Indus Valley Civilisation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Indus Valley Civilisation spread across an area larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, yet for thousands of years almost no one knew it had existed. Its baked-brick cities were so thoroughly forgotten that, in the mid-1850s, nearly 100 miles of railway track between Multan and Lahore was laid on a foundation of plundered Harappan bricks. The men carting them away had no idea they were dismantling one of the three earliest civilisations of the Near East and South Asia. This was a Bronze Age world that flourished in the alluvial plain of the Indus River, lasting in its mature form from 2600 to 1900 BCE. It built the first known city sanitation systems, weighed goods on chert cubes accurate to a fraction of an ounce, and traded with Mesopotamia across the sea. Then it vanished. Who ruled these cities, with their grid streets and covered drains? Why did a people who built so carefully leave behind no palaces, no temples, no kings we can name? And what drove them to abandon it all and scatter eastward? The answers begin with a deserter, a forgotten metropolis, and a script that no one has ever read.

• 2. A Deserter And A Survey

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  Charles Masson, a deserter from the East India Company's army, left the first modern accounts of the ruins. In 1829 he travelled through the princely state of Punjab, gathering intelligence for the Company in return for a promise of clemency, and handing over any historical artifacts he found. Versed in the classics, especially the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Masson chose to wander the towns Alexander's chroniclers had described. His major discovery was Harappa, a metropolis on the Ravi River, a tributary of the Indus. Masson filled notebooks with illustrations of artifacts lying half-buried, and in 1842 published his observations in Narrative of Various Journeys in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab. He mistook the ruins for a site from recorded history, wrongly linking them to Alexander's campaign. Alexander Burnes, contracted two years later to sail up the Indus, stopped at Harappa and noted both the baked bricks of its ancient masonry and the haphazard plundering of those bricks by locals. In 1861, three years after Crown rule replaced the East India Company, the Archaeological Survey of India was founded. Its first director-general, Alexander Cunningham, had hoped to prove Harappa was a lost Buddhist city from the seventh-century travels of the Chinese visitor Xuanzang. He failed, but in 1875 he published his findings and interpreted a Harappan stamp seal, concluding its unknown script was foreign to India.

• 3. On The Threshold

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  On the 24th of September 1924, John Marshall made a public announcement in the Illustrated London News that would change the map of the ancient world. "Not often has it been given to archaeologists," he wrote, "as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilisation. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus." Marshall had been appointed to lead the ASI after Lord Curzon pushed through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904. His conviction grew from correspondence with field officers at two sites. At Mohenjo-daro, along the main stem of the Indus in Sind, R. D. Banerji wrote in 1923 of an origin in remote antiquity and noted artifacts matching those at Harappa. Later that year M. S. Vats pointed specifically to the seals and the script shared by both sites. A week after Marshall's announcement, the British Assyriologist Archibald Sayce pointed to very similar seals found in Bronze Age levels in Mesopotamia and Iran, giving the first strong indication of their date. Systematic digging at Mohenjo-daro began in 1924-25 under K. N. Dikshit and continued through the work of Ernest J. H. Mackay between 1927 and 1931. By 1931 much of the city had been uncovered.

• 4. Cities Of Brick And Water

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  Waste water in these cities flowed from a room set aside for bathing into covered drains that lined the major streets. This was the world's first known city sanitation system, seen at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and the partially excavated Rakhigarhi. Individual homes or clusters of homes drew water from wells, and every house had access to water and drainage. Houses opened only onto inner courtyards and smaller lanes. The urban architecture included dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms, and massive protective walls likely built as both flood defences and fortifications. In sharp contrast to Mesopotamia and Egypt, the builders raised no large monumental structures. There is no conclusive evidence of palaces or temples. At one city stands an enormous, well-built bath, the so-called Great Bath, which may have been a public bath. Most city dwellers appear to have been traders or artisans who lived among others of the same occupation in well-defined neighbourhoods. Though some houses were larger than others, the cities were remarkable for their relative egalitarianism, giving the impression of a society with low concentration of wealth. The two largest centres, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, very likely grew to hold between 30,000 and 60,000 people each. By one estimate the whole civilisation at its peak held between one and five million.

