The Indus Civilization Read online

  Figure 1.4 The best estimate of the course of the Indus River during the Indus Age

  The Sarasvati River

  There is a river in the Great Indian Desert that is mostly dry. Today it is generally called Ghaggar in India and Hakra in Pakistan. In ancient times it was called Sarasvati and appears in the Rgveda in many places. It was a holy river, the “foremost of rivers,” in the Vedas:

  Foremost mother, foremost of rivers, foremost of goddesses, Sarasvati, We are, as ’twer, of no repute and dear Mother, give thou us renown.

  In thee, Sarasvati, divine, all generations have their stars. Be, glad with Sunahotra’s sons:

  O Goddess grant us progeny.14

  Linguistic, archaeological, and historical data show that the Sarasvati of the Vedas is the modern Ghaggar or Hakra. During its early (Plio-Pleistocene?) history, the Sarasvati flowed south out of the Siwalik Hills through Rajasthan. A series of shifts took place in its channel, and the course moved steadily in a clockwise direction, eventually flowing east-southeast rather than south. Stream capture by the emerging Yamuna River compromised its watershed, and the Sarasvati began to dry up. By Mature Harappan times, it terminated in an inland delta near the modern Pakistani city of Fort Derawar.15 There is a large number of Mature Harappan sites there, which seem to have taken advantage of the inland delta as a place that had its soils renewed by flood and was naturally irrigated.

  The Sarasvati seems to have never reached the sea, at least in the third millennium when it was in the vicinity of Fort Derawar. Its early history, when it probably did reach the sea through Kutch, is to the south. In spite of its orientation and the presence of fossil riverbeds near the northern Rohri Hills, from Fort Derawar, for about 150 kilometers in a southwesterly direction, there is nothing that resembles the remains of an ancient river—just sand dunes and old alluvium.16

  Climatic Change

  During the Indus Age, there is no sound evidence for climatic change that had an effect pronounced enough to be picked up by archaeological methods. Marshall proposes that there was more rainfall in the Greater Indus region during the Mature Harappan.17 He notes that the high density of prehistoric villages in Baluchistan can be accounted for only by the existence of a more productive environment. He also notes that elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses are all depicted on Indus stamp seals and are animals that prefer a wet habitat. The lion, a dryland animal, is conspicuous in its absence from Indus imagery. Baked bricks were used for shelters that provided protection from the rains rather than the sun-dried variety, which is susceptible to erosion in climates with heavy rainfall. Moreover, the elaborate civic drainage system at Mohenjo-daro must have been created to handle something more than today’s scanty rainfall. The acceptance of this position seems to be one of the few points of agreement shared by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Marshall.18 Their “higher rainfall hypothesis” was thoroughly critiqued in the 1960s.19

  In 1971 G. Singh published a paper reviewing the findings from an investigation of pollen cores from three salt lakes in Rajasthan: Sambhar, Didwana, and Lunkaransar (see figure 1.2).20 The pollen cores were also associated with several radiocarbon dates, and Singh notes an increase in the salinity of the lakes in the early second millennium B.C. He proposes that this increase in salinity was due to increased aridity and that this climatic change could have been the root cause for the eclipse of the Indus Civilization. There has been additional palynological research at these lakes and others in Rajasthan.21 There are two critiques of this work and its findings, concluding that the salt lakes of Rajasthan do not provide sound evidence for climatic change.22

  The changing salinity of these lakes, which appears to be well documented, need not be attributed to changes in rainfall. The geology of Rajasthan is complex. The three lakes investigated are hypersaline today, but there are also freshwater lakes in this same region (Lakes Pushkar and Ganger; see figure 1.2). This observation leads to the conclusion that under one climatic regime in Rajasthan, there can be both freshwater and hypersaline lakes, calling into question the Singh hypothesis.

