From around 1900 BCE the great Harappan cities were progressively abandoned, with civic maintenance, long-distance trade and standardised craft production breaking down. Scholarship now favours a combination of monsoon weakening, the shifting and drying of rivers such as the Ghaggar-Hakra, and de-urbanisation toward smaller villages rather than a single catastrophe. Writing, weights and the urban order largely disappeared from the subcontinent for over a millennium.
It marks South Asia's first large-scale de-urbanisation and a long hiatus before cities re-emerged in the Gangetic plain.
See it on the timeline →