The Indus Civilization Read online

  Figure 1.10 Ernest John Henry Mackay (from a photograph in the Field Museum, Chicago)

  Mohenjo-daro 1926—1931: The Final Five Large Seasons of Work

  Mackay jumped right into the work and began excavating in L Area, south of the stupa on the Mound of the Great Bath. He uncovered the so-called Assembly Hall and other architectural remains that are not well understood, even today. He also found three pieces of sculpture: the Seated Man (L-950); a reasonably well preserved bust called the Stern Man (L-898); and a very poor, abraded head, possibly of a woman, called the Lady of L Area (L-127).

  Mackay was partnered with Daya Ram Sahni, who went to work on the lower city and succeeded in opening a total area of approximately 140 by 120 meters, most in HR Area, but including part of the adjacent VS Area. Sahni made good progress in linking roads and lanes between these parts of the city. It was during this season that the beautiful bronze “dancing girl” was found as well as one of the exquisite jewelry hoards in HR Area.

  The remaining four major seasons of work during the early period of excavation at Mohenjo-daro were completely in Mackay’s charge. His labor force was 600 men, about one-half that of the 1925—1926 season. They were mostly Sindhis from surrounding villages, who returned home following their work at the site. But some Brahuis from Kalat joined and were well regarded by Mackay for their strength and intelligence.

  Mackay was on a long leash. He went to the northwestern quarter of Mohenjo-daro, the rich DK Area, and expanded Dikshit’s operation. He also did the first deep digging of any scale at the site, thereby gaining some sense of the stratigraphy of the northern part of the lower city. N. G. Majumdar assisted him in 1927—1928 and part of 1928—1929, but Majumdar left the work at Mohenjo-daro to excavate Jhukar, 25 kilometers away.

  Mackay succeeded in clearing a vast architectural complex in DK Area, which gives the visitor to Mohenjo-daro a real sense of walking through an ancient city. The splendidly preserved baked-brick buildings stand today much as they did over 4,000 years ago, all published by Mackay himself.34

  In 1931 financial problems put an end to the large-scale excavations at Mohenjo-daro. The final field season started on November 3, 1931, with Mackay planning to investigate remains to the northeast of Mound of the Great Bath. He thought there might be a part of the city wall there. On the morning of November 6, he put four gangs of men to work there, but a telegram arrived from the headquarters of the ASI informing him that a budget crisis demanded he cease all excavations immediately. This brought an end to the major excavations at Mohenjo-daro. Some small-scale work continued there, but the big campaigns were over.

  CONTINUED EXCAVATION AT HARAPPA

  Harappa was far from forgotten. Sahni had undertaken three seasons of independent excavation at Harappa between 1920—1921 and 1924—1925. He had made a good start at the site, but there was a lot left to do, in spite of the ravages of the railroad brick robbers. There was no excavation there in 1925—1926, presumably because of the very large scale of the program at Mohenjo-daro, when Marshall directed the field team and brought so many of his colleagues with him. Sometime in 1925—1926 Madho Sarup Vats became the Superintendent Archaeologist for the northern circle and settled in to address the task of excavating Harappa. At this site, he undertook eight seasons of work, which extended through the end of the 1933—1934 field season. He exposed structures on Mound F, investigated the cemeteries, and defined the “Cemetery H Culture.” A number of important artifacts came to light, including a magnificent red jasper torso and a male dancer.

  Mound F was the best preserved of the excavation areas probed in the early years. This part of the site has a complex set of remains that Sahni and his successor chose to call “the area of the parallel walls.” In 1926—1927, Marshall resolved this issue. He notes in the annual report on the activities of the survey that this architectural complex seems to have been a storage facility since it could be favorably compared to storage rooms associated with Cretan palaces.35 Marshall’s training at Knossos with Sir Arthur Evans gave him the necessary experience to make this connection, one of the clearest examples of how experience in archaeology shapes an archaeologist’s interpretation of remains. From the day of Sir John’s judgment until the present, this building has been called the Granary, despite the fact that there is almost nothing to support his conclusion except the probably fanciful comparison to Knossos.

