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The cities on the Indus River, including sites in modern Pakistan at places such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, surprised archaeologists who found them for a couple of reasons:

 As with the Hittite cities, nobody remembered, for a long time, that the Indus River cities had ever existed. Although the sites have been located, the origin of the people who built and lived there is still uncertain.

 These communities of 2500 BC had streets laid out in a grid of rectangles, like New York City, and houses in Mohenjo-Daro boasted bathrooms and toilets with drains feeding into municipal sewers. Writings found among the ruins indicate that the Indus Valley was home to a literate society that probably spoke an early Dravidian language related to many languages still spoken in parts of South Asia.

At its height, the Indus civilization probably covered an area bigger than Mesopotamia and Egypt put together. (See figure 4-1). Mohenjo-Daro was rebuilt and rebuilt again over the course of what some scientists think were centuries of geologic change that plugged the Indus River, altered its course, and put successive layers of houses underwater. Others say that earthquakes and massive flooding ended the civilization around 1700 BC.

Avantiputra7 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 3.0

FIGURE 4-1: The Indus Valley Civilization was in what is now India and Pakistan.

Nomadic herding tribes from the Iranian plateau arrived in northwestern India around then as well, and they seem to have displaced the people of the Indus cities. Raiders eventually destroyed Mohenjo-Daro, by then in steep decline. The newcomers brought an Indo-European language (a distant ancestor of modern India’s Hindi, as well as English and many other tongues) and the roots of what became Indian religion and culture.

Historians have used the term Aryan to mean the people who displaced the Indus River civilization and gave rise to later Indian culture, but Aryan is a widely misunderstood word because of the way German Nazis misused it to refer to light-skinned Caucasians. Properly applied, Aryan refers strictly to speakers of long-ago Indo-European languages; it has nothing to do with ethnicity or physical type.