  There is some evidence that the salinity of the lakes is controlled by underground drainage, which in turn is controlled by tectonics. When the underground drains are tightly squeezed together, plugged, the only way water can leave the basins is through evaporation, resulting in a buildup of salts. When the subterranean drains are open, there is a regular flow of water, and the salts accumulated during evaporation are carried off in groundwater. Tectonics resulting from continental drift and the Subcontinent’s collision with the rest of Asia control the underground drains. Tectonics may also have an important, even controlling, effect on surface drainage and the capture of the Sarasvati’s waters by the Yamuna, as previously noted.

  Whatever the climate of the Indus Age, the weather was not exactly the same from year to year. But it does not appear that over the long run any period was markedly different from any other or that there were long-term trends of increasing or decreasing precipitation or temperature or dramatic shifts in the weather from season to season. During the whole of the Holocene, virtually all of the Greater Indus region had two principal seasons: one hot and wet, the other cold and dry.

  That is the way it was in, say, 1902 B.C., and that is the way it was in A.D. 1902, when the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, made an important appointment. It was cool but comfortable in Calcutta on February 21, 1902, when the government of India announced the appointment of John Hubert Marshall as the new Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Marshall is the man with whom the discovery of the Indus Age and the Indus Civilization can be most closely associated, and it is to that story that I now turn.

  THE DISCOVERY OF THE INDUS AGE

  Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who became Viceroy of India in 1899, was disgusted with the manner in which his colonial government was handling the cultural heritage of its dominions in India. He developed a plan to change this negligence, a major part of which called for the rejuvenation of the ASI. This meant assigning a new person to the post of Director General, and Curzon wanted someone young and vigorous. He found John Marshall (figure 1.5).

  Figure 1.5 Sir John Marshall

  Marshall was then a twenty-six-year-old student of Greek archaeology from Cambridge University. He had been trained in field archaeology at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans, from whom he had learned the best and most recent methods of excavation.23 Marshall was also a brilliant young scholar, full of promise.

  In 1902 nothing was known of the truly ancient periods of Indian life, and the discovery of the Indus Age is a story of archaeological exploration on a grand scale. Prior to the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the 1920s, the earliest secure date in the history of India and Pakistan was the spring of 326 B.C., when Alexander the Great made his raid into the northwestern provinces of the Subcontinent. There was no hint, even in the earliest Indian texts, that during the Bronze Age there had been a period of urbanization of the Greater Indus Valley and Baluchistan, including the fertile plains of Sindh, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, northern Rajasthan, and western Uttar Pradesh, and extending as far west as the Dasht River on the modern border between Pakistan and Iran.

  THE FIRST VISIT TO AN HARAPPAN SITE24

  The story of discovery actually begins in March or April 1829 when a man known as Charles Masson visited the huge mounds adjacent to the modern village of Harappa, near an abandoned course of the Ravi River in Sahiwal District of the Punjab (figure 1.6).25 Masson traveled in the western borderlands of British India in the 1820s and 1830s as an antiquarian from the state of Kentucky in America, but he was in fact a deserter from the British Army of Bengal. He confused Harappa with the city of Sangala, the capital of King Porus, who Alexander the Great defeated in his last great battle. Masson’s was a good enough guess for the times.

  We do not know what Harappa means. T. G. Aravamuthan has proposed that the name was derived from Mesopotamia, a place called “Arrapha” or “Arrapkha” on the site of the mod
ern town of Kirkuk. This is surely fanciful, probably just as fanciful as the notion that the Harappa of today is the “Hariyupiya” of the Rgveda.26

  In 1831 Lieutenant Alexander Burnes made an historic journey up the Indus River. In the course of the journey, Burnes visited the site of Amri and was the first man to publish it as an archaeological site. While in the Punjab, Burnes went to Harappa, just two years after Masson’s visit. His observations on the site do not vary significantly from those of Masson.