  When Vats retired from excavation at Harappa, some work continued. K. N. Sastri discovered an Indus cemetery at Harappa in excavation square R-37. This cemetery is, in fact, an extension of the Posturban Cemetery H, excavated by Vats. R-37 dates to the middle to later portions of the Mature Harappan, but it was the first Mature Harappan cemetery to have been discovered and is still the largest. There is no cemetery known at Mohenjo-daro, although stray burials and other interesting human skeletal finds are known.

  SIR JOHN MARSHALL AND THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

  By 1931 there was a paradigm for this extraordinary body of material and the two cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, from which it had been derived. This early synthesis was largely the creation of Sir John himself, but was expanded by both Mackay and V. Gordon Childe.

  Marshall’s Paradigm for the Indus Civilization

  Marshall put forth his synthesis of the Harappan Civilization in the opening chapters of his monumental work, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization.36 His first concern was for the physical environment, and he proposed that the climate was different during the Bronze Age in Pakistan and northwestern India. Marshall supported this with the following evidence: (1) Baked bricks were used as protection against heavier rainfall; (2) street drains were used to carry off the rainwater and would not be needed under today’s dry conditions; (3) the lion, a dry-country animal, may be completely absent in the representations of animals. Finally, the great archaeological explorer Sir Aurel Stein found the remains of flourishing Bronze Age communities in Baluchistan, leading him to conclude that there was a substantially larger population in this region during those times. Stein attributed this in large part to a wetter climate. V. Gordon Childe supported Stein’s position with this observation: “The lavish use of baked brick in prehistoric cities would seem a needless extravagance under modern rainless conditions.”37

  The hypothesis that the climate in the Greater Indus Valley was remarkably wetter in the third millennium is no longer accepted.38 The view presented in this book is that the climate of this region was not markedly different in the third millennium B.C. from the one we have today.

  On the cultural side, Marshall saw a striking uniformity at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. “Though these two cities are some 400 miles apart, their monuments and antiquities are to all intents and purposes identical.”39 Once again, Childe concurs, noting how the two sites were “astonishingly homogenous. . . the agreement is so complete that every remark in the subsequent description would apply equally to either site.”40

  Marshall went on to say that the Harappans were just as individual (interestingly, he used the term national in this context) as the other civilizations, shown by the character of the domestic architecture and such monuments as the Great Bath. The “remarkably naturalistic quality” of Indus art is another feature, as is the painted pottery. The use of cotton instead of flax and the quality of the writing system were also seen as unique, national markers for the Indus. “But behind these and manifold other traits that are peculiar to the Indus Civilization and give it its national character is a tissue of ideas, inventions and discoveries which were common property of the then civilized world and cannot be traced to their respective sources.”41 These shared features included domestication of animals; cultivation of wheat, barley, and other grains; growing of fruits; building of houses; organization of society in cities; spinning and weaving of textiles and dyeing them various colors; the use of the potter’s wheel and the decoration of wares; river navigation; the use of wheeled vehicles; the working of metals; writing; fashioning of ornaments from faience, iv
ory, bone, shell, and semiprecious stones.

  The Indus Civilization was centered in Sindh and the Punjab, but Marshall did not think of the two metropolitan centers as “twin capitals.” There was already some evidence for an extension of the civilization into Saurashtra (Kathiawar, for him), although there was sparse evidence available from the east, since little work was done there. It is interesting to see that he thought in terms of a diffusion of the civilization from Sindh to the west, into Baluchistan.42

  The script was much like other quasi-pictographic scripts of the era, but its similarity had misled those who wished to decipher it. Four attempts, each using another of the scripts (Sumerian, proto-Elamite, Minoan, and Hittite) as a model, had failed by 1931, and Marshall cautioned against the use of this methodology.43

