New Beginnings: Cities and States
The thousand-year gap
Find out what happened in north India after the Harappan cities declined.
Remember the Harappan (Indus, Sindhu-Sarasvatī) civilisation from Grade 6? It was India's First Urbanisation. In the early 2nd millennium BCE (a few centuries after 2000 BCE), it broke up.
Some cities were abandoned. In others people stayed on but went back to village life. They had to, because everything that makes a city work had gone:
- big buildings, private and public
- crowded streets and busy markets
- people with special jobs (metalsmiths, potters, builders, weavers ...)
- a writing system
- drains and sanitation
- an administration, and above it a state with rulers
Without these, a city can't carry on as a city: nobody runs the drains, nothing is written down, nobody organises things. So people went back to farming.
Picture a timeline:
| When | What |
|---|---|
| up to about 2000 BCE | Harappan cities: the First Urbanisation |
| the next thousand years | almost no cities, though there were important regional cultures |
| the 1st millennium BCE | cities grow again in the Ganga plains, parts of the Indus basin and nearby, then spread |
How do we know? From two sources: archaeology (digging up the old cities) and old books (late Vedic, Buddhist and Jain texts that describe them). Each one checks the other.
This new phase is called India's Second Urbanisation, and it has carried on right up to today!
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