Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.120

c7.120

But it stands equally to reason that an idea can only take root in prepared and congenial soil. By the middle of the 3rd millennium, something very important was happening in the Indus valley, and happening probably at great speed. Then or rather earlier, certain of the little communities in the Baluch foothills were emboldened to experiment. Who the first leaders were who led their people, however hesitantly, down to the wide and jungle-ridden plain we shall never know, nor why they ventured; but they were bold men, pioneers in the fullest sense, no mere ejects from the highland zone. Some, perhaps many of them, led forlorn hopes and perished. Imperfect though our knowledge be, we know enough to recognize here and there on the Indus plain the débris of villages or small towns which antedate the full-blown civilization and were superseded by it. For example, at Kot Diji, fifteen miles south of Khairpur and twenty-five miles east of Mohenjo-daro, excavation in 1955-7 revealed a town of pre-Indus date with a strongly walled citadel armed with rectangular towers of stone and mud-brick. About 2400 B.C. (the central figure, as Dr. F. A. Khan tells me, of a C 14 dating by the University of Pennsylvania of some of the latest pre-Indus material) this town was covered with a burnt deposit upon which was built an unfortified settlement of Indus Civilization type. The pottery of the pre-Indus town was partially comparable with that found under the Harappā fortifications in 1946, but already included, by borrowing or anticipation, some Harappān elements.⁵³