indus-valley-civilisation

""The fact that even smaller towns and villages had impressive drainage systems” remarks Kenoyer, “indicates that removing polluted water and sewage was an important part of the daily concerns of the Indus people.”"

"Hitherto it has commonly been supposed that the pre-Aryan peoples of India were . . . black skinned, flat nosed barbarians. . . . Never for a moment was it imagined that five thousand years ago, before the Aryans were heard of, Panjab and Sind . . . were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own . . . even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. . . . there is nothing that we know of in prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in western Asia to compare with the well- built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjodara. . . . nothing that we know of in other countries at this period bears any resemblance, in point of style, to the miniature faience models . . . which . . . are distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that has rarely been surpassed in glyptic art. (v-vii)"

"These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro."

"Public baths (probably often part of temples), private baths for most inhabitants, sewerage through underground drains built with precisely laid bricks, and an efficient system of water management with numerous wells and reservoirs testify to the care that was taken of the ordinary inhabitant. Mohenjo-daro, for instance, probably had over 700 wells, some of them fifteen metres deep, built with special trapezoid bricks (to prevent collapse by the pressure of the surrounding soil), and maintained for several centuries; quite a few of those wells were found in private houses. Dholavira had separate drains to collect rain water and six or seven dams built across nearby streams (apart from several large reservoirs located in the lower town)."

"S. R. Rao notes: The Harappans were a highly disciplined people conscious of their civic duties, which explains the meticulous care taken to keep the cities clean. No encroachment of streets is seen tor over 500 years at Lothal in spite of the fact that the houses had to be rebuilt several times after the havoc wrought by floods…. The story of the rise and decline of the Indus Civilization is an epitome of man’s struggle for Conquering nature and building an integrated peace-loving and prosperous society. In this struggle the Harappans ’seem to have succeeded to a large extent."

"All this made the British archaeologist John Marshall, who took charge of the excavations at Mohenjo-daro, remark in wonder: There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizen’s."

"At Surkotada from all the three periods quite a good number of bones of horse (Equus Caballus Linn) ... have been recovered. The parts recovered are very distinctive bones: first, second and third phalanges and few vertebrae fragments."

"One of the startling discoveries at Surkotada has been horse bones which have refuted the earlier belief that the use of the horse was unknown to the Harappans."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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’."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)"

"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 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."

"We do not suggest that Hinduism, as we find it today, was there in the Indus civilization. All that we would say is that some later features of Hinduism have been echoed by ‘Indus’ finds, and thus this civilization is likely to have contributed to the stream of ‘sanatana dharma’ or traditional religion of the modern Hindus."

"[I]n religious matters, the present-day Hindus are the descendants of the Indus valley people."

"The ethos of the ancient Indian Civilization is shaped during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods."

"We have found at Mohenjodaro evidence of practically every one that is capable of formative expression, viz of the cults of Shiva and the Mother goddess, of the Nagas and tree deities , of animal tree and stone worship, of phallism and of the practice of Yoga. We have seen, moreover, that although there are no visible traces Of Saktism at Mohenjodaro, there are strong reasons for believing that it existed on the Indian soil from a very early period.."

"Taken as a whole, their [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism."

"It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization."

"[More recently, Kenoyer found between those two civilizations] “… no significant break or hiatus.”"

"It is strange but true that the type and style of bangles that women wear in Rajasthan today, or the vermilion that they apply on the parting of the hair on the head, the practice of Yoga, the binary system of weights and measures, the basic architecture of the houses etc can all be traced back to the Indus Civilisation. The cultural and religious traditions of the Harappans provide the substratum for the latter-day Indian Civilisation.”"

"This leads us to the question of the Indus religion. Many scholars ,both foreign and Indian, are very reluctant to find any trace of modern Hindu rituals and beliefs in the finds which have been interpreted as evidence of Indus religion. Two facts, however, cannot be wished away – regrettably from the point of view of this group of people. One is the indubitable presence of Siva in the form of linga-like stones found both at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, a distinctively phallic stone column at Dholavira, a seated ithyphallic stone figure from the same site, the famous ‘Siva-Pasupati’ figure on a seal, and the terracotta representation of a Siva-linga set in ‘Yoni-patta’ at Kalibangan. The second such evidence is the widespread presence of sacrificial pits at Lothal, Kalibangan , Banawali , Rakhigarhi and possibly a few other sites. These pits possibly have variations of their own. Their shapes and contents may also vary from site to site. However, their generic similarity with the ‘havan kundas’ which many devout people still dig up every day, light fire in, and pour offerings on, them is undeniable."

