The first recorded note of the discovery of Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was made in an 1842 book by James Lewis. Lewis was a British East India Company soldier who deserted the army and while travelling through the Punjab province in British India saw the ruins of the ancient civilization at a small town called Harappa. By 1872, brick robbing had destroyed the upper layer of the site. These hard well-burnt bricks were primarily used to build a railway bed being constructed by the British. Though finds at Harappa were reported, it was not until 1920 that proper excavations began at Harappa under John Marshall, the then director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). These excavations resulted in the discovery of IVC. Due to the common archaeological convention of naming a civilization after its first find-spot, IVC is also known as the Harappan Civilization.
Excavation of the sites of the Indus Valley Civilization is an on-going process and by 1999, 1,056 cities and settlementshad been found. IVC flourished in the basins of two major rivers: Indus River, which remains one of longest in Asia; and Ghaggar-Hakra River, which is identified by many scholars as the dried up form of what was once the Sarasvati River. IVC encompassed most of Pakistan, a significant part of India and parts of Afghanistan. With an area around the size of Western Europe, it is the largest of the four ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. The era in which IVC existed is not known yet. According to a May 2016 study published in the prestigious Nature journal, experts now believe that the Harappan Civilization is 8,000 years old – 2,500 years older than previously thought. This would make IVC older than the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations.
