Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.62

c8.62

Here we have, then, earlier phases marked by a microlithic industry and in part by a ceramic which is essentially local though perhaps, in its animal-decoration, influenced at long range by the cultures of the Baluchistan frontier; and a later, iron-using phase in which, as the N.B.P. pottery indicates, elements that certainly included a new trend towards urbanization found their way southwards from the developing civic centres of the Jumna-Ganges doab. The absence of Painted Grey Ware and the presence of iron closely followed by N.B.P. pottery shows that this penetration from the northern plains occurred not appreciably earlier than the 5th century B.C.