"Lothal was probably the most important port after Dvarka drowned. Both were gateways to Sarasvati lands and dominated maritime trade west and south. At the head of a now diverted River Sabarmati tributary, its 12.2-metre thick walls, protection against floods, enclosed a modest seven hectares (17.29 acres) with habitation outside. The massive 214 metres long, 37 metres wide, 4.5 metres deep dock, originally probably deeper was built with over a million kilndried bricks. Eighteen to twenty metres long and four to six metres wide ships could enter with two passing each other. Away from the main current to avoid siltation, lock gates controlled a channel to the estuary at high tide. Estimated to hold 30 ships of 60 tons, or 60 of 30 tons each, it indicates heavy traffic. Navigational instruments to measure angles of the horizon and stars and stone anchors have also been found. A 3.5 metres long wharf, raised against flooding, connected the dock to a 64-room warehouse, containing merchant seals. Each Indus-Sarasvati merchant had a seal to identify and label imports and exports, authenticating ownership, many found in Mesopotamia indicating their main trade outlet."

"There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens."

"We have found at Mohenjodaro evidence of practically every one that is capable of formative expression, viz of the cults of Shiva and the Mother goddess, of the Nagas and tree deities , of animal tree and stone worship, of phallism and of the practice of Yoga. We have seen, moreover, that although there are no visible traces Of Saktism at Mohenjodaro, there are strong reasons for believing that it existed on the Indian soil from a very early period.."

"Mohenjo-daro, whose population has been estimated at 40,000 to 50,000, was probably the most extensive city; its total area, a fifth of which has been excavated, is generally stated to be between 150 and 200 ha (hectares), although the German archaeologist Michael Jansen, who conducted a detailed research on the city’s urbanism, leans towards 300 ha,17 which would make it possibly the largest city of the ancient world. Harappa was about half that size."

"Mohenjo-daro’s acropolis, measuring about 200 x 400 m, is majestic by any standard. It boasts the famous complex of the ‘great bath’ with its central pool used for ritual ablutions, a huge ‘college’, a ‘granary’, an ‘assembly hall’ (or ‘pillared hall’), and wide streets carefully aligned along the cardinal directions. We may allow ourselves to conjure up the ruler or rulers meeting in some of those spacious halls along with officials, traders and, perhaps, on special occasions, representatives of the main craft traditions : builders, potters, seal makers, metal workers or weavers."

"There is continuity in the survey and planning tradition from Mohenjodaro to Sirkap and Thimi . . . The planning modules employed in the Indus city of Mohenjodaro, Sirkap of Gandhara, and Thimi of Kathmandu Valley are the same."

"The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology. The excavated city of Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley—overrun by the Aryans in 1500 B.C.—is one of the archaelogical glories of Pakistan and the world. The excavations are now being damaged by waterlogging and salinity, and appeals for money have been made to world organizations. A featured letter in Dawn [a daily Pakistani newspaper] offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjodaro in "appropriate places": "Say (unto them, 0 Mohammed): Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty. . . . Say (O Mohammad, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you. Most of them were idolaters.""

"In the late 1850s, railway lines were laid through Punjab, particularly between Lahore and Multan, a line running south of the Ravi river, and through Sind. But to stabilize a railway line, you need ballast—a lot of it—and in flat alluvial plains, ballast material is not always easy to come by. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have an old ruined city at hand, with tons of excellent bricks waiting to be plundered. That is precisely what happened to a group of huge mounds located near a village called Harappa, in the Sahiwal district of Punjab, on the bank of a former bed of the Ravi, twelve kilometres south of the river’s present course. No one could have guessed that this name, ‘Harappa’, was destined to become world-famous—least of all the engineers of the Western Railways, who had eyes only for the cartloads of bricks they could ‘mine’ from this bountiful quarry. The cartloads soon became wagonloads, with a light railway laid for speedier extraction. Alexander Cunningham, who had visited the site in 1853 and again in 1856, returned to it in 1872 as the director of the newly formed Archaeological Survey of India (ASI); in his report, he recorded, with some anguish, that the massive ancient walls he had noted during his initial visits had vanished, having been turned into ballast for no less than 160 km of the new Lahore-Multan line. Who could have manufactured those compact, precisely proportioned baked bricks? Neither Cunningham nor the few of his countrymen who preceded him to Harappa had a clue."

