Since the early 1920s, archaeologists have been unearthing astonishing ancient civilization in northwestern India, now called the Indus-Sarasvathi culture. It was enormous, at least seven hundred miles from north to south and eight hundred miles from east to west. If you dropped the entire Egyptian civilization along with all of Sumer (two high cultures which was flourishing at about the same time) into that same geographical area, you still would have had lots of room left over!
Here researchers found the best-planned cities anywhere on the planet. The neatly arranged gridiron pattern of streets and houses revealed organizational and construction skills unparalleled in the ancient world, and not always equaled in the world today. The cities were gargantuan for the time-three miles in diameter, which isn't a bad size for a town even today.
The quality of the drainage system in these towns, which included brick-lined sewers complete with manholes , would not be seen again till Roman engineers set up shop two thousand years later.
The people who lived here had many of the trapping of civilization as we know it today (except maybe TV They had nicely appointed bathrooms where they took bucket showers. They had one of the earliest written languages in the world. They had a sophisticated system of weights and measures that was borrowed by the businessmen of Mesopotamia.
They had seaports, but those excavated docks are eerie to look at these days because the river tributaries they once serviced had gone away. The long-abandoned piers now overlook the bleak Thar Desert.
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