  The early notices of Harappa by Masson and Burnes have historical importance primarily because they came to the attention of Sir Alexander Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey. In 1875 Cunningham reported that at Harappa “in 1853, and again in 1856, I traced the remains of flights of stairs on both the eastern and western faces of the high mound to the northwest, as well as the basement of a large square building.”27 In this report he noted the size of the site (4 kilometers in circuit) and the height of the mounds (12 to 18 meters). He also noted, with considerable regret, that many of the features he had seen earlier had disappeared: “The whole have now been removed to form ballast for the railway. Perhaps the best idea of the extent of the ruined brick mounds of Harapa [sic] may be formed from the fact that they have more than sufficed to furnish brick ballast for about 100 miles of Lahor [sic] and Multan railway.”28 Cunningham acquired a stamp seal from one Major Clark, which today can be identified as a typical Indus type, although Cunningham thought that it was not “Indian” since the bull did not have the hump of the zebu (figure 1.7).

  In 1886 M. Longworth Dames published a second seal from Harappa that had been acquired by an education inspector by the name of J. Harvey. In his one-page note, Dames discusses and illustrates Cunningham’s (or rather Major Clark’s) seal and the new find, as well as some interesting but obscure bibliography.

  J. F. Fleet published a third seal from Harappa in 1912 that had been acquired by Mr. T. A. O’Connor, then the District Superintendent of Police. O’Connor excavated at the site in 1886, and this seal came from his work there. The Fleet paper is important for two reasons: (1) He reveals that all three seals were in the British Museum, where they remain today; and (2) the Cunningham—Clark seal is published accurately as a photograph of the impression and not as Cunningham’s rather crude drawing.

  Figure 1.6 Plan of Harappa (after Meadow 1991)

  Marshall was on home leave in 1906 and examined the three published seals in the British Museum during this visit. Not long after his return to India he had two of his associates in the ASI visit Harappa to report on the scale and condition of the site. In 1920 Marshall instructed his colleague in the ASI, the Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, to conduct an excavation at Harappa. He opened trenches on the mound labeled “A-B” on Cunningham’s plan as well as on the northernmost mound, now labeled “F.” Sahni found more stamp seals in stratigraphic context, and by the end of the season Marshall felt that the results proved that the Harappa seals belonged to a time prior to Alexander the Great, or, in Indian terms, the pre-Mauryan epoch—a real breakthrough in ancient history.

  Figure 1.7 The first seal from Harappa (after Cunningham 1875)

  Sahni spent three consecutive field seasons at Harappa. He helped archaeologists solve the “mystery of the seals.” But neither he nor Marshall understood that there was an entire civilization waiting for them. This insight was to come from the south, in Sindh, at a place called Mohenjo-daro.

  Mohenjo-daro was first visited by Superintendent Archaeologist Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar in 1911— 1912. He thought the site was not old because the bricks looked modern to him—a real miss there.

  Bhandarkar’s successor was Rakal Das Banerji, a gifted and energetic man. During the field season of 1919—1920, one year prior to Sahni’s initial probing of Harappa, Banerji visited Mohenjo-daro. He correctly identified the Buddhist stupa, which dates to the early centuries of the common era (c. A.D. 150—500), on the summit of the site and noted the double-mound layout. Banerji picked up a flint scraper from the surface of Mohenjo-daro, and, concluding that Mohenjo-daro was a very ancient site, he decided to excavate. During this work, two more stamp seals were found in a trench near the stupa below the level of the Buddhist structures.

  By summer of 1924 Marshall knew that there was something important at the two sites, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. He had his staff bring material from the excavations to his headquarters where they could be compared.

