Periodisation of the Indus Valley Civilisation

"The Pre-Harappan and the Harappa cultures are not two disparate entities but urban and rural aspects of the same cultural phenomenon. The Harappan phase at Kot Diji, Amri and Kalibangan, should not be understood as one culture supplanting another, but like a city corporation taking over a sub-urban village to urbanise."

"The two limits of the Indus civilization are now easy to assess, based on the first and last occurrences of Harappan objects in independently dated contexts in Mesopotamia."

"We can say that the Indus civilization came into existence by c. 2600 BC and was alive at 1400 BC and later. This is the baseline; the exact points of the beginning and the end are difficult to determine and perhaps not even necessary. But one may safely accept the broad chronology of the Indus civilization in the subcontinent from c. 2700 BC to c. 1300 BC."

"I shall begin by taking up the problem of the date of the beginning of this civilization. Many Indian books still refer to the date propounded first in 1946 by Mortimer Wheeler, i.e. 2500 BC. That was based on Wheeler’s own subjective estimate of the date of the earliest contact between the Indus civilization and Mesopotamia. Assuming that this contact was not significantly earlier than the reign of the Mesopotamian king Sargon and accepting 2325 BC as Sargon’s date, he arrived at the round figure of 2500 BC, allowing 175-odd years for this civilization to form a relationship with Mesopotamia. The earliest date of the Mesoptamian civilization, typified by the Early Dynastic Period is 2700/2800 BC. Thus, according to Wheeler’s scheme, the Indus civilization was later than the Mesopotamian civilization, which was natural in the light of his belief that the idea of civilization came to the Indus from the former."

"This led to a serious debate amongst all the archaeologists, of the world who were dealing with the Indus-Sarasvatj Civilization, directly or indirectly, What one group called ‘Pre-Harappan’, the other group called ‘Early Harappan’. Why this controversy cropped up? It is all a question of ‘approaches’ in archaeological Studies which are primarily two—the ‘culture-historical’ and “culture- processual’."

"It may perhaps be important to make a statement regarding what I mean by the term ‘Late Harappan’, since it has often been used rather loosely or in different senses by different scholars. To me Late Harappan would mean a culture-complex which has tranformed itself from the Mature Harappan, losing some of the latter’s traits and evolving some new ones, but still identifiable as having been derived from the latter."

"The economic scenario that we come across on reaching Stage IV of the civilization in the Sarasvati Valley, in the 3rd millennium BCE, may well be termed as a revolution within an evolution. There is no walk of life in which this revolution is not reflected—whether it be town planning or industrial advancement, or trade. In this stage, there sprang up a regular system of writing, weights and measures, and seals and sealings, along with the production of pieces of art and craft—indeed, all that is needed to call it a highly advanced civilization, as against its humble beginnings—pit dwellings in the 5th millennium BCE."

"The term 'Early Harappan' as opposed to 'Pre-Harappan' has gained acceptance for a number of reasons. The principal reason is the evidence for cultural and historical continuity between the Early and Mature Harappan as well as the premise that the process of change was primarily autochthonous. It involved the peoples of the Greater Indus Valley itself, without significant or out-of-the-ordinary, external influence."

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and destruction on the scale of the Aryan invasion."

"In 1922 archaeologists started to turn up evidence of the Indus civilization. Mohenjodaro and Harappa have had most of the publicity, but new discoveries are still being made all the time.... Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda , who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization."

"The decline of Harappan urbanism probably had many contributing factors. The shift to a concentration on kharif cultivation in the outer regions of the state may have seriously disrupted established schedules for craft production, civic flood defense, building and drain maintenance, and other publicly organized works on which the smooth running of the state depended. The reduction in the waters of the Saraswati and the response of its farmers by migrating into regions to the east tore apart the previous unity of the Harappan state, disrupting its cohesion and its ability to control the internal distribution network."

"With Indra, whose epithet in the Rgveda is purandara 'fort-destroyer', as his chief protagonist, Wheeler had a dramatic script that he could have marketed in Hollywood. "Indra stands accused" was his lighthearted, but later regretted, caricature of the principal culprit behind the demise of the great civilization"

"The archaeological record of Harappan decline in the Indus Valley itself has never revealed any obvious connection with the widely claimed origin for these Indo-European invaders in the Pontic steppes or central Asia. In my view, supported linguistically.. the Harappan decline had nothing whatsoever to do with any Indo-European arrival in Pakistan or India, since this language family had already been present there for several millennia beforehand. (Bellwood 2014, 156)"