The Bolan pass connects the western side of the Indus valley with the highlands of Baluchistan and beyond. Mehrgarh nestles at the foot of the pass on the alluvial Kachi plains beside the Bolan river. It is a well-chosen spot: sheltered location; plenty of water; good for agriculture; and good as a transit point for any trade or travel that is going on between the mountains on one side and the lowlands and the Arabian Sea on the other. Mehrgarh is far enough from the coast – about 500 kilometres – to have been safe from oceanic inundation (still an issue 9000 years ago with one further major episode of global superfloods yet to come). Moreover, although rugged, Baluchistan is not high enough to have supported an ice-cap during the last glaciation. Other than occasional unavoidable flooding of the Bolan river, we may therefore speculate that Mehrgarh would have enjoyed a moderate climate threatened by no obvious environmental or geological hazards when it was founded around 9000 years ago.
So it’s easy to see why those first inhabitants – who were already farmers and clearly knew a thing or two about agricultural land – chose to settle at Mehrgarh rather than somewhere else. What is not so clear is whether there was any special motive or purpose or plan or inspiration behind the settlement or whether it is just to be seen the way scholars usually portray it – i.e. as part of some general, haphazard ‘trend’ towards sedentarization and intensified food production in north-west India that had in some vague way been prompted by climate change.
Mehrgarh is extensive, running north to south along the west bank of the Bolan river in a strip up to a kilometre wide and more than two kilometres long – although not all sectors were occupied at the same time. The Period 1 material is clustered towards the northern end of the site, where it is estimated to cover an area of approximately 3–4 hectares. Of this only a very small proportion (75 square metres) has as yet been excavated.14
One of the several things about Mehrgarh that I find puzzling, given the generally high level of development and discipline shown by its people from the beginning, is that the first settlers either did not know how to make pottery, or for some inexplicable reason chose not to use it. At any rate no pottery has been found in the earliest occupation layer (Period 1A) dated to around 9000 years ago; it begins to show up in Period 1B, about a thousand years later.15
This ‘aceramic’ phase suggests that Mehrgarh’s first inhabitants must have been relatively unsophisticated; however, other evidence – notably concerning their competence as builders – contradicts this view. From the outset, for example, they built with well-made mud bricks of regular size (33 × 14.5 × 7 centimetres)16 and oriented certain structures to the cardinal directions.17 Many of the structures are simple dwellings with relatively strong walls made out of two courses of bricks laid side by side and with floors on which the ancient impressions of reeds can sometimes still be made out. The average size of these dwellings is small, just 5 by 4 metres, and yet they are frequently subdivided into several small rooms:18
Plan of Compartmented buildings at Mehrgarh. Based on Rao (1991)
Ovens and hearths … were usually found in the corners of rooms and signs of their use can be seen as traces of smoke on the plastered walls. One circular oven was lined with bricks and had a dome [like the tandoor ovens of Pakistan and northern India today] which was traced in its collapsed condition.19
Some of the Mehrgarh structures bear a striking family resemblance to much later buildings of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization – notably the so-called ‘Granary’ of Mohenjodaro, which has numerous narrow, cell-like compartments and has been interpreted as a storage facility.20 The same interpretation has been given by the French archaeological team to ‘Structure B’ at Mehrgarh, which measures:
6.3 metres by 6.7 metres, is oriented north-south, and is made up of six rectangular rooms. Three rooms measure 2.25 metres by 1.5 metres and the other three 3.3 metres by 1.5 metres. No doorways between rooms were found even though there are two, three or four preserved courses of bricks. The walls were made of two rows of bricks … The floors of five of the rooms were covered with pebbles (three rooms were completely covered with them).21
There are traces of many other compartmented structures at Mehrgarh from several successive periods in the life of the town. Some of them are preserved up to a height of more than 15 courses of bricks and in none of them have doors or windows been found. The cell units are often no larger than 1 square metre and it is presumed that they must have been entered through their roofs.22
Diagram of cell units at Mehrgarh. Based on Quivron (1991).
