Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c13.3

c13.3

THE dual pattern of prehistoric Western India at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., with the great urban civilization of Harappā in the plains and the simpler peasant communities in the Baluchistan hills, had endured almost unaltered for seven or eight hundred years at least; the Baluchi settlements themselves are likely to have been established as early as 3000 B.C., and some of them perhaps earlier. There is no evidence of violent change in the archaeological record of this time; villages are deserted, towns rebuilt after a flood, or new settlements are made, but the small, self-sufficient societies in the remote valleys of the hills or the vast organization of the Harappā empire in the plains continue their way of life unaffected by the outside world.