Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.46

c8.46

Between them, the two sites of Hastināpura and Ahichchhatrā, imperfect though our knowledge be of both, proclaim the emergence of a comfortable and organized city-life in the Jumna-Ganges basin sometime in the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. To this period belongs the earliest settled occupation known to us in the Delhi region; at the Purāṇā Qila (Indrapat), which may fairly be described as the first Delhi, and Tilpat thirteen miles to the south. In 1955 a list of thirty-four Painted Grey Ware sites was published,89 and the number is constantly increasing. Nothing that we know contradicts the impression that this Ganges Civilization was as widespread as it was prosperous. We may recognize in it the general urban background of the Mahābhārata without too much labouring of detail: a picture of wealthy and jealous dynasties and polities, based upon a limitless and fertile soil and serviceable river-communications. About the middle of the millennium, a knowledge of iron-working spread through the region, doubtless introduced from Persia where iron-smelting had been familiar for five or six centuries. Its arrival meant no overwhelming revolution in the mode of life of the cities of the Indian plains. Some of their pots and pans underwent a technical change about this time; more important, the introduction of coinage, also from Persia, betrays a quickening of the commercial sense. But, once established, the Ganges Civilization endured through the centuries with a changelessness which the modern age has not altogether shaken. Ahichchhatrā may be dead, but Banaras swarms busily and immutably upon a buried past of similar antiquity.