The Indians are commercial and religious. They start the game with Ceremonial Burial and The Alphabet and build war elephants instead of knights. The Indian subcontinent is the home of one of the world's oldest and most influential civilizations. From about 5000 BC, increasing numbers of settlements of subsistence agriculturalists began to appear throughout the Indus Valley; by 2600 BC some of these villages grew into urban centers, forming the basis for the early Harappan civilization, the peer of contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. However, unlike these regions, centralized imperialism, which was attempted in the Mauryan Period (325-185 BC), collapsed. Nonetheless, the ascension of Chandra Gupta Maurya (321-297 BC) is significant because it inaugurated the first Indian empire; the Mauryan dynasty was to rule almost the entire subcontinent except the southern coasts. Using War Elephants to good effect, he defeated Alexander's successor Seleucus, the ruler of the eastern Greek holdings in Iran and India. The result was a treaty by which Seleucus ceded the trans-Indus provinces to Chandra and the latter presented Seleucus with 500 elephants for his own army. A century later, the disintegration of the Mauryan empire gave rise to a number of feuding kingdoms, the Guptas and Pajputs in the north and Chola, Hoysalas and Pandyas in the south, unable to stand alone against the coming Islamic tide. The first Arabic raids in the subcontinent were made along the western coast and in Sind during the 7th and 8th centuries, and there had been Muslim trading communities in India for decades before. The permanent military movement of Muslims into northern India, however, dates from the late 12th century and was carried out by the Turkish dynasty that arose on the ruins of the Abbasid caliphate. Sultan Mahmud, who conducted more than 20 campaigns in India from 1001 to 1027 AD and established a large but short-lived empire, laid the road to conquest. By 1186 AD, the Mahmud realm had been destroyed by the Ghurids, who proceeded to conquer the Rajput kingdoms and establish a Muslim sultanate in Delhi, from which a series of able Turkish overlords ruled the north until 1526 AD.