and covered drains in many neighborhoods.

Answer: From the cities themselves: the ruins show careful planning.

Common mistake

Thinking we can read every ancient writing. The Indus script and some others are still a mystery, waiting for a new Rosetta Stone.

Try it at home

  • On graph paper, plan a city like Mohenjo-daro: main streets running north–south and east–west, blocks of houses, a well, and drains that lead out of the city.
  • Where would you put the big public bath and the granary (grain store)?
Going further. Find India and its rivers in Asia: Mountains, Rivers and Deserts (World Geography). Our numerals and zero are the start of the Math Ladder.

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 2 XP.

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