"Harappa presents a more complex picture with four mounds, some of which were surrounded by walls as thick as 14 m at the base, with impressive gateways controlling access to the city. Unfortunately, the site was too badly plundered to give us a fair idea of the overall plan of the fortifications...."

"Kalibangan . . . is strategically located at the confluence of the Sarasvatī and Drishadvatī Rivers and must have played a major role as a way station and monitor of the overland communications of the Harappan peoples."

"The study offered 'the first stratigraphic evidence that a palaeochannel exists in the sub-surface alluvium in the Ghaggar valley. The fact that the major urban sites of Kalibangan and Kunal lie adjacent to the newly discovered subsurfacefluvial channel body ... suggests that there may be a spatial relationship between the Ghaggar-Hakrapalaeochannel and Harappan site distribution' (Sinha et al., 2013)."

"Such a conclusion had been reached by archaeologists long ago, since Kalibangan, for instance, shows no evidence of independent water supply; unlike Mohenjo- daro, it had very few wells, and unlike Dholavira, no reservoirs, yet it was continually occupied for several centuries: for its water supply through the year, it must therefore have depended on the Sarasvati, on whose left bank it lay, with entries into its fortified enclosures facing the riverbed."

"A remarkable discovery ... at Kalibangan was that of a ploughed agricultural field.... This is the earliest agricultural field ever brought to light through an excavation anywhere in the world."

"Marshall identified certain stone objects ... as lingas and yonis... [At Kalibangan] has been found a terracotta specimen which is clearly identifiable as linga-cum-yoni."

"The fire-altars of Kalibangan and Lothal are so far without parallels at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Indeed, it has been asked [by Raymond and Bridget Allchin]: "Fire- worship being considered a distinctly Indo-Aryan trait, do these {ritual hearths of Kalibangan] carry with them an indication of an Indo-Aryan presence even from so early a date?" This hypothesis new seems quite plausible to me, if "Indo-Aryan" here is understood to refer to carriers of the Bronze Age culture of Greater Iran, who had become quickly absorbed into the Indus Civilization, culturally and linguistically. It is supported further by the cylinder shape of the famous Kalibangan seal showing a Durga-like goddess of war, who is associated with the tiger. The goddess on the Kalibangan cylinder seal is said to be similar in style, especially the headdress, to one depicted on a cylinder seal from Shahdad [in Kerman on the desert of Lut in Iran, a major centre of the Bronze Age cultural tradition]. Seated lions attend to a goddess of fertility on a metal flag found at Shahdad."

".,. the so-called-'citadels' at Indus cities were taken to be the seats of government but B.B. Lal (1981) has now conclusively proved that at least at Kalibangan it was not at all so; it was possibly the place where collective religious ceremonies were held around the 'fire altars'. Inother words, underlying the mature Indus Civilization or Harappan Culture was a great deal of social change, all of which is not easy to comprehend but without which the cities would not have emerged on the Indus plains. Social changes and cultural changes keep on interplaying variously at various levels (Gupta 1974)."

"Such "ritual hearths" are reported from the beginning of the Harappan period itself. It has been suggested that they may have been fire altars , evidence of domestic, popular and civic fire-cults of the Indo-Iranians, which are described in detail in the later Vedic literature. It may then be an indication of culture contact between an early group of Indo-Aryans and the population of the still-flourishing Indus civilization."

"This Harappan city of about 10 ha was found in the Fatehabad district of Haryana, on the bank of an old bed of the Ghaggar. According to R.S. Bisht, who directed the excavations in the 1970s, ‘Banawali was an important administrative headquarters or provincial capital and a prosperous trading centre along the Sarasvatī during the Indus times.’"

"In the opinion of the Allchins, ‘Dholavira appears to be one of the most exciting discoveries of the past half century!’"

"Its town planning apart, Dholavira shot into prominence because of a unique find: an inscription almost three metres long, found lying on the floor of one of the chambers of the castle’s northern gate. It was not inscribed there; its ten signs, each over 35 cm high, were made of a crystalline material which must have been embedded in a wooden plank, and the whole ‘signboard’ was probably hung above the northern gate, where it would have been visible to much of the middle town. In terms of size, there is no remotely comparable inscription from any other Harappan site. (Of course, boards with signs simply carved or painted on a plank would have vanished without a trace; it is the crystalline material alone that was preserved in this case.)"