Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.107

c8.107

In summary terms, the contrast between the first urbanization of the northern (Gangetic) plains and that of the Deccan is this. In the north, urbanization began in the developed Bronze Age, during the earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C.; and when, about 500 B.C., iron and the parallel innovations of coinage and a new ceramic technique appeared upon the northern scene, they were absorbed into the existing social system without any drastic change of personality. In the Deccan, on the other hand, the Iron Age descended from the north as a sudden imposition upon a Chalcolithic (largely microlithic) local tradition of altogether lower grade. There, the Iron Age began in the full sense as a revolution.