How did the Indus civilisation end?

• Historians believe things started to fall apart around 1900BC.
• By 1700BC many Indus cities had been abandoned.

But how did this peaceful, well-organised civilisation collapse in just 200 years?

• Looking at the ruins we can see many changes.

• The cities became overcrowded, with houses built on top of houses.

• Important buildings like the Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro were built over.

• People stopped clearing the drains and they became blocked.

• Some traders even hid their valuables under the floors of their homes.

• What were they scared of? Why did this happen?

• Trade was very important for the Indus civilisation.
• They traded a lot with Mesopotamia, which was an advanced civilisation in the Middle East.
• Mesopotamia's trade networks collapsed and this would have had a big impact on the Indus cities.
• There would have been less work for traders and for manufacturers, who made the things which the traders sold.

• Some historians believed the Indus civilisation was destroyed in a large war.
• Hindu poems called the Rig Veda (from around 1500 BC) describe northern invaders conquering the Indus Valley cities.
• It's more likely that the cities collapsed after natural disasters. Enemies might have moved in afterwards.

• Many historians believe the Indus civilisation collapsed because of changes to the land and climate.

• The Indus river may have flooded and changed its direction.

• The Indus cities were closely linked to the river, so changes in the river flow would have had a terrible effect on them.

• Repeated flooding would have made it hard to grow crops.

• It is believed that at the same time, the Ghagger Hakra River (another river in the area) dried up.

• People were forced to leave many of the cities along its banks, such as Kalibangan and Banawali.

• People would have starved and diseases would have spread.

• The Indus Valley lay undiscovered for thousands of years.

• In 1826, a British traveller in India called Charles Masson came across some strange brick mounds.

• Thirty years later, engineers building a railway found more bricks.

• These bricks were the first evidence of the lost Indus city of Harappa.

• In the 1920s, archaeologists began to dig at the sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

• They had discovered two long-forgotten cities and found the Indus Valley civilisation.

• The Indus Valley people did not leave great structures, like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, but they did help shape the modern world.

Explore the pictures below to find out about the legacy of the Indus Valley culture.