Comprehensive survey of the civilization on the banks of Saraswati River.

Contributed research papers.

This book discusses climate and dating of the Indus Valley civilization and Sir Mortimer Wheeler summarizes other contributions to the study.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

The Lost Saraswati Civilization is an edited work of Deo Prakash Sharma and madhuri Sharma. Till today around 2668 Harappan and its associated sites have been reported in north-West south Asia in which 1100 sites are located on dry banks of river Saraswati and its tributaries. During 3rd millennium B.C. Hindon was a tributary of river Saraswati and around 250 Harappan sites have been reported on the banks of river Hindon, mandi, Hulas, Alamgirpur, Sanuoli Toppal are important Harappan sites located on the bank of river Hindon which is now a tributary of yamuna. We have excavated 208 Harappan sites. Ganweriwala is the largest (350 hectares) Harappan site located on dry bank of Saraswati (or Hakra) in Cholistan (Pakistan) . Few excabvated harappan sites in Saraswati region are Desalpur, Dholavira, kalibangan, Bhirrana, Barror, Dhalewan, Banawali, Kunal and Rakhigarhi. Saraswati or Hakra or Ghaggar was a holy river. From 6000 B.C. to 1800 B.C. Saraswati flowed from south of Siwalik through Himachal, Haryana, Punjab, Northern Rajasthan and Finally was joining Desalpur in Arabian sea. Due to tectonic disturbance in the Siwalik, Saraswati river course moved streadily in the clockwise direction eventually flowing eastsouth east rather than south. The stream captured by the emerging Yamuna river compromised its water shed and river Saraswati began to dry up around 1800 B.C. Archeologists observed after analyzing literature and remote sensing images that river Saraswati flowed through Rajasthan desert. This lost river Saraswati was 1500 km. Long and between 3 to 12 km. Wide. This volume includes 27 papers.

This book offers a critical synthesis of the archaeology of South Asia from the Neolithic period (c.6500 BCE), when domestication began, to the spread of Buddhism accompanying the Mauryan Emperor Asoka's reign (third century BCE). The authors examine the growth and character of the Indus civilisation, with its town planning, sophisticated drainage systems, vast cities and international trade. They also consider the strong cultural links between the Indus civilisation and the second, later period of South Asian urbanism which began in the first millennium BCE and developed through the early first millennium CE. In addition to examining the evidence for emerging urban complexity, this book gives equal weight to interactions between rural and urban communities across South Asia and considers the critical roles played by rural areas in social and economic development. The authors explore how narratives of continuity and transformation have been formulated in analyses of South Asia's Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological record.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.