from CULTURE 1993 Stanley Wolpert

Transcription

1 I NDUS from CULTURE 1993 Stanley Wolpert Archaeological evidence found in the Indus Valley of southern Asia reveals a vast Bronze Age civilization dating from about 2500 to 1500 b.c. Excavations have uncovered ancient cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro complete with citadels, granaries, public baths, and drainage systems. The civilization remained strong until around 1750 b.c., when a series of floods and a change of course of the Indus River caused the economy to decline. In the following passage, historian Stanley Wolpert describes the archaeological evidence from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and speculates on aspects of modern-day Indian culture that may have originated with the Indus Valley civilization. THINK THROUGH HISTORY: Summarizing According to Wolpert, what are some aspects of modern-day Indian culture that may have originated with the Indus Valley civilization? The monumental excavations of the ancient Punjab 1 city of Harappa (Hara is one of Shiva s names), begun in 1921, and of its mighty reflection south along the Indus at Mohenjo-daro ( Mound of the Dead ), started a year later, have transformed our historical understanding of ancient India. The discovery of these two Indus cities, some four hundred miles apart, served first of all to extend the roots of urban Indian civilization back at least a thousand years before the Aryan invasions. The archeological remains at these sites also emphatically reversed the relative cultural status of India s Aryan conquerors and her pre-aryan peoples. The pre-aryan dāsas, or slaves, whose darker skins differentiated them from Aryan color, were suddenly revealed as more advanced, sophisticated, and technologically precocious than the semibarbaric hoard of Aryan invaders from the west, whose only civilized advantages seem to have been some superior weaponry and the use of harnessed horses. When Sir John Marshall sent D. R. Sahni to lead the dig at Harappa in January 1921, he had good reason to suspect that something significant lay buried beneath the enormous earth-covered mounds rising along the eastern bank of the river Ravi in the Punjab s Montgomery district. The site had been known to British officials in India for almost a hundred years. Sir Alexander Cunningham, a British general and amateur archeologist, visited it several times in 1853 and 1873, finding and recording small, indecipherable seals, which he picked up with other tantalizing objects near the mounds. There were also hundreds of thousands of burnt 1. Punjab: a region of northwest India and northern Pakistan between the Indus and Jumma rivers 1

2 bricks scattered over the region, enough to provide ballast for a hundred miles of steel track on the Lahore to Multan Railroad, which practical-minded Indian contractors and British engineers used for precisely that purpose. The richness of the archeological yield at Harappa has equated the name of that city with the Indus Valley civilization it represents. Radiocarbon dating now verifies that from at least 2300 to 1750 b.c. this great city, no less than three and a half miles in circumference, flourished behind massive ramparts of brick, forty feet thick at their base. The great wall of Harappa protected the citadel from the waters of the Ravi as well as from possible human invasion. The citadel itself rose almost fifty feet and was similar in size and geographic orientation to the one found at Mohenjo-daro, also standing to the west of the lower town, with its workers quarters. The same central board of imperial urban planners seems to have designed both cities; even their bricks were baked to similar standard measurements. The extensive use of Harappan bricks for railway support, however, has made it impossible for archeologists to identify any clear building remains within the citadel walls, such as those discovered at Mohenjo-daro, but several granaries have been found north of the citadel, along the river bank. Constructed in two rows with six storage areas in each and ventilation ducts to circulate air freely through the thick-walled warehouses, these granaries could have been used to keep an ample surplus of wheat and barley at hand for Harappa s population (estimated to have been about 35,000); or they might have been used to store produce to be shipped downstream or imported goods brought from Mohenjo-daro or from distant Sumeria. These large and costly facilities attest to the wealth of the Harappan civilization, which, like Sumer, may have been ruled by a priest-king who was worshipped as divinity incarnate. A small stone statue that could perhaps represent such a monarch has been found at Mohenjo-daro. His elongated eyes, thick lips, and impassive, bearded face reflect almost supernatural serenity and power, while his jeweled head- and arm-bands, as well as the cloverleaf design on his robe, might have been insignia of exalted rank. Between the granaries and the walled citadel of Harappa were discovered workers quarters or barracks that were more sturdy and well drained than the slum dwellings in most later Indian cities, where lower caste or outcaste laborers hover in abject poverty beyond the town wall, clinging to the tattered fringes of Indian society. Was Indus society already polarized, as Indian society would later be, into a priestly-warrior elite, ruling over a mass of urban artisans, merchants, servants, and other slaves of the gods? No historic records have been found that name any priest-king or his bureaucratic assistants, and we can only assume that they somehow mastered the skills necessary to protect their subjects from floods and wild beasts. We do know, however, from the remarkable images carved on Indus seals, that tigers, elephants, and rhinoceros, as well as buffalo and bulls, all inhabited the forests of this now almost desert region. From the same seals, we also know that the people of the Indus had a written language. 2

