In 1826, an Englishman, Charles Masson, while visiting a village named Harappa in Western Punjab, now in Pakistan, noted the remarkably high walls and towers of a very old settlement, and felt that the city belonged to the times of Alexander the Great.

In 1872, a famous archaeologist, Sir Alexander Cunningham, after collecting some archaeological objects from Harappa concurred with the opinion of the people of the village that the city was about a thousand years old.

It was in 1924 that another archaeologist, John Marshall, reported that the Harappan civilisation was as old as the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Marshall noted that seals, sealings, written script and works of art found in Harappa were different from those with which scholars were already familiar and which belonged to a much later period.

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But it was Dayaram Sahni who was associated with the excavations at Harappa 1921 onwards, while R.D. Banerjee found the re­mains of Mohenjo-daro.

In Mohenjo-daro, the settlement lay underneath a Buddhist monastery belonging to the Kushan period. And it is known that the deeper an archae­ologist digs, the earlier he moves in the time scale.

Then there was the evidence that people living in these settlements did not know the use of iron, which meant that the settlement existed before the begin­ning of the second millennium BC, when iron came in use.

Further, there emerged evidence suggesting that the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilisation were contemporaneous. This meant that the people of Harappa lived in the early third millennium BC, the same as the people of Mesopotamia.

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The other contemporary civilizations in the world were: the areas around the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea, the Hwang-Ho valley in China, and the Nile valley in Egypt.