TheIndosphere

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Early Harappan period

Also known as Regionalisation era · Early Indus villages

The Early Harappan period, roughly 3300 to 2600 BCE, is the phase of farming villages and small towns in the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra plains from which the cities of the Indus civilisation grew, with regional cultures such as Hakra, Kot Diji, Amri and Sothi.

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From villages to cities

The cities of the Indus civilisation, which flourished from about 2600 BCE, did not appear from nothing. Archaeologists working from the 1950s found below and around them earlier settlements with distinctive pottery, mud-brick houses and, in some cases, walls. In 1970 M. Rafique Mughal proposed that these represented an Early Harappan phase, ancestral to the cities, and the term has been widely adopted. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and others call the same span the Regionalisation era, stressing that it consisted of several regional traditions that gradually drew together.

Regional cultures

In the Cholistan desert, along the dry course of the Hakra, the archaeologist Mughal recorded dozens of settlements with Hakra ware, dating from about 3800 BCE. In Sindh, Kot Diji, near Khairpur, was a walled settlement with a distinctive pottery decorated with wavy lines and fish-scale patterns, a style found over a wide area. Amri, on the lower Indus, gave its name to another regional culture. In the Ghaggar plain of present-day Haryana and Rajasthan, the Sothi-Siswal pottery is found at sites such as Kalibangan, Banawali and Rakhigarhi in their earliest levels. In the Gomal valley and Bannu basin to the north-west, Rehman Dheri was a planned walled town with a grid of streets.

Features

Several elements of later Harappan culture already appear in this period: the use of mud brick in standard proportions, planned layouts, town walls, beads of carnelian and other stones, copper tools, painted designs such as the pipal leaf and the fish-scale, and signs scratched on pottery that some scholars see as precursors of the Indus script. At Kalibangan, a field beneath the town's early levels preserves furrows in two directions at right angles, interpreted as one of the earliest ploughed fields known, a pattern of mixed cropping still used in the region.

At Harappa, excavations from the 1980s have shown a continuous sequence from a Ravi-phase village around 3300 BCE through a Kot Diji phase to the city.

The transition

Around 2600 BCE many Early Harappan settlements were abandoned, burned or rebuilt, and the uniform material culture of the mature cities, with standard weights, seals, script and brick sizes, spread across the whole region in a relatively short time. Why the transition happened so quickly is debated: explanations include the growth of trade and of elites, the integration of the regional cultures, and changes in the river systems. Some claims of very early dates for Harappan features, such as those reported from Bhirrana in Haryana, remain contested.

Further reading

  • Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. AltaMira Press, 2002
  • Wright, Rita P. The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society. Cambridge University Press, 2010
  • McIntosh, Jane R. The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives. ABC-CLIO, 2008

See also

  • Mehrgarh — Mehrgarh is a Neolithic settlement in Balochistan, ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), occupied from about the seventh millennium BCE, which documents the transition to farming in South Asia and precedes the Indus cities by thousands of years.
  • Indus Valley Civilization — The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan Civilization, was a Bronze Age urban culture that flourished across the Indus river system and beyond between roughly 2600 and 1900 BCE, one of the world's three earliest urban civilizations alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia.
  • Harappa — Harappa is the Indus site in the Punjab, ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), that gave the civilization its alternative name, occupied for well over a thousand years and heavily damaged by nineteenth-century brick robbing.
  • Kalibangan — Kalibangan is an Indus site in Rajasthan on the dry bed of the Ghaggar, notable for a ploughed field of the pre-urban period and for rows of brick-lined pits interpreted as fire altars.
  • Rakhigarhi — Rakhigarhi in Haryana is among the largest Indus sites, and the source of the first ancient genome successfully sequenced from the civilization.
  • Sarasvati river debate — The Sarasvati debate concerns whether the river praised in the Rigveda is the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra system, and what follows for the dating and location of Vedic culture.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.