"The problem is that Dholavira was a town of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization, 2,000 years older than Kāmpilya. This fact offered evidence of the continuity of only one urban model from the Indus-Sarasvatī to the Ganges civilizations in the time frame of two millennia."

"The most remarkable structure, alongside the town’s eastern side, is a 217-m-long, 36-m-wide basin. (Its proportions, incidentally, are almost exactly in the ratio of 6:1.) If we consider that its 1.5 to 1.8 m-thick walls were made of millions of carefully adjusted baked bricks, we will have an idea of the energy and resources deployed on its construction. No other Harappan site has so far come up with such a huge water structure (as long as two-and-a-half football fields!). In view of stone anchors and marine shells found in it, S.R. Rao, the excavator, identified it as a tidal dockyard: at high tide, boats sailing up the Gulf of Cambay would have easily pushed on upstream the Bhogavo before berthing at Lothal’s basin."

"India has given to the world the earliest dockyard known to humanity."

"Mughal (1990, 1997) considers the Hakra culture to be earlier than Kot Dijian, now designated as Early Harappan by Mughal and others, and earlier than the Harappan. That may be correct. It is also quite likely that some Hakran settlements, like related Kot Dijian ones, persisted and were contemporary with, or even later than, the Harappan (Shaffer 1992). Only more archaeological fieldwork excavations and radiometric dates may resolve these issues."

"Mughal (1970, 1973) has strongly argued that the Kot Dijian cultural group of this area was the direct predecessor to the Indus Valley civilization, based on stratigraphy and material artifact analysis. At some sites, Kot Dijian culture is chronologically earlier than the Indus Valley/Harappan culture sites; other Kot Dijian sites are contemporary with those of the Indus Valley/Harappan culture, while other Kot Dijian sites are later than those of the Indus Valley/Harappan culture."

"The site of Shortughai has never been considered as anything other than a trading post or a Harappan colony and not the result of a migratory current from India to Central Asia."

"Shortugai in Bactria, “a settlement completely Harappan in character on a tributary of the Amu Darya (…) on the foot of the ore-rich Badakshan range (…) with lapis lazuli, gold, silver, copper and lead ores. Not one of the standard characteristics of the Harappan cultural complex is missing from it.”"

"The Indo-Aryan invasion doesn’t get farther than Pirak in Baluchistan."

"If Pirak… represents the start of Indian culture, there is in the present state of Indian archaeology no ‘post-Pirak’ except at Pirak itself, which lasted till the 7th century BC: the site remained, along with a few very nearby ones, isolated."

"The evidence from Pirak is, till now, the best from any part of the whole Indus system during this period."

"The processes [at Pirak] are too complex to be attributed to the arrival of invaders who at the same time would have had to have introduced rice from the Ganges, sorghum from the Arabian Gulf, and camels and horses from Central Asia."

"[None of the transformations] can be explained in the context of invasions of semi-nomadic peoples coming from the [Central Asian] steppes. … How could this series of transformations be seriously attributed to Indo-Aryan invaders? … Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research … enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups."

"In the case of Pirak, however, it must be admitted that the cultural innovations do not appear to be clearly Indo-European. Perhaps there was only indirect contact via other ethnic groups in Seistan."

"Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus."

"The Indus civilization (…) is doubly remarkable: first, because it was the only complex society of either Antiquity or the modern world, that operated without social stratification and the state; and, second, in what must be a related phenomenon, because it was an agrarian society in which the villages were not oppressed by the towns (…) In sum, Indus Civilization is by far the most egalitarian of any of the pristine Old or New World civilizations, and that by a long way and by any measure."

"In 1922 archaeologists started to turn up evidence of the Indus civilization. Mohenjodaro and Harappa have had most of the publicity, but new discoveries are still being made all the time.... Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda , who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization."

"Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology, subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people. For many years, the ‘invasions’ or ‘migrations’ of these Indo-Aryan-speaking Vedic/Aryan tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the Ganga-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an uncritical reading of Vedic texts. Current evidence does not support a pre- or proto-historic Indo-Aryan invasion of southern Asia. Instead, there was an overlap between Late Harappan and post-Harappan communities, with no biological evidence for major new populations."

"The ethos of the ancient Indian Civilization is shaped during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods."

"There appear to be many continuities [between the Indus and later historical cultures]. Agricultural and pastoral subsistence strategies continue, pottery manufacture does not change radically, many ornaments and luxury items continue to be produced using the same technology and styles . . . There is really no Dark Age isolating the protohistoric period from the historic period."

"The great rivers, for all their beneficence, were at the same time treacherous and formidable enemies. If not constrained and directed by wise, largescale and sustained effort, they were destroyers no less than fertilizers."

"A continuous series of cultural developments links the so-called two major phases of urbanization in South Asia . . . The essential of Harappan identity persisted."

"It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization."

"The Indus civilization has challenged scholars’ understanding since its discovery some eighty years ago, and in recent years the application of systematic and problem-orientated research, coupled with much new and unexpected data, has overturned many previous interpretations."

"There is one curious fact in regard to the beginnings of Indian history. For the Indus Valley culture, we have abundant archaeological data, but no written evidence. For the early Vedic culture we have abundant written evidence but no archaeological data."

"Hitherto it has commonly been supposed that the pre-Aryan peoples of India were... black skinned, flat nosed barbarians. . . . Never for a moment was it imagined that five thousand years ago, before the Aryans were heard of, Panjab and Sind . . . were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own . . . even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. . . . there is nothing that we know of in prehis- toric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in western Asia to compare with the well- built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjodara. . . . nothing that we know of in other countries at this period bears any resemblance, in point of style, to the miniature faience models . . . which . . . are distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that has rarely been surpassed in glyptic art."

"These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro."

"Taken as a whole, [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism."

"Indians have always been justly proud of their age-old civilization and believing that this civilization was as ancient as any in Asia, they have long been hoping that archaeology would discover definite monumental evidence to justify their belief. This hope has now been fulfilled."