Harappa

At www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2012/is-the-harappan-civili… ….. is the Indus Civilisation much older than generally thought. It must be as it was so near the early farming zone that stretched across northern Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, on the one hand, and the Iranian coastal plain and the Indus heartland on the other. A team effort by archaeologists in Pakistan and India are now looking at the evidence preserved in the ground – and when published some textbooks on the region will have to be re-written. They have found the cultural remains of pre-early Harappans that go back into the 7th millennium BC. People were thus spreading outwards, in the east as well as the west, of the Fertile Crescent. At the same time, the more substantial evidence of the Indus civilisation, buildings and towns, seem to align directly with the timeline in Sumeria – which begins with the Ubaid civilisation. Whilst the Sumerian language is unrelated to the speech of people around them, the Elamites, inhabiting mostly coastal Iran, appear to have spoken a language that was akin to Dravidian. Elam might be regarded as a sort of outer bastion of Baluchistan, and Baluchistan as the progenitor of the Indus civilisation.