Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c5.8

c5.8

South of the northern barriers lie the Great Plains of India, with an average width from north to south of some 200 miles and an average height of 500 feet above the sea. On the map their shape is that of a leaning gable, with the ridge in the neighbourhood of Siālkot, north of Lahore. The shorter and more westerly slope of the gable is the Plain of the Indus, the more easterly the Plain of the Ganges, with Ambālā and Simla in the divide. The prehistory and much of the history of the two plains, in spite of their superficial continuity, is strikingly different, for reasons which must be discussed in due course. Here it will suffice to observe that the land of the middle and lower Indus, with the lost rivers of the Sarasvati or Ghaggar system which at one time ran parallel or perhaps tributary to it, is barred by desert towards the south-east and was alternatively threatened or reinforced from the Baluch highland towards the west; it remained essentially submontane. The obstructive desert, the Thar, may not in the earlier part of our period have been of its present large dimensions, but at least its mountainous south-eastern flank, the Arāvalli Range, was a durable barrier to the spread of early cultures. Round the northerly end of the Range there was, in the Bronze Age (earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C.) some interconnection between Bikaner and the Jumna-Ganges plains, as is shown by the distribution of the Painted Grey Ware (p. 26); and, round the southerly end of the Range and the desert, the Indus Civilization crept from the mouths of the Indus into Kāthiāwād and beyond. The Ganges, on the other hand, with the mighty Jumna to the west of it and a host of imposing tributaries along its great length, culminating in the maze-like mingling of its delta with that of the Brahmaputra, escapes into a more leisurely landscape, choked at one time with the vast jungles that form the background of the Indian epics. Invasion from the passes of the north-west frontier—its normal source—surged laterally across the middle Indus plain but then encountered the Jumna-Ganges plain at the head of its longer axis. There, in the environs of Pānipat north of Delhi, the passage narrows between the Jumna and the Ghaggar, and further progress eastwards was liable to challenge. The barrier once passed, the Ganges valley lay open towards Bihār and Bengal, though distance and jungle were still substantial obstacles to penetration.