Origins and Urban Planning of the Indus Valley Civilization

The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, developed in the basins of the Indus and the now largely dry Ghaggar-Hakra rivers, across present-day Pakistan and northwestern India, between roughly 3300 and 1300 BCE. Its mature urban phase, conventionally dated to about 2600-1900 BCE, made it contemporary with Egypt's Old Kingdom and with Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods, and at its height it covered more than 1.25 million square kilometers, a territory larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. Its roots lay in the long Neolithic sequence documented at Mehrgarh, in Baluchistan, where farming and herding communities were established from around 7000 BCE onward, and archaeologists have identified more than a thousand Indus sites to date, among them the major urban centers of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in present-day Pakistan and Dholavira, Lothal, Kalibangan, and Rakhigarhi in present-day India. Together with Sumer, Egypt, and China, the Indus Valley forms one of the four great primary centers of early urban civilization in the Old World.