The term "Ghaggar-Hakra" figures prominently in modern labels applied to the Indus Civilisation on account of a good number of sites having been found along the Ghaggar-Hakra river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan. Following a tradition in archaeology, the civilisation is sometimes referred to as the Harappan, after its type site, Harappa, the first site to be excavated in the 1920s this is notably true of usage employed by the Archaeological Survey of India after India's independence in 1947. The Indus Valley Civilisation is named after the Indus river system in whose alluvial plains the early sites of the civilisation were identified and excavated. A relationship with the Dravidian or Elamo-Dravidian language family is favoured by a section of scholars. The Harappan language is not directly attested, and its affiliation uncertain as the Indus script has remained undeciphered. The early Harappan cultures were preceded by local Neolithic agricultural villages, from which the river plains were populated. However, there are only five major urban sites: Harappa, Mohenjo-daro (declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 as "Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro"), Dholavira (declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 as "Dholavira: A Harappan City"), Ganeriwala, and Rakhigarhi. There were however earlier and later cultures often called Early Harappan and Late Harappan in the same area for this reason, the Harappan civilisation is sometimes called the Mature Harappan to distinguish it from these other cultures.īy 2002, over 1,000 Mature Harappan cities and settlements had been reported, of which just under a hundred had been excavated.
The discovery of Harappa and soon afterwards Mohenjo-daro was the culmination of work beginning in 1861 with the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India during the British Raj. The Indus civilisation is also known as the Harappan Civilisation, after its type site, Harappa, the first of its sites to be excavated early in the 20th century in what was then the Punjab province of British India and is now in Pakistan. Gradual drying of the region's soil during the 3rd millennium BCE may have been the initial spur for the urbanisation associated with the civilisation, but eventually weaker monsoons and reduced water supply caused the civilisation's demise, and caused its population to scatter eastward and southward. The large cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa very likely grew to contain between 30,000 and 60,000 individuals, and the civilisation itself during its florescence may have contained between one and five million individuals. The civilisation's cities were noted for their urban planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage systems, water supply systems, clusters of large non-residential buildings, and new techniques in handicraft ( carnelian products, seal carving) and metallurgy ( copper, bronze, lead, and tin). It flourished in the basins of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial, mostly monsoon-fed, rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the seasonal Ghaggar-Hakra river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan. Together with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the Near East and South Asia, and of the three, the most widespread, its sites spanning an area stretching from today's northeast Afghanistan, through much of Pakistan, and into western and northwestern India. The Indus Valley Civilisation ( IVC), also known as the Indus Civilisation, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. Terracotta figurines indicate the yoking of zebu oxen for pulling a cart and the presence of the chicken, a domesticated jungle fowl.
Miniature votive images or toy models from Harappa, c.