3 The dig at Mohenjo-daro yielded a much clearer map of that ancient city on the west bank of the Indus, 250 miles north of the Arabian Sea. There were, in fact, no fewer than ten cities, constructed with singular conservatism one on top of the other over what must have been a period of many centuries. Marshall and his assistants were so excited by the lavish wealth of bricks, shards, seals, statues, beads, and other artifacts scattered in profusion in the sands of Sind that they sacrificed scientific precision to speed. We have, therefore, no clear idea of the chronological sequence of the finds or the longevity of Mohenjo-daro s many reincarnations, the earliest three of which are now submerged beneath the rising water table. We do know that the walled citadel contained many imposing buildings, one of which was a great hypocaust built of bricks coated with bitumen. 2 It was complete with dressing rooms and was similar in size and complexity to the bathing tanks that still form an integral part of most Hindu temples. No great temple or center of worship has been found as yet at Mohenjo-daro, but that may be because the appropriate place for one, just east of the bath, has not been excavated. A sacred Buddhist stupa 3 stands over that spot on the citadel, and permission has never been granted to move it. A large granary has been found to the west of the bath, and near that an even more spacious building (230 by 78 feet) possibly a royal palace has recently emerged. Beyond the citadel s walls sprawled the humbler city of the mass of Mohenjodaro s population. Planned along a north-south grid, the town was divided into a number of major blocks, which may have separated various occupational or kinship groups from one another, as in subsequent Indian cities castes would reside in their own enclaves. Some of the blocks contained spacious homes, whose sturdy brick foundations indicate multilevel structures. Domestic life was oriented around open interior courtyards that ensured privacy, much the way well-to-do Indian homes have been built and organized ever since. The covered brick drainage, both inside individual homes and on public streets, was technologically sophisticated and more sanitary than that found in many modern Indian towns. Mohenjo-daro s municipal administration, whether theocratic or not, was certainly conscientious. The standard sizes of streets and blocks, as well as of bricks, further attest to centralized authority. A block of small cells has been identified in one area of the low town as having been either a police station barracks or a monastery. There were public wells, and shops lined the main streets of Mohenjo-daro s cities during their half millennium at least of historic vitality. Wheel-made pottery, much of it redware or buffware painted black, at times designed with animal as well as geometric motifs, has been found in profusion at all major Indus sites. The countless small shards of drinking cups appear to indicate that these people may have initiated the later Indian habit of using clay cups only once, possibly from fear of contamination or pollution. Many large sewer seepage pots and curious perforated vessels have also been found. In addition to potters, Mohenjo-daro s artisans included fine metallurgists, who were adept at fashioning tools and weapons of copper and bronze as well as stone. 2. bitumen: kind of mineral pitch used as mortar for bricks 3. stupa: a monument 3

