# Indus Valley Religion · The Canon · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/canon/indus-valley-religion/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en
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The Canon · No. 010
Indus Valley Religion
Harappan religion
c.3300 – c.1300 BCE · Indigenous / Folk · Extinct · Pakistan and northwest India
II. THE FIRST CIVILISATIONS — c.3000 – 1000 BCE
### How many
### Who began it
### What it is for
### What it worships
### What it holds
### What it does
### After death
### Its texts
### Its branches
### Of note
### Its timeline
- c.7000 BCE Mehrgarh; farming and figurines in the region.
- c.2600–1900 BCE Mature Harappan phase; Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, planned cities with grid streets and drains.
- c.1900 BCE Decline, now widely attributed to the drying of the Ghaggar-Hakra river system rather than to invasion.
- 1921–22 CE Rediscovery by Daya Ram Sahni and R. D. Banerji.
- 1931 Marshall proposes the proto-Shiva reading of the Pashupati seal.
- Ongoing The Aryan migration debate. The mainstream position, supported by 2018–2019 ancient-DNA studies (Narasimhan et al., Shinde et al.), is that Steppe-derived ancestry entered South Asia after the Harappan decline. This is politically charged in India and the entry states the evidence rather than the politics.
### Sources
Verified 2026-09-13, against these.
- Narasimhan et al., The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia, Science (2019)
- Shinde et al., An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers, Cell (2019)
- Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script (sign count)
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