The Indus Valley Civilization (also known as the “Harappans”) lived from 3300-1300 BCE around the Indus Valley River, located in mostly modern day Pakistan (www.khanacademy.org, The Indus River Valley Civilizations). They were a very extensive civilization, having towns and villages from the Narmada River to north east Pakistan. The civilization’s time period was divided into three parts; the Early Harappan Phase from 3300-2700 BCE, the Mature Harappan Phase from 2700-1900 BCE, and the Late Harappan Phase from 1900-1300 BCE (Ibid).
This civilization was one of the “Ancient East”, the other two being Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. During this time period, Egyptians had started building pyramids around the start of the Mature Harappan Phase and the ancient Sumerians had become more civilized around 3000 BCE (Khan academy, Indus River Valley Civilizations). Around the mid-Mature Harappan Phase, Sargon the Great ruled the Akkadian Empire. Close to the Late Harappan Phase was the rule of Hammurabi in the Babylonian Empire. Like the Indus Valley Civilization, these empires and other civilizations started small, close to rivers.
Harappans had two great geographical advantages. Their towns and villages were isolated by the Himalayas in the north, and the highlands in the west in
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British officials were along the Indus Valley River monitoring railway construction in what was then then the Punjab province of British India and what is now Pakistan. Some of the workers found many lodged in the ground. There we thousands of uniformly-placed bricks that were found, but the workers unaware that the bricks before them were ancient artifacts. They had even used the bricks as a road bed for the railway. Many archaeologists thought that they had discovered the ruins of the Maurya Empire that ruled over ancient India from 322-185 BCE