The Indus Civilization Page 2
There is evidence of variation in the frequency and intensity of the forms of communication and interaction throughout the Indus Age. But communication never dropped to nil, or even close to it. The region was always alive—sometimes it was more alive than others—with activity linking the diverse peoples there.
While the forms of communication and interaction are not known in detail, or even with much certainty, we have some hints of the range of activities that took place. This knowledge comes from the study of the archaeology, the historical and ethnographic records, and a reading of the cultural geography. Based on the observation that the early history of the Indus Age is one of success and growth, it is reasonable to believe that balanced, symbiotic relationships favorable to this end were in place. Anthropologists have used the term exchange systems to describe relationships that serve to share risk so that if disaster befalls one people in one place, their neighbors can be called on to assist them. Such relationships enhance survivability. They also imply interaction, not only in the time of need, but over protracted periods of time. The mechanism here is exchange, for which the regular and predictable interchange of “gifts” is used to sustain a relationship that is in part used to mollify the hardship of periodic but unpredictable events—flood, crop failure, pestilence, warfare, and other disasters.
Seasonality in the lives of farmers and herders is based in part on geography and the fact that adjacent regions can be complementary. The symbiosis of the highlands of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier with the Indus lowlands is one of the timeless facts of life within the Greater Indus region. Migration of pastoralists from the mountains in the winter, and back again for the summer, is one of those constant, enduring patterns of movement and interaction that were present during the Indus Age and beyond, into modern times. These nomads are frequently also craftspeople, traders, tinkers, transporters, bards, and messengers. They bring news from afar and bring along their children—potential marriage partners for the people with whom they stay in the course of their yearly round.
It is clear that the peoples of the Indus Age had a heavy dependence on animals, especially cattle and to a lesser extent sheep and goats. In this sense they were pastoralists, whether settled or nomadic. Seasonal nomadism must have been common. Some individuals may have been settled for a part of their lives and nomadic at other times. This leads unmistakably to the proposition that the constant search for pastureland may well have been one of the most important of the great engines driving the interaction and communication within the Greater Indus region. But it should also be clear that not all of the mobile craftspeople, traders, tinkers, transporters, bards, and messengers were involved in the pastoral component of the subsistence economy. Some must have been sustained in other ways, outside of this subsistence regime. The nature of their integration into their own society and the sociocultural system of those around them, however, led to movement, travel, and the spread of products and ideas.
It is in the nature of people to contemplate what I call the “thrill of travel”: crossing a river just because it is there; visiting a “foreign” place just because it sounds interesting and the journey is challenging; going to an island that can be seen only from a mountaintop just because no one has ever done it. This is very human stuff and another in the range of human attitudes and activities that shapes the distribution of artifacts across a landscape such as the Greater Indus region. It implies the movement of people and their possessions as well as their skills.
Another related activity has to do with bards and people who carry news. These are “professional” wanderers who tell tales, keep an oral folk literature alive, and carry to new localities information of happenings in the places they have visited. They tell of famines and plagues; war and peace; marriages and deaths; the comings and goings of the great, near great, and even those who only presume such status.
We have little grasp of the details of the social structure of the peoples of the Indus Age; this is another challenge to those of us who deal with these ancient peoples. But, with the dawn of the Indus Civilization, we begin to have a sense of social hierarchy and craft and career specialists. From the disparate archaeological remains dated to a single stage or phase of the history of the Indus Age, as well as from some considerations of physical anthropology, we also get a sense that there was considerable ethnic and social diversity throughout this period.
This serious gap in our knowledge is, in reality, simply another of the major challenges for future archaeologists. But we can say that the life of families everywhere does imply the movement of people. Bringing new men or women into families after marriage is one source of mobility. Near the end of their productive lives, persons of the elder generation may take up residence with the young. Children are often shared among dispersed segments of a family or lineage. There are also the shorter-term gatherings for marriages, births, rights of passage, and “holidays.” We clearly do not know the social forms of the peoples of the Indus Age and therefore cannot talk about patrilocal postmarriage residence, or the form of their lineages and/or clans, or even whether they had them. But what we can say is that the social life of humans everywhere in every age implies some degree of movement of people and their possessions. This distribution of artifacts also implies the movement of skilled persons, who, for short or long periods, took up residence in varying locations. Thus, when we look at the geographical spread of artifacts, we see that it is not all trade and commerce, transportation specialists, and pastoral nomads moving in their search for pastureland. Some of it is the ordinary stuff of family business: acquiring a mate, caring for the elderly, sharing happy or socially important occasions with relatives and friends.
