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Introduction: There is a formidable record of recent archaeological work on the Indus or Harappan Civilization 97, 15, 50, 54). This wealth of data makes it impossible fully to review ancient India's earliest cities, and perhaps its first state. I therefore focus on two themes. Following a short statement on geography and basic bibliography, I review the beginnings of the village farming tradition on which the Harappan Civilization rests. I then discuss a recent theoretical position on the rise of the ancient cities of the Indus. The Urban Phase of the Indus or Harappan Civilization (Figure 1) stands out from other complex societies of the Bronze Age of Asia in several ways. The first of these has emerged from recent work in Pakistan. The roots of sedentism and the village farming community have now been documented in the seventh millennium BC, at the site of Mehrgarh on the Kachi Plain of the central Indus Valley. The beginnings of food production and the village farming way of life, on which the Indus Civilization rests, were once thought to be relatively recent, implying a short period of gestation leading to the Harappan Civilization (6
351). This gestation period has now been shown to have been very long and deep, but punctuated at its terminus by a very rapid transition to urbanization encompassing something on the order of 100-150 years. Thus the rise of the ancient cities of the Indus presents archaeologists and culture theorists with a challenge to the "uniformitarian" model of cultural change. Rather than emerging from a long, slow period of gradual and constant cultural growth and modification leading to a slowly emerging pattern of urbanization and social complexity, the Harappan Civilization seems to have resulted from a very short period of transformation, a veritable revolution within the urbanization process. Space does not permit a bibliographic review of either the state formation literature (1, 73a) or the Harappan Civilization generally (3, 5, 24, 73). The discovery of the "ancient cities of the Indus," Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, was an exercise in pure archaeological discovery (49, 57). There was no hint in the historical literature of the Indian subcontinent that an historical era had predated the Mauryan Empire of the third century BC. In fact, prior to the 1924 publication of the article announcing the excavations at Mohenjo-daro (41) and the earliest secure date in ancient Indian history was the spring of 326 BC and Alexander the Great's raid into the northwestern borders of the region. There is still no useful historical record to provide archaeologists with significant insights into those aspects of Harappan life and history that are difficult to elucidate from the archaeological record. We do not know what these people called themselves or their cities, towns, and villages. We have no king lists, no internal chronology, no historical sense of the provinces and districts of the civilization. There is no historical record of commerce, production, consumption, or technological skills and processes. And what is perhaps most important, there is no historical record of the internal social organization of these peoples-their "lineages," "clans," "sodalities," or "guilds." We have from history alone no sense of the role of the "state" as opposed to the religious institutionin the operation of Harappan life-a theme central to understanding the historical dynamics of the other ancient civilizations of Asia. As will be seen, this is an area of Harappan scholarship within which there is interesting potential from both a study of the Indus writing system and the historical record of Mesopotamia. At the moment it can only be observed that while the Indus peoples were certainly literate, and therefore had their own historical record, those who study this culture are left with the disadvantage of having to study it within the confines of "protohistory." The lack of a true historical record does not mean that interesting and important insights into the Harappan Civilization are beyond the archaeologist's grasp. Indeed, if we judge by the amount of excavation, study, and writing on this topic, much of new worth is being accomplished.
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