The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c6.1

c6.1

Secondly, as to distribution. Over sixty sites¹ have produced significant elements of the Harappā culture between Rupar, at the foot of the Simla hills, and Sutkagēn-dōr, near the coast of the Arabian Sea 300 miles west of Karachi (fig. 1). With rare exceptions they are towns or villages of the plain: most of them line present or former courses of the Indus and its tributaries, or of those other rivers which flow south-westwards from the sub-montane region about Ambala and, as the Sarasvatī or Ghaggar, Hakrā or Wāhindat, formerly watered the deserts of Bikaner and Bahāwalpur and may even have struggled through as a rival Indus to the Arabian Sea.² To the west, the hills include innumerable cognate village-cultures (earlier, contemporary and later) which on occasion descend also to the plains; but the Harappans were, first and last, lowlanders, as befits a civilized folk. The diversity of the hill-divided village groups is in standing contrast to the widespread uniformity of the riverine civilization.