These and related activities are the forces of diffusion and migration, whether direct or indirect. The word diffusion is not used much in this book, but the study of the Indus Age is certainly concerned with the distribution of artifacts. Since we know that the artifacts themselves did not move in some self-propelled way across the Greater Indus region, we must surmise that human mechanisms were involved. While we have little grasp of the specifics of the ancient world in terms of which of these activities or customs was responsible for this or that distributional pattern, we do have an understanding of the range of mechanisms used.
The flip side to this interaction and movement of peoples and things is that we also see cultural and biological diversity among the peoples both today and, in a less precise way, in deep antiquity. The interaction has not now, or ever, led to cultural and biological homogenization. Geography, distance, the forces of human parochialism, strong senses of group identity, and the need for protection and solidarity have combined to yield a diversity of peoples and cultures.
Sometimes, perhaps most often, this diversity is expressed in hierarchies of affiliation, sometimes nested. In Pakistan, for example, the national identity combines with regional affiliations of peoples: Sindhis, Punjabis, Baluchis, Pathans, and the like. Within each of these regional sociocultural populations there are divisions by subregion, occupation, lineage,and so forth, down to the family and individual.
The forces of intercommunication, diffusion, homogenization, and regional unity are in constant, dynamic tension with local forces of parochialism and the need for group identity and solidarity. All of these forces are real and in some ways contradictory. Over the long durée of the Indus Age, they led to a kind of “unity of diversity” from the Mediterranean to the Indus.5 They also make telling the story of the Indus Age a difficult task, as one tries to seek and explain the roles of autochthonous and interregional culture processes.
There are two large issues addressed in this book that are influenced by the point of view just expressed: the nature of the food-producing revolution and the rise of urbanization.
A Food-Producing Subsistence System Very Much at Home in the Subcontinent
It is virtual archaeological dogma that the domestication of wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and cattle took place in the Nea
r East in the early millennia of the Holocene, 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. There are new perspectives on this important transition in human history, and the borderlands of the Subcontinent may have played a pivotal role in this transformation, giving the region a more central place in human history. More is said of this complex matter in chapter 2.
The Indus Civilization Arose and Flourished by Processes of Change That Are Essentially Local, and Yet It Participated in a Much Larger World of Trade, Commerce, and Culture History
On the eve of its discovery the Indus Civilization was called the “Indo-Sumerian Civilization,” by Sir John Marshall, so close was the historical relation thought to be.6 This was a suggestion that was based mostly on the presence of Indus-style seals in Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran, as well as a few other artifacts. It was soon seen to be a mistaken notion and dropped, the individual character of the Indus remains having come through. It is now clear that the process of urbanization in ancient India was an autochthonous one, recalling that the Greater Indus region was never isolated from the larger region to the west, or for that matter to the north, south, and east as well. The ancient cities of the Indus did not arise in an historical vacuum—but then, neither did the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, but that is another story. This part of the Indus Age story is told in chapter 3.
We know that for virtually all of the second half of the third millennium (2500—2000 B.C.) at least some of the peoples of the Indus Civilization were engaged in trade, exchange, and what appears to have been quite intense, regular intercourse with peoples in the Arabian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and the Iranian plateau. This interaction moved significant amounts of material culture all over the mega-region, and there was a certain amount of ideological iconography involved as well. But still, the Indus, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and Central Asia remained distinctive cultural entities. This part of the story is outlined in chapter 12.
The Indus Civilization Is an Example of Archaic Sociocultural Complexity, But Without the State
There is no real consensus among archaeologists on the definition of the archaic state, although there seems to be some agreement on a few points. The ancient state was a form of political organization. It developed among civilizations with large-scale economies and considerable specialization in craft and career tracks. The administration of the state was a prominent feature of this form of political organization, and some portion of the career specialists formed the bureaucracy of the state. The craft and career specialists, and the other peoples of their society, were arranged in a hierarchy of classes. The state monopolized the use of force as a means of social control and as an agency to protect, if not expand, the sovereignty of the people it encompassed. The state form of organization placed the management of diplomacy and warfare within the domain of a strong, forceful leader. States focused power on individual leaders, usually called kings.
The Indus Civilization is something of a faceless sociocultural system. Individuals, even prominent ones, do not readily emerge from the archaeological record, as they do in Mesopotamia and Dynastic Egypt, for example. There are no clear signs of kingship in the form of sculpture or palaces. There is no evidence for a state bureaucracy or the other trappings of “stateness.” Nor is there evidence for a state religion in the form of large temples or other monumental public works.
It is clear that the Indus Civilization is an example of archaic sociocultural complexity, just as complex in its own way as the archaic civilizations of Mesopotamia and Dynastic Egypt or the Maya and Inca of the New World. But the Indus Civilization was not organized as a state, if by state we adhere to the criteria previously outlined.
