Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.80

c7.80

Just so far, it may be claimed that the potential of these upland groups was not unlike that of early Greece, with its small hill-divided and independent states. There, however, the encompassing sea provided a sufficient measure of mutual contact to create, if not unity, at least an inter-territorial sentiment of Greek civilization and nationhood as against the outer 'barbarians' of alien speech and tradition. In the massif of Baluchistan, save at its southernmost end, this vitalizing link was missing. Instead, however, there lay along its flank the great plain of the Indus and its tributary or adjacent rivers, a plain at that time largely jungle-covered but serving, with its broad waterways, in some sense as an inland sea and as a passable means of lateral communication. Those two factors—the terminal ocean and the flanking plain—were together formative in the sudden emergence of the next cultural phase, that of the Indus Civilization, probably a little before 2500 B.C.