INDUS

Four and a half thousand years ago, cities with straight brick streets, covered drains, wells in nearly every house and standard weights rose along the Indus and its neighbouring rivers. The Harappans traded with Mesopotamia, made beads that travelled across Asia, left thousands of carved seals, and then their cities faded, with a script that no one has yet read.

This illustrated history follows the evidence from the first farmers to the transformation of the cities: Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi, homes and food, crafts and kilns, trade, burial, climate and rivers, and the long debates about kings, language and identity. It treats the competing theories fairly and keeps them separate from what excavation, seals, weights and foreign texts can prove.

Each of its seventy chapters ends with The Historian’s Verdict, which grades what is well established, probable, disputed or unknown. Appendices give a timeline, the people in the book, a reader’s guide to the evidence, a list of terms, the Indus signs and the names of Meluhha, and places to visit.

The evidence is laid out. The reader decides.