by Tony Joseph
This continuity shows that the people who built one of the earliest, largest and most remarkable civilizations of the ancient world did not suddenly appear from elsewhere; they were here for long and they built it from scratch. The earlier assumption that the Harappan Civilization was an offshoot of the Mesopotamian Civilization has, therefore, been proved wrong (the Mesopotamian Civilization lasted from around 4000 BCE to arguably 330 BCE when the region was conquered by Alexander, and it spanned Iraq, Kuwait, northern Saudi Arabia, south-eastern Turkey, eastern Syria and parts of Iran). There are no mysteries about the development of the Harappan Civilization that would be solved by the assumed migration of later-day city builders from Mesopotamia.
Of course, as we saw in chapter 2, the people of the Harappan Civilization were themselves a mixture of agriculturists from the Zagros mountains of Iran and the descendants of the First Indians. But that admixture happened millennia before the first cities of the Harappan Civilization went up and, therefore, it would make no sense to describe the population as anything but South Asian – just as it would make no sense to treat Asian, European and American civilizations as African since all modern humans originally came from there.
This is not to say that there were no contacts between the Mesopotamian Civilization and the Harappan Civilization. The significant trade relations between the two have left behind many archaeological footprints and there are symbolic or cultural artefacts which clearly show influences that run both ways. For example, there are Mesopotamian seals that show the water buffalo, a natural resident of the Indus Valley and not Mesopotamia. In one Mesopotamian seal, a hero grapples with a buffalo, while in another, nude heroes slake the thirst of water buffaloes. Both seals belong to the period of the Akkadian emperor Sargon.
Imprint of an Akkadian period Mesopotamian cylinder seal (ca. 2350–2000 BCE). The seal depicts two kneeling nude heroes holding vessels from which spurts water to quench the thirst of two buffaloes.
Left: An Akkadian period Mesopotamian cylinder seal, ca. 2250–2150 BCE. Right: Impression of the cylinder seal. On the left of the impression is a bull-man in combat with a lion. On the right is a bearded nude hero subduing a water buffalo that is standing on its hind legs.
Asko Parpola, author and emeritus professor of South Asian studies at the University of Helsinki, explains it this way: ‘It has been plausibly suggested that Harappans brought some water buffaloes from the Indus Valley by ship, given that Sargon boasts that ships came from far-off Meluhha to his new capital, Akkad.’ Meluhha was the name by which the Harappan Civilization was known to the west Asians and there are many references to it in Mesopotamian records – including an inscription on a cylinder seal that reads ‘Su-ilisu, interpreter of the Meluhhan language’.
There is also evidence of elephants, rhinoceroses and peacocks reaching Mesopotamia from Meluhha. And it was not just animals and birds. Mario Liverani, professor of ancient Near East history at the Sapienza University of Rome, says sesame, a plant of South Asian origin, came to Mesopotamia via the Indus Valley, and was acclimatized to the new environment as a summer crop. ‘Seasonally it ?tted well with cereal cultivation, which took place in the winter,’ writes Liverani in Uruk: The First City.
On the other hand, there are five seals from Mohenjo-daro and six moulded tablets from Harappa depicting a hero holding off two tigers on his right and left with bare hands, and these are strikingly similar to the seals of Mesopotamia and the mythology around the Sumerian king Gilgamesh.1 In the Mesopotamian seals, the king is usually holding off lions instead of tigers in the same manner, but there are no depictions of lions in the Harappan Civilization. It is, of course, possible – as the archaeologist and author Jonathan Mark Kenoyer argues – that the tale of a hero dealing with ferocious animals in this manner is a myth that predates both civilizations and goes back to the hunter-gatherer period, and that both the Mesopotamians and the Harappans were interpreting this in their own manner in their artefacts.
The way in which some men in both Harappan and Mesopotamian sculptures wear their upper cloth is also strikingly similar, with the robe being drawn over their left shoulder and under the right arm, leaving the right shoulder bare. The distinctive trefoil design (a three-leaf clover) on the robe worn by the Priest King, one of the most magnificent sculptures recovered from Mohenjo-daro, is found in Mesopotamia as well. Says Asko Parpola in The Roots of Hinduism, ‘West Asian gods and divine kings had festive clothes with golden stars, rosettes and so forth sewn on to them, which were known in Sumerian and Akkadian as “sky garments” . . . The cloak of the “priest-king” statue from Mohenjodaro is clearly a form of “sky-garment” decorated with trefoils, originally filled with red paste.’
A dagger with an ivory handle and flint blade from Egypt, ca. 2750 BCE, perhaps showing contemporary Mesopotamian influence. The bearded figure of a priest-king wears Mesopotamian clothing and is flanked on both sides by lions he is subduing.
A Harappan Civilization seal depicting a man subduing tigers on his right and left
The hairstyle of some men on the Harappan sculptures – the plaited double bun or chignon – is also found in Mesopotamian sculptures, including one of Emperor Sargon himself in the city of Susa. The Dutch archaeologist Elisabeth C.L. During Caspers describes the hairstyle thus: ‘The hair is dressed in a bun, which is then secured horizontally, by means of a ribbon or hair-slide of some sort, resulting in the division of hair into two protuberances one above the other.’2
But these possible proofs of cultural interaction and influence both ways do not change the fact that the Harappan Civilization in its essence was unique and significantly different from the civilization to its west.
