India's longest coast guards twenty-three Indus Valley sites
Western India's Gujarat stretches about 2,340 kilometres of shore—the nation's longest—mostly around Kathiawar, across some 196,024 square kilometres. No other Indian state holds more Indus Valley sites: twenty-three, including Lothal's dry dock, vast Dholavira, and seal-rich Gola Dhoro.
Gujarat is India's fifth-largest state at about 196,024 square kilometres and ninth-most populous with 60.4 million people. Its name traces to Gurjarat or Gurjaradesha, a region spanning parts of today's Rajasthan and Gujarat long before the Mughals, generally linked to the Gurjars. It has the country's fourth-largest state economy and leads all states in exports, supplying about a third of the national total.
Lothal is thought to have been among the world's first seaports, with the earliest known dry dock, while Dholavira ranks among the largest Indus cities and Gola Dhoro produced five rare seals. Between 1000 and 750 BCE the region traded with Egypt, Bahrain and Sumer. Under Chandragupta Maurya, the governor Pushyagupta ruled from Girinagar, modern Junagadh, and dammed the Sudarshan lake; a Junagadh rock records the Saka satrap Rudradaman I around 100 CE, and another inscription of 450 CE describes Skandagupta's governor repairing that lake's flood-damaged embankment.
A first-century Greek merchant's guide, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, is the oldest written record of the coast's maritime trade. Zoroastrians fleeing Iran settled here in the 8th or 10th century, and their descendants became the Parsis. The Chaulukya dynasty ruled from 960 to 1243 from Anhilwara, now Patan, one of India's largest cities with perhaps 100,000 people around 1000. Printed Gujarati cotton has turned up in Egypt in layers from the 10th to 16th centuries and was traded as far as Indonesia. Qutbuddin Aibak failed to conquer the region in 1197, and a Muslim merchant community thrived on the coast for another century before Alauddin Khalji's campaigns of 1297 to 1300.
Source: Gujarat