  So impressed indeed was I by their novel character that I lost no time in publishing an account of them in the Illustrated London News, my hope being that through the medium of that widely read journal I might succeed in getting some light thrown on their age and character by archaeologists in other countries. . . . In the following issue of the Illustrated London News appeared a letter from Professor Sayce pointing out the close resemblance between these objects from the Indus Valley and certain Sumerian antiquities from southern Mesopotamia, and a week later there appeared in the same journal a longer article from the pens of Messrs. Gadd and Sidney Smith giving a more detailed comparison of the pictographic script and other antiquities found in the two countries . . . there can now no longer be any doubt that the Punjab and Sind . . . [sites are] roughly contemporary with the Sumerian antiquities of Mesopotamia. . . . Simultaneously also the same conclusion was reached by Dr. E. Mackay, director of the American expedition at Kish, who in an unpublished letter to me pointed out the similarity between the ceramic wares found at Mohenjo-daro and at Kish.29

  FURTHER EXCAVATIONS AT MOHENJO-DARO AND HARAPPA

  Marshall and his colleagues knew that they were now onto something very big—an entirely new civilization of the Bronze Age, dating to the time of the Sumerians and Dynastic Egypt. The ASI was spurred to action. Brick robbing had destroyed much of the architecture at Harappa, so their main efforts were in Sindh, where Rao Bahadur Kashinath Narayana Dikshit took charge of the excavations at Mohenjo-daro in 1924—1925 (figure 1.8). He published the first site plan of Mohenjo-daro with his substantial preliminary report.30 We can see from this plan that Dikshit did a great deal during this season, opening up trenches all over Mohenjo-daro. Dikshit’s “Site E” is a trench approximately 450 meters long that yielded a series of striking and important antiquities as well as what he (incorrectly) called a “temple” or “shrine” (figure 1.9). The small finds poured in during this season:

  “The quantitative results of the operations were no less striking than the character of the remains disclosed. The total number of small finds registered during the season was 7,152, far exceeding the number of antiquities recorded during a single season at any other ancient site in India.”31 The next field season (1925—1926) at Mohenjo-daro was a huge undertaking, directed by Marshall himself.

  Indo-Sumerian Civilization: The First Name

  In the preliminary reports on the excavations at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa prior to 1926 the term Indo-Sumerian Civilization was used to describe the remains. It was clear that the peoples of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia were in contact, and that might have shaped ancient Indian civilization. In 1926 Marshall dropped the term in favor of Indus Civilization (never Indus Valley Civilization), noting that the previously used “term (‘Indo-Sumerian’) is likely to imply a closer connection with Sumer than seems now justified.”32

  Mohenjo-daro 1925—1926: The Big Season

  Marshall had proper staff quarters and facilities, including a site museum, built at Mohenjo-daro, and in December 1925 he began a very large-scale excavation at the site. Virtually everyone who was anyone in the ASI was there. Marshall’s financial resources for this season allowed him to hire as many as twelve hundred laborers. By the end of the season significant portions of the Lower Town had been opened, plans of many buildings drawn, and numerous artifacts discovered. For example, they found the so-called priest-king. It was Marshall’s only season of excavation at the site, but he discovered the Great Bath, surely one of the most significant finds in all of
the digging at Indus sites.

  Figure 1.8 Rao Bahadur Kashinath Narayana Dikshit

  Figure 1.9 The first site plan of Mohenjo-daro (after Dikshit 1924—25)

  The Need for New Leadership at Mohenjo-daro

  No matter what the importance, or success, of the Mohenjo-daro program, Sir John Marshall had many other things to do. His senior staff members were busy with their duties as well. It was also clear that the work at Mohenjo-daro needed someone familiar with Mesopotamian archaeology, so on two accounts Marshall needed a new man. He selected Ernest John Henry Mackay (figure 1.10).

  Mackay was a veteran archaeologist when he joined the ASI in 1926. He had been trained in field archaeology by Sir Flinders Petrie in Egypt, where he worked until 1916. Mackay then moved on to excavate tumuli in the Arabian Gulf. He served in the army in Palestine during the First World War and from 1919 to 1922 was Custodian of Antiquities for the government there. In 1922 Mackay became field director of the Field Museum—Oxford University Archaeological Expedition to Mesopotamia, where he excavated Jamdat Nasr and the important Sumerian city of Kish. Mackay demonstrated an interest in the Harappan Civilization in early correspondence with Marshall and in a paper on Indo-Sumerian connections.33 He arrived at Mohenjo-daro in time for the 1926—1927 field season.