A fragment of the ‘Stele of Vultures’ from Mesopotamia, ca. 2450 BCE. This stele to commemorate the victory of a Sumerian city state against its neighbour depicts two men (top right and bottom right) wearing their hair in a double-bun style.
A sculpture from Mohenjo-daro depicting a man wearing his hair in a double-bun style.
A civilization like no other
Let us count the ways in which it is so. Unlike the Mesopotamians with their monumental ziggurats (houses for the patron gods and goddesses of each city), the Harappans have nothing that can be identified as grand temples or even large ritual places. Thirty-two ziggurats have been discovered so far in Mesopotamia – twenty-eight in Iraq and four in Iran – but not even a single structure has been clearly identified as a temple in the vast expanse of the Harappan Civilization.
Neither were there clearly recognizable palaces for the kings in the Harappan Civilization, again quite unlike in Mesopotamia. The Harappans also did not set up sculptures glorifying kings and their exploits, unlike in the civilization to its west. Even the well-known and skilfully carved Priest King sculpture of Mohenjo-daro is no more than seventeen and a half centimetres in height and eleven centimetres in width! And there is no way to even tell whether it represents a king or a priest or a nobleman. Most archaeologists would only go as far as to say that the sculpture might represent a prominent member of the ruling elite of Mohenjo-daro.
Bust of the priest-king from Mohenjo-daro. He is depicted wearing a trefoil-patterned robe and a ribbon headband with a central ornament as well as an ornament on his upper arm.
What about elaborate funerals for the royals, a major feature of west Asia and Egypt? No, there are no signs of ostentatious and elaborate funerals for anyone in the Harappan Civilization, and no pyramids for departed leaders either as in Egypt. In Mesopotamia, the royals were buried with enormous hoards of precious jewellery, artefacts and sometimes even their servants – all to meet their corporeal needs in the afterlife. In the Harappan Civilization, by contrast, burials are often accompanied by pottery containing food for the afterlife and not much more, though people were often interred with their personal ornaments. There is nothing remotely suggestive of the kind of royal funerals that seem to have been common in west Asia. The historian Shereen Ratnagar says in Understanding
Harappa that graves had an average of fifteen pots, with some provision of food and drink for the departed, including joints of meat. The pottery found in the graves included lavishly painted dishes on stands, squat, bulging jars and S-profile jars. Ornaments were never in profusion, and tools were few.
If you think this is because Harappans didn’t know how to make precious jewellery and artefacts you would be wrong! Quite a few pieces of jewellery and ornaments found in the royal burials of west Asia came from the Harappan Civilization. In fact, jewellery made of carnelian, turquoise, lapis lazuli and other precious stones and shells was a major item of export for the Harappans and its cities had lots of workshops for making it. It is just that the Harappans, like the Chinese, preferred to hand down their precious possessions to their descendants rather than bury them. When people got tired of their heirlooms, they probably recycled them to make new items too.
This is, of course, bad news for archaeologists and historians. The royal burials of west Asia and the pyramids of Egypt have been enormously helpful in bringing alive that period of world history. By contrast, precious items and even bronze and other metal items are under-represented in the Harappan Civilization because archaeologists can find them only in those rare circumstances where ancient individuals buried their treasures, often in their own houses, and then failed to recover them for whatever reason. Sometimes, archaeologists also stumble upon items that have ended up in the trash heap or have been lost in the streets. As you can imagine, such artefacts cannot match the richness and variety of royal burials intended to provide the dead with enough resources for their afterlife.
A striking feature of the Harappan Civilization that sets it apart from its contemporaries is the lack of representation of violence between humans. There are many Harappan seals that depict violence, but these involve supernatural beings in conflict with each other or humans attacking animals or humans and supernatural beings in combat, not humans in conflict with other humans.
There is one seal that is an exception to this rule, though, and in it two men, with hair worn in the double-bun style, are spearing each other, while they are both being held by the hand by a female figure, perhaps a deity, wearing a headdress with a long pendant. It could also be that they are holding the female figure by the hand, rather than the other way around. This has been interpreted variously as a conflict over a woman or even as a scene of human sacrifice.
This near absence of representation of human-on-human violence is also reflected in the lack of evidence of war weaponry such as battleaxes or swords. The weapons that the Harappans had were spears, knives and arrows, all necessary for hunting animals or even winning a fight with a rival, but perhaps not sufficient for war, says Kenoyer, who also points out that in the 700 years of the Harappan Civilization’s existence – between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE – there is no evidence that any of its cities were attacked or burnt down.
Imprint of a cylinder seal from Kalibangan depicting a woman standing between two men who are about to spear each other.
Public infrastructure, not private palaces
Now that we know what the Harappans did not have, let us look at what they had that was unique to them. What did they excel in? Here’s a partial list.
