The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c15.s1.t2.1

c15.s1.t2.1

When we leave Prehistory and our survivors of a prehistoric age, we come to the "matrix of our civilization", the stage of the large scale agricultural communities with a knowledge of copper and bronze. Here again, we see the familiar pattern of a slow advance of civilization. Naturally, the Indus basin, as Spate calls it, is an extension of the environment of South West Asia. Similarly Braidwood calls it a periphery of the nuclear Near East. The rest of the country to the east of the Aravallis must have been in a Late Stone Age or Neolithic cultural level. Pre-Harappan and the Harappan cycles did not spread eastwards. Sometime at the end of this great urban civilization, two great landmarks appear in our cultural horizon. While the *Aryans came from the west and destroyed or displaced the great urban civilization of the Indus basin*, a widespread technological progress of the Gangetic basin is suddenly registered, either simultaneously or even a little earlier. We are completely ignorant about their origin. While Piggot, Heine Geldern and Gordon tried to derive this Gangetic valley from Western elements, Lal has made an attempt to support an independent origin. Yet the solution of the problem of their origins require an intensive attack on the Gangetic valley.