Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.79

c7.79

In the 4th and 3rd millennia, if not before, the sullen borderland where the Iranian plateau drops tumultuously to the Indus plain sheltered a hive of hidden tribal and village societies, appropriately cellular but sharing a common standard of living and technology. In their recondite valleys they were diversely reaching the cultural optimum which their rugged milieu permitted. Their pottery, modified from region to region and age to age, was by 3000 B.C. of good quality, wheel-turned and well-baked, often thin and attractively painted with geometrical or semi-realistic motifs which betrayed both their own individuality and their cultural kinship with the societies of the great plateau behind them. They made stone implements amongst which simple chert blades predominated, and a little copper or bronze was beginning to come their way for use or ornament. Occasional contact between one community and another and with the outside world is manifest, but for the most part the tribes or regions, though not necessarily devoid of a nomadic element, were self-contained on the basis of the local crops which they learned to irrigate by the concentration of flood-water (with or without masonry dams),¹⁸ and the small flocks and herds which the children tended on the neighbouring slopes. Further integration, whether political or cultural, was barred by environment.