South Asia in the ancient world (3500 BC – 800 BC). The first cities, the first writing, the first kings who called themselves gods. These articles cover Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and the Bronze Age world that connected them.
At Mohenjo-daro almost every house had a bathing area draining to covered street drains big enough for workmen to enter; only two brick toilets are known.
· 2500 BCPowder from 61 skeletal samples at the Rakhigarhi cemetery gave one usable ancient genome. Cell published it on September 5, 2019, with no Steppe ancestry.
· 2500 BCA 2026 Ministry of Culture post calls Dholavira's ten-sign gypsum inscription the world's oldest-known signboard, at a city ASI excavated under R.S. Bisht.
· 2500 BCThe Indus cities of 2600–1900 BC left no identified palace or royal tomb. J. M. Kenoyer proposes rule by competing elites and calls 'Great Bath' a guess.
· 2500 BCAbout 4,000 Indus texts survive, averaging five signs, with no bilingual text and no agreed language, so no decipherment has been accepted since the 1870s.
· 2500 BCS. R. Rao called the brick basin at Lothal the earliest dock in the world. Lawrence Leshnik measured its sill, channel and stones in 1968 and saw a tank.
· 2400 BC
