Sedentary agriculture, including cotton cultivation and the…

3069 BCE to 2926 BCE

Sedentary agriculture, including cotton cultivation and the beginnings of urban life and civilization, develop about 3000 at Harappa in the Indus Valley (now in Pakistan).

The term Indus script (also Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization, in use during the Mature Harappan period, between the twenty-sixth and twentieth centuries BCE.

In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it remains undeciphered, and even its interpretation as writing has been contested.

The underlying language is unknown, and the lack of a bilingual inscription makes the decipherment unlikely pending significant new finds.

The vast majority of the inscriptions come from small personal seal stones.

Strings of Indus signs are most commonly found on flat, rectangular stamp seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials including tools, miniature tablets, copper plates, and pottery.

The earliest examples of the Indus script date from around 3000 BCE.

By this time, the Saraswati River, the principal watercourse of the seven great rivers celebrated in the Vedas, has gone permanently dry.

The Nadistuti hymn in the Rigveda (10.75) mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, and later Vedic texts like Tandya and Jaiminiya Brahmanas as well as the Mahabharata mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert.

The goddess Sarasvati was originally a personification of this river, but later developed an independent identity and meaning.

Most scholars agree that at least some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra River, while the Helmand is often quoted as the locus of the early Rigvedic river.

Whether such a transfer of the name has taken place, either from the Helmand to the Ghaggar-Hakra, or conversely from the Ghaggar-Hakra to the Helmand, is a matter of dispute.

Both nineteenth and twentieth century fieldwork (Marc Aurel Stein) and recent satellite imagery suggest that the Ghaggar-Hakra river in the undetermined past had the Sutlej and the Yamuna as its tributaries.

Geological changes diverted the Sutlej towards the Indus and the Yamuna towards the Ganga, and the formerly great river (the Rann of Kutch is likely the remains of its delta) did not have enough water to reach the sea anymore and dried up in the Thar Desert.

Geologists estimate this change to have occurred between 5000 and 3000 BCE, that is, before the Mature Harappan period.

It is sometimes proposed that the Sarasvati of the early Rigveda corresponds to the Ghaggar-Hakra before these changes took place (the "Old Ghaggar"), and that the late Vedic end Epic Sarasvati disappeared in the desert to the Ghaggar-Hakra following the diversion of Sutlej and Yamuna.

However, the fourth millennium date of the event far predates even high estimates of the age of the Rigveda.