• 5. Rulers Without Faces

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  Archaeological records give no immediate answer to who ruled the Harappan cities or how. What survives are signs of complex decisions and the large-scale mobilisation of resources. Most cities were laid out on a highly uniform grid, divided into two levels with one part raised slightly above the other. Such planning, paired with large public works, points to some kind of planning authority. The remarkable consistency of Harappan weights and measures, visible in pottery, seals, weights, and bricks, suggests a central authority able to set definitive regulations. Two major theories compete. In one, a single state or federation ruled all or most of the Indus Valley, the standardised weights and measures serving as the proof. In the other, there was no single ruler, and each city governed itself as an independent city state. The standardisation ran deep into measurement itself. On an ivory scale found at Lothal in Gujarat, the smallest division was roughly 1.704 millimetres, the smallest ever recorded on a Bronze Age scale. Harappan engineers used decimal division, and their hexahedron chert weights followed a ratio in which each unit weighed about 28 grams, close to the English Imperial ounce. The weights and measures later used in Kautilya's Arthashastra, of the fourth century BCE, match those used at Lothal.

• 6. Seals And Silent Symbols

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  Between 400 and as many as 600 distinct symbols have been found pressed onto stamp seals, small tablets, ceramic pots, and a dozen other materials. One appears on a signboard that apparently once hung over the gate of the inner citadel at Dholavira. Most inscriptions run about five characters long, and most are tiny; the longest on any single object, a copper plate, carries 34 symbols. The script has never been deciphered, and it has not even been demonstrated to be a writing system. In a 2009 study published in Science, P. N. Rao and colleagues compared the pattern of symbols to linguistic scripts and to non-linguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language, and found the Indus pattern closer to spoken words. Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel, who in 2004 argued the system did not encode language at all, disputed the finding. The seals themselves are made of steatite, usually pierced at the back to take a cord. One from Mohenjo-daro shows a figure seated cross-legged in a pose some call yoga-like, surrounded by animals. Sir John Marshall saw in it a resemblance to the Hindu god Shiva, and it became known as the Pashupati Seal. Doris Srinivasan later argued the figure has neither three faces nor a yogic posture. The animal on the majority of mature-period seals, part bull and part zebra with a single majestic horn, has never been clearly identified.

• 7. Merchants Of The Gulf

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  Etched carnelian beads, a Harappan-style cubical stone weight, and a Harappan-style cylinder seal turned up at Susa in Iran, hints of trade reaching deep into the late third millennium BCE. The Indus networks economically integrated a huge area taking in parts of Afghanistan, the coastal regions of Persia, northern and western India, and Mesopotamia. Much commerce passed through middlemen merchants from Dilmun, modern Bahrain and the islands of the Persian Gulf. Such sea trade became feasible with plank-built watercraft carrying a single central mast and a sail of woven rushes or cloth. At Lothal, an excavator found a brick basin he claimed was a dockyard, and nearby several heavily pierced stones resembling the anchor stones of traditional Western Indian seafarers. Bridget and Raymond Allchin reported that this dockyard reading has been challenged, with Leshnik suggesting the basin instead held sweet water channelled from inland to an area where local supplies were saline. In the 1980s, discoveries at Ras al-Jinz in Oman demonstrated maritime connections with the Arabian Peninsula. Indus craftspeople even designed products for foreign markets, adapting their work to the taste of foreign elites. Ancient DNA from graves at Gonur Depe in Turkmenistan and Shahr-e Sukhteh in Iran identified 11 individuals of South Asian descent, presumed to be of mature Indus origin.

• 8. Drought And The Scattering

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  Around 1900 BCE the signs of decline began, and by about 1700 BCE most of the cities had been abandoned. Examination of human skeletons from Harappa in the 2010s showed the end of the civilisation brought an increase in inter-personal violence and in infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis. Many scholars trace the collapse to an abrupt and critical mega-drought and cooling 4,200 years ago, the event that marks the onset of the Meghalayan Age. The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed, and its water depended on the monsoons. From about 1800 BCE the climate grew cooler and drier, the monsoon weakened, and floods became erratic and less extensive, making inundation agriculture unsustainable. The IVC residents had never developed irrigation, relying on seasonal monsoon floods. As the monsoons shifted south, people migrated toward the Ganges basin in the east, founding smaller villages and isolated farms. The small surplus there could not support trade, and the cities died out. Yet the people did not simply disappear. After 1900 BCE the number of sites in today's India rose from 218 to 853, by Possehl's count. At Bhagwanpura in Haryana, excavators found Late Harappan pottery overlapping with the earliest Painted Grey Ware, associated with Vedic culture around 1200 BCE. At Pirak in Balochistan, the Harvard archaeologist Richard Meadow notes a settlement that thrived continuously from 1800 BCE until the time of Alexander the Great's invasion in 325 BCE.