The Indus civilization

Character and significance

While the Indus (or Harappan) civilization may be considered the culmination of a long process indigenous to the Indus valley, a number of parallels exist between developments on the Indus River and the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia. It is striking to compare the Indus with this better-known and more fully documented region and to see how closely the two coincide with respect to the emergence of cities and of such major concomitants of civilization as writing, standardized weights and measures, and monumental architecture. Yet nearly all the earlier writers have sensed the Indian-ness of the civilization, even when they were largely unable to articulate it. Thus, historian V. Gordon Childe wrote that:

India confronts Egypt and Babylonia by the 3rd millennium with a thoroughly individual and independent civilization of her own, technically the peer of the rest. And plainly it is deeply rooted in Indian soil. The Indus civilization represents a very perfect adjustment of human life to a specific environment. And it has endured; it is already specifically Indian and forms the basis of modern Indian culture. (New Light on the Most Ancient East, 4th ed., 1952.)

The force of Childe’s words can be appreciated even without an examination of the Indus valley script found on seals; the attention paid to domestic bathrooms, the drains, and the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro can all be compared to elements in the later Indian civilization. The bullock carts with a framed canopy, called ikkas, and boats are little changed to this day. The absence of pins and the love of bangles and of elaborate nose ornaments are all peculiarly South Asian. The religion of the Indus also is replete with suggestions of traits known from later India. The significance of the bull, the tiger, and the elephant; the composite animals; the seated yogi god of the seals; the tree spirits and the objects resembling the Shiva linga (a phallus symbolic of the god Shiva) of later times—all these are suggestive of enduring forms in later Indian civilization.

It is still impossible to do more than guess at the social organization or the political and administrative control implied by this vast area of cultural uniformity. The evidence of widespread trade in many commodities, the apparent uniformity of weights and measures, the common script, and the uniformity—almost common currency—of the seals all indicate some measure of political and economic control and point to the great cities Mohenjo-daro and Harappa as their centres. The presence of the great granaries on the citadel mounds in these cities and of the citadels themselves suggests—partly on the analogies of the cities of Mesopotamia—the existence of priest-kings, or at least a priestly oligarchy, that controlled the economy and civil government. The intellectual mechanism of this government and the striking degree of control implicit in it are still matters of speculation. Nor can scholars yet speak with any certainty regarding relations between the cities and surrounding villages. Much more research needs to be done, on many such topics, before the full character of the Indus civilization can be revealed.

Chronology

The first serious attempt at establishing a chronology for the Indus civilization relied on cross-dating with Mesopotamia. In this way, Cyril John Gadd cited the period of Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 bce) and the subsequent Isin-Larsa Period (2017–1794 bce) as the time when trade between ancient India and Mesopotamia was at its height. Calibration of the ever-growing number of radiocarbon dates provides a reasonably consistent series from site to site. The broad picture thus obtained suggests that the mature Indus civilization emerged between 2600 and 2500 bce and continued in full glory to about 2000 bce. Thereafter the evidence is still somewhat unclear, but the late stage of the mature culture probably continued until about 1700 bce, by which time it is probably accurate to speak of the Post-Urban, or Post-Harappan, stage.

Extent

All the earlier writers have stressed the remarkable uniformity of the products of the Harappan civilization, and for this reason they provide a definite hallmark for its settlements. The more-recent evidence suggests that, if the outermost sites are joined by lines, the area enclosed will be a little less than about 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km)—considerably larger than present-day Pakistan—and if, as is generally inferred, this cultural uniformity coincided with some sort of political and administrative unity, the size of the resulting “empire” is truly vast. Within this area, several hundred sites have been identified, the great majority of which are on the plains of the Indus or its tributaries or on the now dry course of the ancient Saraswati River, which flowed south of the Sutlej River and then, perhaps, southward to the Indian Ocean, east of the main course of the Indus itself. Outside the Indus system a few sites occur on the Makran Coast, the westernmost of which is at Sutkagen Dor, near the present-day frontier with Iran. These sites were probably ports or trading posts, supporting the sea trade with the Persian Gulf, and were established in what otherwise remained a largely separate cultural region. The uplands of Baluchistan, while showing clear evidence of trade and contact with the Indus civilization, appear to have remained outside the direct Harappan rule.

To the east of the Indus delta, other coastal sites are found beyond the marshy salt flats of the Rann of Kachchh (Kutch) and in the interior of the Kathiawar Peninsula (Saurashtra). These include the estuarine trading post at Lothal on the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), as well as many other sites, some of which are major. West of the Indus River a number of important sites are situated on the alluvial Kachchhi desert region of Balochistan, Pakistan, toward Sibi and Quetta. East of the Indus system, toward the north, a number of sites occur right up to the edge of the Himalayan foothills, where at Alamgirpur, north of Delhi, the easternmost Harappan (or perhaps, more properly, Late Harappan) settlement has been discovered and partly excavated. If the area covered by these sites is compared with that of the Early Harappan settlements, it will be seen that there is an expansion in several directions, along the coast to both the west and the east and eastward through the Punjab toward the Ganges-Yamuna Doab.