So, although they did not make pottery, the very first inhabitants of Mehrgarh did make a range of brick buildings – and these look like the work of people who knew what they were doing. The compartmented structures may not have been ‘granaries’ – there’s no definite evidence – but, whatever they were, they clearly had a function and were built according to some sort of protocol. Such a protocol must, logically, have antedated the foundation of Mehrgarh in order to feature in an already developed form in the oldest habitation layers there.
The first people of Mehrgarh were accomplished farmers, from the beginning, as Gregory Possehl has pointed out. They grew domesticated wheat and barley, still two of the principal food grains of northern India today.23 In their suite of crops they also included other carefully chosen domesticates: lentils, peas and chickpeas:
The pulses, annual legumes cultivated for their seed, are an especially interesting group of plants because they are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen in symbiosis with the bacterium Rhizobium found on their roots. They add nitrogen to the soil, rather than consume it, and if these plants are rotated and mixed with the food grains, higher yields are achieved through increased soil fertility.24
Because agricultural knowledge like this ought to take centuries, maybe millennia, to build up, Gregory Possehl is not alone amongst archaeologists in his conviction that Mehrgarh does not represent the beginnings of the food-producing tradition in north India but an already developed stage of it.
There is also evidence that the domestication of wild species of goats, sheep and cattle was undertaken by Mehrgarh’s first settlers, with great success, as though this was something else that they already understood how to do from experience that they had acquired in another location. Moreover, they seem to have arrived at Mehrgarh with this animal-domestication programme already in mind and in the initial years supplemented their diet with hunting on the Kachi plains (gazelle, swamp-deer, blackbuck, wild pig, elephant, etc.) while the development of their domesticated herds was underway. ‘What we see at Mehrgarh,’ concludes Possehl,
is a sequence of events that seems to document the local domestication of animals. The sheep, goats and cattle start out looking wild, and were manipulated … Over time the potential domesticates came to look like domesticated animals (smaller, with the osteological hallmarks of domesticated beasts) … The contribution of domestic or ‘pro-domestic’ stock to the faunal assemblages came to surpass that of other animals early in the aceramic.25
I note in passing that the food-production sequences that archaeologists have been able to piece together at Mehrgarh show a good level of fit with the Manu story – which, unlike the Noah story, says nothing about animals on the Ark, but which does tell us that the archetypal Indian flood survivor brought on board, ‘carefully preserved and assorted, all the seeds which have been described of old’.26
Other materials excavated at Mehrgarh add to our understanding of its first settlers: they used small amounts of copper ‘thought to be of the native variety, not smelted’; their primary tools, fashioned from flint, include sickle blades bearing the characteristic sheen imparted when such blades are used to harvest crops; they wove textiles; they made baskets, sometimes waterproofing them with bitumen; they fashioned awls, spatulas and needles from bone; they also possessed a well-developed bead-making industry producing tiny disc-shaped beads in black steatite, barrel-shaped beads in calcite and bangles of polished conch shell;27 Dentalium shells –
long, hollow tubes that form natural beads – have likewise been found in Mehrgarh. These shells are endemic to the Gulf of Cambay.28 There is also evidence of contact with coastal areas ‘and long distance trade networks as attested by the presence of marine shells, lapis lazuli, and turquoise in even the earliest graves’.29
Mention of these earliest graves raises another mystery that surrounds the first inhabitants and founders of Mehrgarh. Unlike later occupants of the site, they buried their dead with great care and ceremony. The bodies were carefully arranged in a ‘flexed’ or embryonic posture, oriented with the head towards the east and the feet towards the west,30 surrounded by personal effects and sometimes by offerings of food and drink for sustenance on what was clearly believed to be some form of afterlife journey of the soul.31 Such burials – 166 graves in total – began right at the start of aceramic Period 1A and were sustained over more than a thousand years down to Period 11A before gradually being abandoned.32 A particularly interesting ‘side-wall’ grave from Period IB contained the remains of an adult male or female
alongside a very eroded wall. At the feet were a polished stone axe, a large flint core, a piece of a red ochre lump, a bovine bone, and two fragments of a double-pointed bone tool, a third fragment of which lay in front of the thorax and provides evidence for the intentional breaking of the tool before burial. Also associated were two turquoise beads (as a belt) and other bovine bone fragments.33
Ritual burials of this nature, with more or less elaborate grave goods, were conducted again and again in the early years of Mehrgarh. The practice is firmly established at the beginning, with a number of distinct conventions in place concerning the style and orientation of the grave and the types of objects and ornaments interred with the deceased. All of this suggests a complex religious and funerary culture – one that must already have been in use by Mehrgarh’s first inhabitants when they established the site.