4 The heavy brick walls and unadorned streets of Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and the more recently discovered Indus sites of Kot Diji, Lothal, and Kalibangan leave an overall impression of ponderous utilitarianism, yet some smaller surviving artifacts offer tantalizing glimpses into the artistic sensibilities and beauty that must have flourished in Indus cities as well. A naked bronze dancing girl of Mohenjodaro, for example, is most realistic, a figurine whose gaunt and boyish femininity still seems to mock mankind provocatively with her footless stance, haughty head, and petulantly poised arm. But the most exciting, yet frustrating, of all Indus artifacts are the small square steatite seals found in such profusion at Mohenjo-daro. These magnificent seals, probably made for merchants who used them to brand their wares, provide brilliant portraits of Brahmani bulls, unicorns, tigers, and other animals, whose realistic likenesses reappear two thousand years later on the capital plinths 4 of the pillars of Ashoka. The seals also contain pictographic signs (usually above their animal figures) the still-undeciphered first writing of Indian civilization. Almost four hundred different pictographs have been identified on the seals, far too many for the signs to have been phonetic, but too few for the language to have been ideographic. We assume that the pictographic words are the proper names of Indus merchants, written from right to left. Many attempts have been made to crack the Indus script and link it with the later Brahmi alphabet, the most recent by a team of Russian Indologists, who used computers to help them analyze the pictographs. One seal found in the northern area of Mohenjo-daro depicts a figure seated in yogic, ithyphallic posture, surrounded by a tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, water buffalo, and deer. He wears a horned headdress, appears to have more than one face (or possibly a tiger s mask), and wears a tiger s skin on his torso and bangles on his arms. This image may be the earliest artistic depiction of Shiva, India s Great God (Maheshvara) as Lord of Beasts (Pashupati).... Indus civilization, now represented by no fewer than seventy unearthed sites, extended over almost half a million square miles of the Punjab and Sind, from the borderlands of Baluchistan to the desert wastes of Rajasthan, from the Himalayan foothills to the tip of Gujarat, probing the limits of its ecosystem during the half millennium of its mature survival. Recently discovered Harappan outposts along the Makran coast, including that of Sutkāgen Dor near the border of modern Iran, clearly attest to brisk and continuous trade with Sumer, especially during the reign of Sargon of Akkad ( b.c.). Thanks to Indus seals found in the Sumerian dig at Ur in 1932, we know that merchants from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were trading with their Sumerian counterparts between 2300 and 2000 b.c. The huge granaries beside the river at Harappa seem to indicate that Indus merchants exported their surplus grain to Sumeria, and possibly elsewhere. By this time (ca b.c.), the Indus people had begun to spin cotton into yarn and weave it into cloth, a dyed fragment of which has been found at Mohenjo-daro. The use of cotton for clothing is one of India s major gifts to 4. plinth: the block of stone that acts as a base for a pillar 4

5 world civilization, and the spinning and weaving of cotton was to remain India s premier industry, with expanding production for both the home market and export. It is impossible to determine how extensive cotton production was at this time, but some of this rare and remarkable produce was surely exported to Mesopotamia and may indeed have been a major item in that trade. Most Indian exports, however, were probably luxury items of relatively little bulk and weight, such as etched carnelian beads, shell and bone inlay goods, ivory combs, and possibly even peacock feathers and apes commodities later imported from India by King Solomon plus pearls and precious wood products. It is unclear whether spices were as yet used and traded, though from green amazon stones found at Indus sites, we do know that the merchants of Mohenjo-daro imported products from as far south as the Nilgiri Hills in southern India and may have established commercial relations with the Malabar coast. The presence of Tibetan jadeite at the sites indicates the probable northern limit of Indus commercial contact, while silver, turquoise, tin, and lapis lazuli were imported from Persia and Afghanistan. By the time of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, the nomadic hunting, food-gathering, and fishing subsistence economy of later Stone Age peoples and the marginal small-village agricultural economy of the Baluchi Hills had been clearly displaced by a sophisticated inundation-and-irrigation agricultural and commercial economy capable of supporting a large surplus urban population. Though wheat seems to have been the most important grain in the Indus Valley, rice (whether wild or cultivated) has been found at Lothal; other crops included field peas, dates, mustard seeds, and sesamum. The people of the Indus had domesticated a wide variety of animals, including the dog, cat, camel, sheep, pig, goat, water buffalo, zebu, elephant, and chicken. (One or two clay figurines that appear to depict horses have been found at a few Indus sites, but these may reflect foreign travel or imports, since it seems most probable that the horse first invaded India along with the Aryans.) The domestication of fowl obviously enriched the diet of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa and, along with cotton spinning, ranks among India s earliest gifts to world civilization. The zebu and water buffalo had already become India s leading draught animals, though the depiction of both on seals suggests they were worshipped as well as whipped. Much the same sort of ambivalence toward draught animals, who occupy the front room of a peasant s home all night but feel the wrath of his stick whenever they loiter in harness, remains characteristic of Indian behavior to the present.... No graves have as yet been discovered at Mohenjo-daro, but cemeteries have been found at Harappa and more recently at the port of Lothal and in Kalibangan. Careful analysis of the skeletal remains of almost one hundred corpses indicates that the people of Harappa were a mixture of predominantly Proto-Australoid and Mediterranean physiques, as in modern peninsular India, ranging in height from five feet to five feet and nine inches, and averaging around thirty years of age at death. Most of the bodies were inhumed outstretched on their backs with their heads pointed toward the north. A number of pots were 5

