Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.58

c8.58

Nevertheless, the mosaic does already seem to make something of a pattern, and the pattern is this. There is in central India, at any rate outside Gujarāt, no recognizably urban phase which can be equated with that of the Painted Grey Ware of the plains, i.e. prior to 500 B.C. Future exploration may modify this view; but at present it would appear that along the great central rivers organized civic life began with the introduction of iron shortly after the middle of the 1st millennium B.C., following a phase of Chalcolithic village life in which copper was itself comparatively rare and costly—in other words, trade was rudimentary and the social horizon essentially a local one. If this provisional conclusion is supported, the spread of civilization in India assumes a logical shape: beginning with the fertilization of Middle Eastern ideas along the north-west coast and up the Indus valley about the middle of the 3rd millennium; then spreading southwards, on the one hand, as far as the Narbatā estuary, and overflowing from the upper Punjab on the other hand through the Pānipat-Delhi corridor into the great plains of the Ganges-Jumna doāb in the first quarter of the 1st millennium B.C.; and later, between the 5th and 3rd centuries B.C., percolating eastwards to the Ganges estuary and southwards amongst the Chalcolithic communities of central India. Farther south again, in peninsular India, it is likely enough that city-life was somewhat later still in its inception.