But in use for how long? And where? Where did the mature religion with afterlife beliefs that we get a glimpse of at Mehrgarh 9000 years ago have its origins?
Although most archaeologists consider the origins of Indian agriculture to lie either in the Near East or in the sub-Himalayan piedmont region, there is one discordant observation about the first settlers which raises doubt. Although the observation was published in 1983 in the peer-reviewed journal Current Anthropology, and although its validity has not been challenged by any of the archaeologists working at Mehrgarh, it seems that no scholar has yet got fully to grips with what it could mean.
The observation, arising from research conducted by dental morphology specialist John Luckacs, concerns ‘the high frequency of shovel-shaped incisors among the inhabitants of Mehrgarh Period I. This is a distinctive feature of populations of eastern and southeastern Asia.’34 According to Luckacs, the teeth of the Period I inhabitants of Mehrgarh
contrast strongly with the European dental complex [generally found in India and in the neighbourhood of Mehrgarh from antiquity] and share several dental features common with the Sundadont pattern … The Neolithic people of Mehrgarh may represent the western margin of South-Southeast Asian phenotypic dental pattern known as Sundadont.35
Though passed off in a low-key manner, the implications of this discovery are actually quite extraordinary – since the way overland from south-east Asia to north-west India is very long indeed and since the Sundadont characteristics found at Mehrgarh have never been observed anywhere else in the subcontinent.36 Moreover, south-east Asia’s extensive Sunda Shelf – the home of Sundadont teeth and a continent-sized landmass above water at the Last Glacial Maximum – was submerged in several rapid stages between 16,000 and 11,000 years ago.
The implications seem obvious at first, i.e. that forced out of their original homes (where they had established agriculture, religion, etc.) by the flooding of the Sunda Shelf, the first settlers somehow sailed all the way from southeast Asia to the north-west coast of India then sailed up the Indus and then finally crossed overland to the foot of the Bolan pass, where they founded Mehrgarh. Yet the teeth don’t warrant such a large conclusion. They are not pure Sundadont but rather ‘share several dental features in common with the Sundadont pattern’ and are more likely to have come from some intermediate place – though where that might have been cannot be guessed from the dental evidence alone.
Besides, if flooding is to be cited as the reason why settlers – hypothetically – would have left the Sunda Shelf and sailed to India, then why do we need to look so far afield when we have half a million square kilometres of good land to the north, south and east of Gujerat that was inundated during the same period? Aren’t hypothetical flood refugees much more likely to have reached Mehrgarh from there, less than a thousand kilometres away, than from distant Indonesia or Malaysia on the Sunda Shelf?