Planning and architecture

The Harappan sites range from extensive cities to small villages or outposts. The two largest are Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, each perhaps originally about a mile square in overall dimensions. Each shares a characteristic layout, oriented roughly north-south with a great fortified “citadel” mound to the west and a larger “lower city” to the east. A similar layout is also discernible in the somewhat smaller town of Kalibangan, and several other major settlements appear to have shared this scheme. Other major sites include Dholavira and Surkotada near the Rann of Kachchh; Nausharo Firoz in Balochistan, Pakistan; Shortughai in northern Afghanistan; Amri, Chanhu-daro, and Judeirjo-daro in Sind; and Sandhanawala in Bahawalpur. Among the smaller sites, special interest attaches to Lothal, where a number of unique and problematic features were discovered in excavations. Of all the sites, Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Kalibangan, and Lothal have been most extensively excavated, and more can be said of their original layout and planning. Thus, they are considered in greater detail below.

At three of the excavated major sites, the citadel mound is on a north-south axis and about twice as long as it is broad. The lower city is laid out in a grid pattern of streets; at Kalibangan these were of regularly controlled widths, with the major streets running through, while the minor lanes were sometimes offset, creating different sizes of blocks. At all three sites the citadel was protected by a massive defensive wall of brick, which at Kalibangan was strengthened at intervals by square or rectangular bastions. At Kalibangan, traces of a somewhat less substantial wall around the lower town have also been discovered. In all three cases the city was situated near a river, although these courses are now extinct.

The most common building material at every site was brick, but the proportions of burned brick to unburned mud brick vary. Mohenjo-daro employs burned brick, perhaps because timber was more readily available, while mud brick was reserved for fillings and mass work. Kalibangan, on the other hand, reserved burned brick for bathrooms, wells, and drains. Most of the domestic architecture at Kalibangan was in mud brick. Brick was generally bonded in courses of alternate headers and stretchers—the so-called English bond. Stone was rarely, if ever, employed structurally. Timber was occasionally used as a lacing for brickwork, particularly in large-scale work such as the defenses or the granary at Mohenjo-daro. The common bricks were made in an open mold, but for special purposes sawed bricks were also employed. Timber was used for the universal flat roofs, and in some instances the sockets indicate square-cut beams with spans of as much as 14 feet (4.5 metres).

The houses were invariably entered from the side lanes, with the walls to the main streets presenting a blank brick facade broken only by the drainage chutes. Apart from domestic structures, a wide range of shops and craft workshops have been encountered, including potters’ kilns, dyers’ vats, and the shops of metalworkers, shell workers, and bead makers. There is surprisingly little evidence of public places of worship, although at Mohenjo-daro a number of possible temples were unearthed in the lower city, and other buildings of a ritual character were reported in the citadel. The size of houses varies considerably. At the one extreme are single-roomed barracks, with cooking and bathing areas formed within by partition walls, and at the other are large houses around a central courtyard or sometimes with a set of intersecting courtyards, each with its own adjoining rooms. Nearly all the larger houses had private wells. In many cases brick stairways led to what must have been upper stories or flat roofs. The bathrooms were usually indicated by the fine quality of the brickwork in the floor and by waste drains.

Important sites

Mohenjo-daro

The mounds of Mohenjo-daro lie near the right bank of the Indus in the Larkana district of Sind province. The excavations revealed that the lowest level of former occupation was covered by deposits of alluvial silt to a depth of about 30 feet (10 metres), attributable to annual flooding. The lowest levels are thus below the present-day water table and are still largely unexcavated. As noted above, the main features of the layout of Mohenjo-daro are a citadel to the west and a lower city and grid of streets to the east. Enough has been said of the general features of the lower city to make it unnecessary to say more of the considerable areas excavated in that part. The citadel, however, demands further attention. In the citadel the English archaeologist Sir John Hubert Marshall discovered a massive platform of mud brick and clay approximately 20 feet (6 metres) in depth, above which were six main building levels. Under this platform lay the remains of the early period. It is probable, but by no means certain, that the platform was raised as protection against floods. Both it and the great brick defensive wall around the perimeter were built at the beginning of the intermediate period.

The main buildings of the citadel all apparently belong to the same period. The most striking of these is the Great Bath, which occupies a central position in the better-preserved northern half of the citadel. It is built of fine brickwork, measures 897 square feet (83 square metres), and is 8 feet (2.5 metres) lower than the surrounding pavement. The floor of the bath consists of two skins of sawed brick set on edge in gypsum mortar, with a layer of bitumen sealer sandwiched between the skins. Water was evidently supplied by a large well in an adjacent room, and an outlet in one corner of the bath led to a high corbeled drain disgorging on the west side of the mound. The bath was reached by flights of steps at either end, originally finished with timbered treads set in bitumen. The significance of this extraordinary structure can only be guessed at, but it has generally been thought that it is linked with some sort of ritual bathing. To the north and east of the bath were groups of rooms that evidently were also designed for some special function, probably associated with the group of administrators or priests who controlled not only the city but also the great state that it dominated. To the west of the bath a complex of brick platforms about 5 feet (1.5 metres) high and separated from each other by narrow passages formed a podium of some 150 by 75 feet (45 by 22 metres), which has been identified by Wheeler as the base of a great granary similar to that known at Harappa. Below the granary were brick loading bays. In the southern part of the mound an oblong “assembly hall” was discovered, having four rows of fine brick plinths, presumably to take wooden columns. In a room adjacent to this hall, a stone sculpture of a seated male figure was discovered, and nearby a number of large worked-stone rings, possibly of some architectural significance. It seems certain that this area was invested with some special significance and may well have been a temple or connected with some religious cult.