Asia's First Civilizations - India And China

Like Sumer, Egypt, and other early civilizations in the Middle East,
civilizations first developed in East and South Asia in the vicinity of great
river systems. When irrigated by the massive spring floods of the Yellow
River, the rich soil of the North China plain proved a superb basis for what
has been the largest and most enduring civilization in human history.
Civilization first developed in the Indus River valley in present-day Pakistan
in the middle of the 3d millennium B.C., more than a thousand years earlier
than it did in China. In fact, the civilization of the Indus valley, usually
called Harappan after its chief city, rivals Sumer and Egypt as humanity's
oldest. But like Sumer and its successor civilizations in the Middle East,
Harappan civilization was unable to survive natural catastrophes and nomadic
invasions. In contrast to the civilization of the Shang rulers in China around
1500 B.C., Harappa vanished from history. Until the mid-19th century it was
"lost" or forgotten, even by the peoples who lived in the vicinity of its
sand-covered ruins. Important elements of Harappan society were transmitted to
later civilizations in the Indian subcontinent. But unlike the Shang kingdom,
Harappa did not survive to be the core and geographical center from which a
unified and continuous civilization developed like that found in China. The
difference in the fate of these two great civilizations provides one of the
key questions in dealing with the history of civilized societies: What factors
permitted some civilizations to endure for millennia while others rose and
fell within a few centuries?

Between about 1500 and 1000 B.C., as the great cities of the Indus region
crumbled into ruins, nomadic Aryan invaders from central Asia moved into the
fertile Indus plains and pushed into the Ganges River valleys to the east. It
took these unruly, warlike peoples many centuries to build a civilization that
rivaled that of the Harappans. The Aryans concentrated on assaulting Harappan
settlements and different Aryan tribal groups. As peoples who depended
primarily on great herds of cattle to provide their subsistence, they had
little use for the great irrigation works and advanced agricultural technology
of the Indus valley peoples. Though they conserved some Harappan beliefs and
symbols, the Aryan invaders did little to restore or replace the great cities
and engineering systems of the peoples they had supplanted.