  He found no reason to connect the language of the Indus people with Sanskrit, or its culture with the Aryans. In fact, he argued forcefully, and correctly, that the Indus Civilization was earlier than the Vedic period and that these cultures were the products of different peoples. Marshall, speaking on the Harappan language, said that so vast an area probably contained the native speakers of more than one language but that it was likely that these were within the Dravidian group.44

  Marshall’s discussion of Indus religion was the longest and most complex of all his statements on these ancient peoples. Briefly, he found evidence for a great male god, a female deity, cults associated with sexual symbols, and the beginnings of Shaktism.45 Childe, the preeminent interpreter of ancient civilizations, joined the Marshall paradigm in 1934.46

  There are three theoretical positions that come through in Marshall’s essays. First, the Harappan Civilization was a member of a class of civilizations, most closely related to Sumer and the proto-Elamites. It was “natural” that parallels between these civilizations would be found because of geography and this close relationship. While it was not sufficiently close for the Harappans to be termed “Indo-Sumerian,” the connection was real and important. He even included a simple list of finds that indicated close contact between the Indus and the Tigris-Euphrates regions. 47 There was continuity between the twentieth century and these distant peoples, and he was justified in using historical and ethnographic observations to further his understanding of the Indus peoples. It also helped him to interpret the language and ethnic or biological diversity of the Indus population. Finally, Marshall was a scholar with a commitment to the epistemology of his field. We are not presented with a fait accompli in terms of his propositions concerning the Harappans, but rather a reasoned argument, backed by a sophisticated use of other people’s works and insights. Even when he is wrong, as in the case for a wetter climate, Marshall offers his reasons for believing as he does, and this is a trait of considerable scholarly merit—certainly not found in all discourse on this civilization, even today.

  In spite of Marshall’s greatness, archaeology did not prosper upon his retirement. There was only one major excavation of note conducted in British India in the mid-1930s. This was the inspiration of Professor W. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania.

  W. NORMAN BROWN ENTERS THE FIELD AT CHANHU-DARO

  The spectacular finds at Mohenjo-daro generated interest in fieldwork in a number of scholars and institutions concerned with Indian archaeology. In 1932 the government of India decided to test these waters and to allow “outsiders” to excavate. The door was not thrown open but was left slightly ajar, and an American team managed to slip through.

  One of the great institution builders in the study of Indology in America was Professor W. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania. He was determined to further American involvement in the archaeology of the Subcontinent (figure 1.11).

  Brown hired Mackay to be the field director of an excavation and raised money from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to fund it. After some searching, and a misstart or two, they settled on Chanhu-daro as the site to excavate. The work took place in 1935—1936, the publication appearing shortly before Mackay’s death in 1943.48 The Chanhu-daro excavations are important for two reasons. First, the recovery of bead- and seal-making workshops gives us important insights into Mature Harappan technology. The excavation also recovered the Posturban Phase, Jhukar material, in context, even though Mackay did not do as good a job of excavating and recording this material as he might have.

  A young student of Indian archaeology, H. D. Sankalia, was at Chanhu-daro for almost a month during the excavation (figure 1.12). Sankalia was to emerge as one of the giants of this field, but he departed from this project well before its conclusion.49 In his autobiography Sankalia discusses his time there, which was not much to his liking.50 He had attended classes given by Wheeler at the University of London and had toured sites in England with him. This thoroughly imbued him with the necessity of three-dimensional recording and stratigraphic excavation. Since Mackay understood none of this, Sankalia was put off by the field methods he saw being employed at Chanhu-daro. Moreover, Sankalia was still quite young, and he once admitted to me that he did not take full advantage of this special opportunity. It is also interesting that Brown and Sankalia should come together at this point because they ended up being close colleagues, working together in the 1950s and 1960s on various projects connected with the American Institute of Indian Studies and Deccan College.

