Ancient Indian Town Planning : A Journey Across Two Urbanisations

Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. 2. Identifying an urban center. 3. Salient features of excavated cities and their comparative study. 4. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

The study of urbanization in Ancient India is categorized into two periods. The first period is the mature Indus civilization, which lasted between 2800 B.C. and 1700 B.C. The second period of early Indian Urban growth is generally supposed to have begun around 600 B.C. This coincides with the beginning of the early historic period in the Ganga Valley.

This book analyzes the primary sources, the available literary and archaeological data (published reports) from various sites of the first and second urbanization and cull out information on town planning and architecture of these ancient cities in order to formulate the essentials/fundamentals of town planning in ancient India as developed over centuries.

In this book, a comparative study of the town planning and town the two distinct periods is presented. The study reveals several elements of planning, commonly used during the first phase of urbanization were also found in the second phase. This analysis leads us to assume that certain elements of planning which were found in the second phase were the legacy, which was carried down from the first phase.

The book has been divided into three parts. The first discusses the historiography on urbanization and planning, while the second carries a comprehensive account of the literary data pertaining to planning. This data though is restricted to the sites of only the second phase. The third part deals with the comparative analysis of the elements of architectural planning from the sites of the first and the second urbanization.