Now we must rush over tens of thousands of years in which humanity lived as hunter-gatherers. And then in the Stone Age, in a great arc from the Mediterranean to India, changes in technology led to the invention of agriculture. And that would be the motor for the next turning point in the story of India, the rise of cities. In the year 2007, for the first time in history, most of us will live in cities rather than in the countryside.
Here in the Indian subcontinent, that process of civilization began in 7000 BC, even earlier than ancient Egypt, with the growth of large villages in the Indus Valley. So despite the divisions made by modern borders, nowhere else on earth is there such continuity of settled life. Hello. Assalamu alaikum. Though, of course, when we talk about India in history, we mean the whole of the subcontinent, before modern politics divided up that deep continuum and gave the people new identities and new allegiances.
Multan is your native place? Multan, your native place? Yes. Very nice.
Making historical film for BBC London. These days, civilization is a very problematical word with many shades of meaning. But to historians and archaeologists, it means living in cities, large scale, scale, highly organized societies, monumental architecture, law and writing.
And to find the origins of Indian civilization, we need to come first of all to Pakistan, once part of India, but split to become a separate country in 1947. Because it was here in the valley of the Indus River, comparatively recently, in a series of amazing discoveries, revealed a hitherto completely unknown ancient civilization. Like the other great ancient civilizations in Iraq, Egypt and China, India's first cities had grown up on a river. The ruins of Harappa stood on the dried up bed of a tributary of the river Indus.
Its huge citadel walls had been quarried away by Victorian railway contractors. But there was still evidence of industry and trade, of writing and high-level organisation, and a huge population. Harappa was far older than anything previously known in India.
Amazingly, at the time of the building of the pyramids of Egypt, there had been vast cities here in India. When does Harappa begin? Ahlapa was being named 3500 BC, 5000 years ago from here.
Right, 3500 BC. So this is very, very long-lasting place. And when was this place built? What was the heyday, the high period of the Indus civilization? The high period of the Indus civilization started from 2900 BC to 1900 BC.
This is the highest period. And we call it mature Harappan period. And how many people do you think lived here in the height of its power? I think about two lakh people. Two hundred thousand people.
According to their houses and streets, it is estimated, I guess. Wow, but it's a big city for the ancient world. The next year, 1922, British and Indian archaeologists targeted an untouched site to the south, Mahenjo-dhara. By ancient standards, it was an urban giant, a Bronze Age Manhattan. Just like the modern Indians and Pakistanis, the Indus people were traders.
From here their boats sailed to the Persian Gulf and Iraq, carrying cargoes of ivory, teak and lapis lazuli. The city appeared to be the capital of a great empire, which we now know extended from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. With over 2,000 towns and villages, it was the largest civilization in the ancient world.
And with up to 5 million people, the world's biggest population. But their writing is still undeciphered. Then, after several centuries of stability, the cities declined, trade collapsed, and urban life itself ended.
People went back to the land. But why the Indus cities died is one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology. About 180 million years ago, India was actually an island floating in this vast ocean that we call Tethys. It was moving northwards for about 130 million years. Eventually, about 50 million years ago, it actually rammed into Asia, collided with Asia, to produce the world's largest mountain belt, the Himalayas.
So there's a different perspective to the historian's view. Civilizations come and go. Environment and climate are what shape our human story in the long term, as we're now discovering to our cost. The Himalayas draw the warm air from the south, which is precipitated in rain, the monsoons. And the monsoons made the first Indian civilization.
When they failed, it did too. The key was the shifting and drying up of rivers, and one great river system in particular. What we've been doing is to look at satellite imagery to try and see if you can trace paleo river channels essentially on the flood plains.
So this is the area just along the border between India and Pakistan? That's right. And we're going to basically zoom in on an area over here and look at some satellite imagery in some detail.
So in the satellite imagery what you can see are these light areas which are desert areas, sand dunes, etc. But snaking through the desert you can see the trace, this dark channel-like feature which people believe is the trace of an ancient river. If we now put the sights on for the main phase of the Harappan civilization you can see beautifully how those sights are actually strung along the trace.
of this ancient channel bed. It's very clear there, isn't it? It absolutely matches the curve of the channel bed. And you can trace it actually from India into Pakistan, into the area that's called Cholistan, where you have numerous sites.
So this is from the height of the Indus civilisation? Yeah, probably between 5,000 to 4,000 years ago. When Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were at their height.
So what happens to these sites at the end of the civil...? the harappan civilization actually if we look at the later harappan stages oh yes and what you see is that there's a major shift eastward ...into the eastern part of the... central and eastern part of the Ganges plain, away from the major Gaga-Hakra settlements over here.
In the last 10,000 years we've actually seen a progressive decline in the strength of the Indian summer monsoon. And particularly around, some people suggest that around 3,500 years ago there was actually a major decrease in the strength of the monsoon. climate change isn't just happening now it's happened in the past all these early settlements they make mature harappan civilizations settlements just completely disappear and we see this major shift eastward into the central part of the Ganges plain And ever since, from sacred songs to Bollywood movies, Indian people have loved the monsoon.
The coming of the monsoon has an almost erotic charge. It's the giver of life itself.