by Shamma B S

Created on: May 02, 2007   Last Updated: September 23, 2009

The Indus civilization grew up and flourished in the valley of the Indus in the third and second millennia BC. Before partition in 1947 it was easy to refer to this as the prehistoric civilization of India or of the Indian sub-continent. Now the sites of this civilization are divided between two nation states, namely Pakistan and India; the two main cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, are now in Pakistan. Some writers prefer to call the civilization the Harappan after one of these cities, but I think the first and old nomenclature is the best and most convenient, and here we shall go on referring the Indus civilization.

There was, until the early twenties, a traditional and generally accepted view of the remote Indian past. It was thought that the first cities were built in the first millennium BC by the descendants of pastoral nomads - the Aryans, who had come into India via the Khyber Pass from the north-west in the bronze Age, and had introduced the language which developed into Sanskrit. It was thought that between, say 1500 and 1000 BC, they fought among themselves, and with the aborigines in the Punjab. Then it was supposes that they settled down and created the oldest Indian civilization in the basin of the Ganges, where the first, and therefore the holiest, city in India was Patna.

A word is necessary at this stage about the term Aryans - a word which got into considerable disrepute because of the excesses of Nazi racialists before and during the 1939-45 war. Sir William Jones, a Welshman educated in Oxford, who went out to be Chief Justice of the High Court in Calcutta in 1783, was the first British scholar to master Sanskrit, he realized to his surprise that there was an underlying relationship between Greek, Latin, Celtic, Persian and Sanskrit.

The details of this underlying relationship were elaborated by later philologists and it became clear that there was a great language family having as its main branches Celtic, Italic, Hellenic, Slav, Teutonic, and Indo-Persian. To this language family the name Indo-European or Indo-Germanic was given; by others the family was called Aryan. At the present day it is usually suggested that the whole language family should be referred to as Indo-Aryan or Aryan.

The sacred hymns of the aryas were transmitted orally and were not written down until the eighteenth century AD. They contain references to the aborigines or indigenous population in India whom they confronted as conquerors: they called them the Dasus or

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