It is its marked deviance from the norm of ancient sociocultural complexity that makes the Indus Civilization so fascinating, at least to me. To my knowledge, there is, for example, no close parallel to it in either the archaeological or ethnographic record. In that sense, the Indus Civilization comes across as a kind of counterintuitive civilization, possibly “strange” because there are no existing examples that we can point to as comparative.
The sociocultural form that the Indus polity took is not known, and more clearly characterizing it is one of the most important challenges to archaeologists interested in South Asia and archaic sociocultural complexity.
Whatever the reason(s) for the emergence of the Indus Civilization, its peoples were deeply rooted in the South Asian landscape. They were masters of food production and the extraction of raw materials from a bountiful environment.
GEOGRAPHY OF THE INDUS AGE
In this section, the cultural/natural regions of the Indus Civilization, called Domains, are presented, along with the nature and history of the two principal rivers: the Indus and Sarasvati. Climatic change is discussed, and, finally, a short review of Indus Civilization settlement patterns and subsistence regimes is offered.
Geography
The Indus Civilization covered an area of approximately one million square kilometers. The westernmost Indus site is Sutkagen-dor, near the modern border separating Pakistan and Iran. The principal regions are Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier, the mountainous eastern end of the Iranian plateau. The plains of the Indus Valley, the Pakistani and Indian Punjabs, Haryana and Ganga-Yamuna Doab are included. The northern and western tracks of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan were occupied by the Indus peoples, as were the sandy North Gujarat plain, Kutch, and the hilly savanna of Saurashtra.
Rainfall for the western domains came from the winter westerlies, which brought snow to the mountains of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier and rain to the Punjab and northwestern India. The summer rain of the southwest monsoon brought moisture to Saurashtra, North Gujarat, the Punjab, and northwestern India, and sometimes even to the western domains.
Domains
Sometime ago I proposed a scheme of subregions that could be used in the study of the Indus Civilization.7 These turned out to be quite like those proposed by J. P. Joshi.8 I developed this scheme in an attempt to break up the Indus “monolith” and challenge the “sameness” principle that had been invoked by Wheeler and Piggott. This scheme has been further developed.9 I have come to call these subregions Domains (figure 1.3).
This approach to defining the Domains of the Mature Harappan was based on geography and Mature Harappan settlement patterns. G. Smith has examined them from the perspective of locational geography.10 He undertook two statistical analyses of Mature Harappan sites larger than 10 hectares. The first analysis used a gravity model; the second was a cluster analysis. Both of these analyses produced subregional geographical units that closely match the Domains I have proposed, providing an independent confirmation that there is something important in the study of Mature Harappan Domains as such.11 Smith thinks of the units that his analyses produced as “Harappan polities,” which just might be the case.
The Indus River
The most ancient name of the greatest of rivers in Pakistan is “Sindhu.” In the Rgveda, this may mean simply “stream,” but in most cases it clearly refers to the Indus itself.
Flashing and whitely gleaming in her mightiness she moves along her ample volumes through the realms. Most active of the active Sindhu unrestrained, like a dappled mare, beautiful, fair to see.12
Figure 1.3 Domains of the Indus Civilization
Within the plains of modern Sindh, the Indus River is a fully mature stream. It has a reputation for being a powerful, violent, unpredictable river. But Sindh would be a desert without the Indus. Table 1.1 lists statistics on the characteristics of the Indus.
Table 1.1 Figures on the flow of the Indus River
Total length 2900 km
Length in Sindh, with meanders Approximately 1000 km
Discharge, maximum 885,165 cu ft/second
Discharge, minimum 17,568 cu ft/second
Maximum high water at Sukkur +5.40 m
Total silt per year carried past Sukkur (average for 29 years) 9,937,000,000 cu ft
Average silt carried 1,000,000 tons/d
ay
Maximum velocity in Sindh 3.2 m/s
The Indus floods during the summer because of the Himalayan snow melt—not so much because of rain. The upper course of the river is deep in the mountains, and it is often blocked by ice dams and landslides. The release of these impounded waters is the source of the most devastating of the Indus floods. The alluvium from the Indus is very fertile and is renewed each year. Sindh is, therefore, a proverbial “green machine,” and famine is unknown there.
An outline of the channel history of the Indus River is available from the works of several scholars.13 By identifying paleochannels, studying their shape, direction, and preservation, it has been possible to suggest that the earliest course seen today flowed through the Kachi Plain, well to the west of the modern course. The second course, which may be of the third millennium B.C., flowed just to the west (not east) of Mohenjo-daro (figure 1.4). The Indus was captured by a gap in the Rohri Hills, a limestone formation rich in chert, sometime after the voyage down the river of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. and prior to the thirteenth century A.D.