By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist
No conversation about Harappans and Aryans is now complete without discussing the Oxus civilisation. Cities of the Oxus civilisation, in what is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, traded with cities of the Harappan civilisation to their south, until Harappan cities ceased to exist by 1900 BCE. They also had close ties with pastoralists in the north, in what is now South Russia and Kazakhstan, who had successfully domesticated horses and harnessed them to chariots around 2000 BCE. These horse-domesticating Steppe herdsmen eventually moved south, lived in Oxus basin for a few generations, and eventually split into two groups, the Vedic Indians and the Avestan Iranians, collectively known as the Arya! But we know next to nothing about Oxus civilisation as it was discovered only in the 1970s by Russians and the papers were translated and published fully only in the past 20 years.
