From village to city

The wide plains of Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan, so there is a Punjab in each country) and Sindh (now in Pakistan) are watered by the Indus River and its tributaries (rivers that flow into a bigger one, as the Yamuna flows into the Ganga). That made the plains fertile and good for farming.

A little further east, a few thousand years ago, another river, the Sarasvatī, flowed from the foothills of the Himalayas through Haryana, Punjab, parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

In this whole region, from about 3500 BCE, villages grew into towns, and with more trade and exchange, the towns grew into cities around 2600 BCE. That is 900 years between the first towns and the first cities: nothing happened overnight. The book's timeline puts this civilisation at about 2600 to 1900 BCE.

Archaeologists have given it several names: 'Indus', 'Harappan', 'Indus-Sarasvatī' or 'Sindhu-Sarasvatī' civilisation; the book uses all of them. Its people are called 'Harappans'. It is one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

Why 'Harappans'? Simply because the city of Harappa (now in Pakistan's Punjab) was the first of these cities to be excavated, back in 1920–21, over a century ago. The people are named after a modern discovery; we do not know what they called themselves.

This development is also called the 'first urbanisation of India', the first time cities grew up in India.