6 usually buried with the bodies, and some of the skeletons had been decorated with ornamental jewels. Though no monumental or royal tombs have been found, several coffins were placed inside substantial brick chambers, and at Kalibangan one cist two by four meters in size has recently been discovered. The most interesting burial find, however, comes from the port of Lothal in Gujarat, some 450 miles southeast of Mohenjo-daro, where three double graves, each with a male and female skeleton, have been discovered. This find is possibly the first indication of the well-known Hindu custom of sati, according to which widows were expected to follow their husbands in death as well as in life. The custom of sati as we know it was generally associated with the cremation pyre rather than the grave, but the idea of eternal wifely devotion may well have anticipated the practical change in disposal of the dead that was to become almost universal throughout India at a later date. Sometime shortly after 1750 b.c., a number of factors began to transform the character of Harappan civilization, impairing its quality of life and disrupting its hitherto orderly urban environment to the extent that streets no longer followed any careful grid pattern, homes diminished in size, and pottery as well as drainage deteriorated or disappeared. South of Mohenjo-daro near the small Indus town of Chanhu-daro are two villages whose names have been bequeathed by archeologists to these decaying phases of Indus civilization, called the Jhukar and Jhangar cultures. It appears that the highly efficient, wealthy, and powerful empire of Harappa sustained some cataclysmic blows, which left its great cities and towns to the occupancy of squatters from neighboring villages or from more remote regions; people whose level of culture was more primitive than that of their predecessors. Their buffware was much cruder, their seals simpler and totally different in design from those of Mohenjo-daro in its heyday.... Thanks to the recent careful work and creative archeological studies undertaken by George Dales and Robert Raikes, it is now generally recognized that, around 1700 b.c., a series of floods caused by tectonic earth movements brought an end to this once-glorious civilization. For whatever reason, the Indus seems to have changed its course, spelling ruination to the delicately balanced system of Harappan agriculture. Hoards of jewelry and other precious objects, including copper tools, have been found in the highest strata at Mohenjo-daro, indicating the sense of impending doom and the widespread fear that must have gripped the populace as the flood waters rose. Many homes were hastily abandoned. Cooking pots were found strewn across kitchens; straw was found that had smoldered after a roof collapsed, as were fragments of burned wooden door jambs. But most revealing of all are the skeletons of people fleeing, a family of five caught in the debris as their walls and ceilings crumbled, as the earth moved, or as the river raced in. At least thirty skeletons have been found at Mohenjo-daro alone, not buried but trapped, killed by some terrible disaster. They were assumed until recently to have been massacred by an invading army, though now it seems more likely that all were fleeing a combined earthquake and flood.... 6

7 The city empire with its wondrous citadels was gone, disappearing as dramatically, almost as inexplicably, as it had emerged, washed over by the silt of the Indus and its rushing tributaries of the Punjab, like a world of sand castles reclaimed by rising tide, its crumbling walls and vague outlines all that remain for the next wave of invading children to occupy. Source: Excerpt from A New History of India, fourth edition, by Stanley Wolpert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. 7

8 THINK THROUGH HISTORY: ANSWER Wolpert speculates that the separation of castes in cities may have originated with the Indus Valley people. Cotton-weaving and public bathing are two other traditions that may derive from this early civilization. 8