The story of Ancient India, the vast land that stretches from the Himalayas in the North to the Oceans far south, can be traced back to the 8th millennium BCE.
Later, in the mid-3000s, the first cities of the great Indus or Harappan Civilization rose around the basin of the Indus river system, a little earlier than the Ancient Egyptians around their Nile, or the Sumerians between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Tales of gods and peoples from this period were written for the first time, from older oral traditions, in the Sanskrit of Vedas in the mid-1500s, when Babylon was at its height, and the culture of Mycenaean Greeks would flower and collapse. In the 1st millennium BCE Indian civilization shifted south to the Ganges, where the great literature of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana recorded the glory and the power of the gods, and the worship of a people whose vibrant culture is a reflection of its lands and the migrations of its ancestors.
