THE ANCIENT INDIA

 In the fourth century BC, three Greek writers described India as a land of gold and ivory. They wrote that the people lived in palaces with gold roofs, wore clothes made from the silk produced by their own mulberry trees, and rode on elephants.

The Greeks were not the first outsiders to encounter India. The first people to live there were probably Homo erectus, an early human species that evolved in Africa about two million years ago. They may have migrated southward when the climate became drier and more temperate during the Ice Age. By around 30,000 BC they had reached India's central plain and mixed with Homo sapiens who had migrated there from Africa about 100,000 years earlier.

The Indus Valley civilization flourished in what is now Pakistan for about 3,000 years before collapsing around 1900 BC. Some historians believe it was destroyed by invaders from central Asia who had never heard of the Greeks or Rome; others think that it collapsed because its economy was based on agriculture rather than trade and industry.