Ancient History / Indus Valley Civilization
When we give a brief introduction to Indus Valley Civilization, it is one among the earliest civilizations of the world. Other ancient civilizations are Sumerian or Mesopotamian civilization, Egyptian civilization and Chinese civilization. It is also known as Bronze Age civilization or Harappan civilization. The site name that is discovered first, will be given as the name of the civilization. In 1921, Harappa was discovered first and hence it is called Harappan civilization.
Sometimes, Indus Valley Civilization is also called Proto-Historic civilization. Scripts that are discovered in this civilization,
are unable to decipher. Hence, we cannot put it into historical period.
Most of the history of this civilization was studied by
Archaeologists and hence it has to be put into proto-history (transitional history). That is it got transformed from script-less society to
script society. There seems to be many problems while deciphering the scripts.
These are pictographic scripts without any alphabets. That means these are pictures rather than alphabets. Length of the inscriptions is
very short consisting of hardly 3 to 4 pictures.
These inscriptions are on seals, which are nothing but pieces of stones either in
rectangular or square shaped. Beautiful gods and animals are also present on the seals. The script is written in a boustrophedon style. That is,
it is written from left to right and from right to left in alternate lines.
It was a cosmopolitan civilization consisting of many races. Four different races were living together. They were Mongoloids, Alpinoids, Proto-Australoids and Mediterranean races. Mediterraneans were numerically strong and are popularly known as Dravidians.