A small square stone seal from the Indus cities with a unicorn and signs of the Indus script
Stamp seal and modern impression: unicorn and incense burner (?), ca. 2600–1900 BCE
Marked Harappa

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Indus cities

Along the Indus river, in what are now Pakistan and India, people built planned cities of baked brick with drains, wells and, at Mohenjo-daro, a great bath. Their writing, on small stone seals, has never been deciphered.

Date
About 3300 to 1300 BCIV · First cities and the Bronze Age
Place
Harappa · Mohenjo-daro · Dholavira · LothalAsia
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IMohenjo-daro, a planned city
  2. IIDrains and the Great Bath
  3. IIISeals and an unread script
  4. IVTrade with Mesopotamia
  5. VWhere were the kings?
  6. VIWhy did the cities empty?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Rakhal Das Banerji
  • John Marshall
  • Iravatham Mahadevan

Objects

  • Unicorn seals
  • The bronze “Dancing Girl”
  • The “Priest-King”

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

3300 BC to 1300 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?