Uttar Pradesh, known as united Provinces of Agra and Avadh during the British days, has always been the heartland of the great Indo- Ga ngetic plain. Aryavarta, Bharat, Madhyadesh, or Hindostan –whatever its name in different periods of history of our country has equally, and perhaps especially, stood also for this region, today called Uttar Pradesh. Throughout India’s history, therefore nobody has given it purely regional attention. The territorial limits of the region have varied from era, and it has all along been more of a literary and cultural unit and less of a fixed geographical entity.
Ayodhya and Hastinapur, two towns of Uttar Pradesh, provide the local for the stories of the two major epics of India, the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Archaeological research in the past fifteen or twenty years, and recent excavations, indicate that perhaps the key to the knowledge of the missing link between the
Indus civilization and the Vedic age might lie in this region. It is now beginning to be accepted that the historic city of Varanasi may easily be older than Memphis or Nineveh, Babylon or Mohenjo- daro. Uttar Pradesh, or the Madhyadesh of the early Sanskrit period was perhaps the principal center of the pre-Aryan Indian civilization. There is some reason to believe now that the archaeologist will establish evidence of the fact that the Varanasi –Allahabad- Ayodhya –Kannauj area was the real center of the Indus –valley culture, and that the Mohenjo- daro –Harappa area was perhaps a peripheral region of the territory in which that civilization prospered.