Handbook on Urban History of Early India

This handbook addresses issues around urban growth in early India. It provides theoretical and empirical insights from the perspective of the different regions of the subcontinent using various sources. The book chapters discuss how early urban forms evolved, transformed, and survived on the subcontinent, beginning with the third millennium BCE. This volume also looks at how urban space gradually emerged in borderland areas of the subcontinent and hill areas, which throw up relevant issues and questions of how we need to review elements of what we define as 'urban'. It includes chapters on both the early historic and early medieval periods. The book provides a comprehensive view of early India's urban history, insights into metallic money and cities, the origin of cities and waterways, geospatial and remote sensing techniques to reflect on the emergence of historic settlements, and so on. The contributors have presented the dialectical relationship between the city and the country in their chapters. The book covers themes such as the Indus Valley civilization, the rise of cities in the Ganges valley, the cultural setting of the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Kushan cities, the dynamic of the growth of cities in the ancient Tamilakam, theories of urbanization, archaeological and epigraphic material reflecting on the first cities in different regions of the subcontinent, etc. It is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and scholars in history, architecture, and archaeology, as well as scholars working on Indic studies.