  Figure 1.11 W. Norman Brown

  Figure 1.12 Hasmukh Dhirajlal Sankalia

  Between January 19 and 28, 1936, Mackay had an American visitor at Chanhu-daro. He was the young linguist, Murray B. Emeneau, whose work with Dravidian, especially the etymological dictionary he compiled with Thomas Borrow, would contribute to efforts to decipher the Indus script. Emeneau wanted to hear Brahui, and because many of Mackay’s laborers spoke the language, Emeneau took this as a convenient opportunity to see an excavation in progress and to conduct his linguistic fieldwork.51

  Excavation was the early focus in the discovery of the Indus Age. The most important exploration was that undertaken by Majumdar. There was more done by Stein in the 1920s and 1930s.

  The years between Marshall’s retirement and 1944 were not good ones for the ASI due to many factors that culminated in a crisis in leadership.52 In June 1943, the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, tried to improve things by appointing a new Director General.

  Sir Mortimer Wheeler at Harappa

  A rejuvenation of Indus archaeology had to wait for World War II to be almost over and for the arrival of a Brigadier General from the North African front. In 1944 Robert Eric Mortimer “Rick” Wheeler, a giant of Roman archaeology in Britain, was called away from active military duty to become the Director General of the ASI (figure 1.13). Without skipping a beat, Wheeler went to his new office in Simla. His first day on the job revealed his sometimes theatrical behavior. Wheeler recounts:

  On the top floor of the gaunt railway board building where the Archaeological Survey was then housed at Simla, I stepped over the recumbent forms of peons, past office windows revealing little clusters of idle clerks and hangers-on, to the office which I had taken over that morning from my Indian predecessor. As I opened my door I turned and looked back. The sleepers had not stirred, and only a wavering murmur like the distant drone of bees indicated the presence of drowsy human organisms within. I emitted a bull-like roar, and the place leapt to anxious life . . . one after another my headquarters staff was ushered in, and within an hour the purge was complete. Bowed shoulders and apprehensive glances showed an office working as it had not worked for many a long day. That evening one of the peons (who later became my most admirable headquarters Jemadar) said tremulously to my deputy’s Irish wife, “Oh, memsahib, a terrible thing has happened to us this day 53

  Wheeler lost little time in setting the Archaeological Survey straight. He had his plan to implement. He reconstituted the excavations branch, closed since 1932, and created a new prehistory branch to study the stone ages of the Subcontinent. Ancient India, the journal of the Archaeological Survey of India was begun. But most important,
there was the Wheeler persona: self-confident, even bold, energetic, and powerful as a bull, ready to seize the survey and create a new future for archaeology in the Subcontinent.

  Figure 1.13 Sir Mortimer Wheeler

  One of Wheeler’s first stops was at Harappa. The day in May 1944 was hot there, so hot that Wheeler was advised to be on the site only between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30 A.M.54 As he approached the looming AB Mound, promptly at dawn, he was astounded by its size and was immediately struck by the fact that it must have been a citadel, put in place to protect the inhabitants of the city from attack. The presence of a citadel at Harappa would be revolutionary if true, since the prevailing opinion was that the Harappans were a remarkably peaceful people, energetically engaged in commerce. The lack of palaces, or anything even approaching this kind of social isolation for any class, suggested quite a different social structure from the contemporary peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or even Crete. A few minutes of scraping at the surface of the AB Mound revealed the presence of brick lines, and Wheeler felt that his initial impression was probably right. As he said in his autobiography: “A few minutes’ observation had radically changed the social character of the Indus Civilization and put it at last into an acceptable focus.”55

  Wheeler’s Training Excavations

  Wheeler worked in many directions to bring the survey along the path he had laid out, but the keystone of the plan was a series of training excavations. These were the forums within which he tutored new leaders, and his personal supervision of the schools allowed him to spot talent and bring it along. The schools were held at Taxila (1944—1945), Arikamedu (1945), Harappa (1946), and Brahmagiri and Chandravalli (1947).