Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.124

c7.124

From this explosively successful beginning, from the lightning subjugation of the huge valley and the adjacent coast, the Indus citizens seem to have drawn the penalty of early success: a complacency, even a self-satisfaction, which impeded further effort. Our admittedly incomplete knowledge does not suggest any trend towards new social or aesthetic horizons. The Indus Civilization settled down for perhaps a thousand years to the exploitation of its environment with an equanimity disturbed only by unceasing struggle with its essential but implacable rivers. With the aid of some sort of irrigation-system, which is now deeply buried by post-Indus aggradation but may, in principle, be assumed, it grew food-crops and cotton; it kept considerable herds; and, as a scatter of Indus seals and other trifles in the Mesopotamian cities shows, it traded with its neighbours of the Persian Gulf from the 800 miles of coastline which we must now allot to it. And here it may be that certain cuneiform texts of Old Babylonia help to fill out the picture.