Where was the Indus Valley Civilization?

The Indus Valley Civilization — also called the Harappan Civilization — occupied a vast territory in modern-day Pakistan and northwestern India. Its heartland followed the Indus River and its tributaries, as well as the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra river system (possibly the ancient Sarasvati), stretching from the Arabian Sea coast to the foothills of the Himalayas.

The two best-known cities are Harappa, in Pakistan's Punjab province, and Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh province. Both were large urban centers with planned grid-pattern streets, standardized brick construction, and sophisticated drainage systems. But the civilization extended far beyond these two sites — archaeologists have identified over 1,000 settlements across an area of roughly 1.25 million square kilometers, making it the largest of the ancient world's Bronze Age civilizations by area.

Important sites include Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat, India (the latter featuring what may be one of the world's earliest known docks), Rakhigarhi in Haryana (possibly the largest Indus site by area), and Kalibangan in Rajasthan. Coastal sites along the Arabian Sea and trading outposts as far as Mesopotamia attest to the civilization's extensive commercial networks.

The geographic spread of the Indus civilization across such diverse terrain — from coastal lowlands to semi-arid plains to mountain foothills — demonstrates remarkable organizational capacity. The standardization of brick sizes, weights, and urban planning across hundreds of miles suggests a high degree of cultural and possibly political integration, even though the nature of Indus governance remains one of archaeology's great unsolved puzzles.