At the very least, the similarities to the Sundadont pattern seen in the teeth of Mehrgarh’s Period I people do seem to rule out any possibility that they had migrated to Mehrgarh overland from the west. As Jonathan Kennoyer confirms:
They do not have strong morphological relationships to known Neolithic populations of West Asia. On the contrary their dental morphology associates them with a distinctively Asian gene pool.37
The mystery of who exactly it was who founded Mehrgarh therefore remains unsolved to this day, and the whole issue has been somewhat neglected – perhaps because of its potential to cause controversy. Scholars also continue to have no idea as to what it was that brought the settlers to Mehrgarh in the first place, though they seem to have arrived with a definite plan and purpose in mind. Last but not least, we should not draw conclusions about the state of mental and intellectual development of the first inhabitants from the rather simple and austere nature of their homes, their tools and their lifestyle. This ‘archaeological assemblage’ is consistent with the orthodox historical model of how people at the threshold of sedentarized food production should have looked and behaved when they set up their first permanent settlements.38 But Mehrgarh is also consistent with another model – the model that is suggested in the Rig Veda of a society established by yogic sages to meet simple needs with great efficiency, but showing no interest in material luxuries or excesses that might lure humans away from the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and the immortal destiny of the soul.
Rising seas and melting ice-caps
Mehrgarh Period I takes us back to about 9000 years ago, but the radiocarbon results are frequently confusing,39 ‘the stratigraphy at the site is extremely complex’,40 and because of the margins of inaccuracy that apply to any attempt to date sites as old as this one it is by no means inconceivable that Mehrgarh may in fact be closer to 10,000 than to 9000 years old.41
I decided to find out more about what had been happening in the northwestern Himalayas in the millennia leading up to the foundation of Mehrgarh, during the catastrophic meltdown at the end of the last Ice Age. It was at this time, immediately following ‘the retreat of the last great continental glaciers’, as Possehl puts it, that the food-producing explosion began in north-west India. But strangely neither he nor any other major scholar looking at the revolutionary cultural developments of that epoch has considered the possibility that the melting glaciers and rising sea-levels were more than just symptoms of generalized climate change and might in some way have been directly connected to the introduction at Mehrgarh of a settled agricultural way of life that was apparently new to the subcontinent.
We’ve already seen how dramatically India’s coasts were inundated after 15,000 years ago. But what about the ‘supply’ end of the rising sea-level equation? What about the ice-caps, in runaway meltdown as glaciers collapsed, that sent huge floods roaring down from the mountains to fill up the oceans? If there were cataclysmic outburst floods from glacial lakes in North America and in Europe, then why not in the Himalayas too?
Double meanings
The language of the Rig Veda, even after its passage from a spoken, oral tradition to a written Sankrit tradition, an
d after its more recent transformation from ancient Sanskrit into modern and often prosaic English, remains intensely mysterious – filled with symbols, metaphors and riddles that sometimes seem to have been designed to blur the borderline between image and reality, between the symbol and the thing symbolized.
A small but possibly significant example of this concerns the use of certain Sanskrit words in the Manu story with what can only have been the deliberate intention of exploiting ambiguities and innuendoes in their meaning. This is surely the case, argues David Frawley, with the Vedic word for ‘boat’ – nau – which also means ‘word’ or ‘Divine Word’, while the word for ‘thought’, dhi, also means ‘vessel’.42 Such puns could offer a rational explanation for the improbable image of a ship marooned in the Himalayas that the Manu story leaves us with. For example, although the words used speak literally of a ship attached to the peak of a high snow-covered mountain, the relevant passages could very easily have been intended to suggest that the ‘word’ – the revealed ‘Divine Word’, i.e., the Vedas themselves – had been brought to the Himalayas for safekeeping in the memories of the Seven Sages. That would make sense of the caution supposedly given to the refugees by Vishnu that the ‘ship/word’ should not be allowed to descend from the mountains too fast lest the waters sweep it away. Perhaps the community of Sages that is hinted at in the texts decided to stay for a long time in retreat in the Himalayas, perhaps even for many generations, storing and preserving the seeds of already domesticated varieties of cereals and pulses that they had brought from their homeland until such a moment as they felt it was safe for the ‘Word’ once again to be promulgated amongst men. In this case we should read the term Naubandhana in the Mahabaratha (see chapter 6) not as so much as ‘the place of the binding of the ship’ but as ‘the place of the protection of the Word’.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 25