Who were they?

The people of the Indus civilisation, who built Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Rakhigarhi: planned brick cities with drains, granaries and baths. We cannot read their writing and do not know what they called themselves. They traded across the Arabian Sea with Sumer, where their land was perhaps called Meluhha.

Mesopotamia is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, in today's Iraq, and Sumer its southern part, home of the world's first cities and writing. Sumerian tablets speak of ships from Meluhha bringing carnelian, timber and ivory; Indus seals and beads have been dug up in Ur. They are a yardstick: the Indus cities were as old and as great.

Herders who spoke an early form of Sanskrit and composed the Rigveda in the land of the seven rivers, the Punjab. They called themselves Arya, 'the noble'. Their hymns name the Punjab's rivers and tribes, and their language is the ancestor of Punjabi.

The first Persian empire, ruled from Persepolis by kings such as Cyrus and Darius, the largest the world had seen. Darius made Gandhara and the Indus land, Hindush, provinces that paid him tribute in gold dust. Taxila grew under them; the word 'Hindu' comes from the Persian name for the Indus.

First Alexander of Macedon, who conquered Persia and crossed the Punjab in 326 BCE. Later the Indo-Greeks, Greek kings from Bactria, ruled the western Punjab for nearly two centuries; Menander had his capital at Sagala, Sialkot. They left coins with Greek gods and kings, and Greek ideas in Gandharan art.

An Indian empire founded by Chandragupta Maurya and ruled from Pataliputra, Patna, that took the Punjab soon after Alexander left. His grandson Ashoka was governor at Taxila, turned to Buddhism and carved edicts on rocks at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra.

Nomad horsemen of the Central Asian steppe, called Sakas in India, who pushed into Gandhara and took Taxila from the Greeks. Their king Azes gave his name to an era used to date inscriptions.

Parthia was the Iranian empire that fought Rome. A branch of it, the Indo-Parthians, ruled Taxila under king Gondophares, remembered in Christian legend as the king the apostle Thomas visited.

A people from the borders of China who built an empire from Central Asia to the Ganges, with its capital at Purushapura, Peshawar. Their greatest king, Kanishka, patronised Buddhism, and Gandharan sculpture, the first images of the Buddha in human form, flourished under them.

The second great Persian empire, rival of Rome and Byzantium, which took the western lands of the Kushans; Sasanian princes, the Kushanshahs, ruled Gandhara for them. The Kidarites, a Hun people, took over the region in the 4th century.

Nomad warriors from Central Asia, related in name if not clearly in blood to the Huns who attacked Rome. Several Hun peoples entered India; the Alchon Huns, under Toramana and Mihirakula, ruled the Punjab from Sakala, Sialkot, around 500. Buddhist writers remembered Mihirakula as a destroyer of monasteries, and Gandhara's Buddhist culture never recovered.

Armies of the Umayyad caliphs, the successors of the Prophet ruling from Damascus, who under Muhammad bin Qasim took Sindh and Multan in 712. For three centuries Arab emirs ruled Multan, a city famous for its sun temple, and the Punjab's first Muslims lived there.

A Hindu dynasty that ruled from Kabul and later from Hund on the Indus, after the Buddhist Turk Shahis. Their kings Jayapala and Anandapala fought Mahmud of Ghazni and lost; with them ended the last Hindu kingdom of the north-west.

Turkic peoples of Central Asia, many brought west as slave soldiers, who became Muslim and founded dynasties. The Ghaznavids of Ghazni, Turks by origin and Persian in culture, made Lahore their second capital; most of the Delhi Sultans who followed were Turks too.

A dynasty from the hills of Ghor that overthrew the Ghaznavids. Muhammad of Ghor beat Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain in 1192, and his slave general Qutbuddin Aibak founded the Delhi Sultanate.

Five dynasties that ruled north India from Delhi: the Mamluks or Slave kings, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis. For them the Punjab was the frontier province, defended at Lahore, Multan and Dipalpur against the Mongols.

Nomads of the steppe whom Genghis Khan united in 1206 and led to conquer most of Asia, the largest land empire in history. Genghis reached the Indus in 1221 chasing a prince of Khwarazm; for eighty years after, Mongol armies raided and sometimes held parts of the Punjab, sacking Lahore in 1241.

A Turko-Mongol conqueror, Tamerlane in English, who built an empire from Samarkand. In 1398 he crossed the Punjab and sacked Delhi, killing tens of thousands. Babur, the first Mughal, was his descendant.

A dynasty founded by Babur, a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, who beat the Lodis at Panipat in 1526. Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan built in Lahore its fort, gardens and mosques. Their rule saw the lives of the Sikh Gurus, and their persecution of Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur shaped Sikh history.

Pashtun tribes of today's Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan. Sher Shah Suri, an Afghan, drove out the Mughals in 1540. Later Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani kingdom, invaded the Punjab nine times between 1748 and 1767, fighting the Marathas and the Sikh misls.

Nadir Shah, a soldier who made himself king of Persia, invaded India in 1739, sacked Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. On his way back through the Punjab, Sikh bands harried his columns and took back captives and loot.

A Hindu power from Maharashtra that by the 1750s dominated India. They reached Lahore and Attock in 1758, but were crushed by Ahmad Shah Abdali at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.

The East India Company, a trading company that became the ruler of most of India, defeated the Kingdom of Lahore in the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1845–46 and 1848–49 and annexed the Punjab. After 1858 the British crown ruled it directly until Partition in 1947.