To begin with, they had well-planned cities with neatly laid out streets and residences that were often, though not always, in a north–south and east–west grid-like pattern. They had highly evolved water management technology that hasn’t been seen anywhere else in the ancient world, with Dholavira in Gujarat being an outstanding example. With scanty monsoon rains, and two seasonal streams on either side, Dholavira did everything it could to make its water last, including damming the streams. Inside the fortified walls of the city, it had many interconnected reservoirs, with the eastern reservoir (seventy-four metres long, twenty-six metres wide and seven metres deep) being the largest of its kind in the ancient world. It also had underground storage systems. The storm water drain at Dholavira was made of dressed stone and was more than five feet in height, and you can walk inside it. All these used the natural incline of the site to regulate the flow of water from one place to another.
The Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro
The 700-odd wells and the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro in Sindh also stand testimony to the unique attention the Harappans paid to water. Residents of Harappa, who lived in houses (some of them two storeys high or more) with rooms arranged around a central courtyard, had separate channels for water supply and for sewage disposal. On this topic it is worth quoting the historian Upinder Singh from her book A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India:
A reservoir with steps leading into it, Dholavira
Many houses or groups of houses had separate bathing areas and toilets. Bathing platforms with drains were often located in rooms next to a well. The floor of the bathing area was usually made of tightly fitted bricks, frequently set on edge, to make a carefully sloped watertight surface. A small drain led from here, cut through the house wall, and went out into the street, connecting ultimately with a larger sewage drain . . .
Recent excavations in Harappa have uncovered toilets in almost every house. The commodes were made of big pots sunk into the floor, many of them associated with a small, lota-type jar, no doubt for washing up. Most of the pots had a small hole in the base through which water could seep into the ground . . .
The drainage system of Mohenjo-daro
Singh mentions that archaeologists found ‘lotas’ at the bottom of the internal latrines that the homes were provided with, suggesting that the way South Asians wash themselves hasn’t changed all that much – even if many South Asians today do not have the indoor facilities that the Harappans enjoyed. And not just the residents. Kenoyer says there were bathing platforms and public wells for the convenience of visitors and traders too in Harappa. No contemporary civilization, whether Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Chinese, had anything similar on offer when it came to public conveniences for residents or guests.
Even more striking than the civic amenities, perhaps, is another feat of the Harappans: uniform weights. Across the length and breadth of this largest of civilizations there was only one way to weigh materials, using standardized cubic weights made of chert (a type of rock). The cities of Mesopotamia, by contrast, had a medley of weighing systems, differing both by region and by the commodity that was to be weighed. By avoiding unnecessary conversions between different weighing standards when traders moved from one city to another, the Harappans must have significantly reduced the transaction costs of business. If there were an ‘ease of doing business’ ranking in the third millennium BCE, the Harappans would have been front runners, along with the Egyptians perhaps, who also had a similar, standardized weighing system.
Balance scale and weights from the Harappan Civilization
As ubiquitous as the weights in Harappan cities were the bangles – hundreds of thousands of them. If you think bangles are nothing unique, you would be wrong. As Kenoyer says, ‘If I call my friends in Egypt and ask them how many bangles did you excavate, they may say, a dozen or one or two. In China, you may find one or two. In Mesopotamia, you may find a few. But in the Indus Valley, we find hundreds of thousands of bangles. They were distinctive ornaments and they were for both females and males.’
We can go on listing an endless variety of things that are unique to the Harappans and are still clearly recognizable as ‘Indian’ by us in the twenty-first century – from seals that show veneration for the peepul tree to the ‘handi’ or the cooking pot ‘with a ridge on the top that deflects the fire so that the ridge doesn’t get hot and you can pick it up’, as Kenoyer explains. The pottery styles differed across Harappan cities, but the ‘handi’ design was so popular that these cooking pots could be found everywhere.
A bangle from the Harappan Civilization
Perhaps the most important distinction of the Harappan Civilization was its sheer size – at its height, it may have covered almost a million square kilometres, more than the M
esopotamian and Egyptian civilizations combined. The Harappan Civilization is also likely to have had the largest population of any contemporary civilization – which is not surprising, considering that we were the largest modern human population even as far back as 20,000 years ago, as we saw in chapter 1. South Asia being the centre of modern human population is not a new phenomenon – it is just an ancient track record that we continue to maintain.
To get a sense of how big an area the civilization occupied, remember that today’s India covers about three million square kilometres. The Harappan Civilization covered about a third of that. Imagine what it would have taken to knit together such a large civilization through common standards of weights, seals, script, city design and even burnt bricks which had a uniform height to width to length ratio of 1:2:4. And all this without modern methods of communication and travel. Despite the geographical range of the civilization, it seems to have been less conflict-prone than its western counterparts.
Was it also less unequal than its western counterparts? The answer to that is not clear. The lack of palaces and ostentatious burials could suggest a less unequal society, but the unequal sizes of residences in the cities and the importance of status goods such as precious jewellery suggest otherwise. Most historians today believe that the Harappan Civilization was held together by an ‘elite group’ rather than one powerful king controlling the different ‘city states’.
So whichever way you look, the Harappan Civilization seems to have sprung from very different impulses and instincts than other contemporary civilizations and the Harappans seem to have made different choices about the kind of society they wanted to live in. But how did a collection of farming villages evolve into something that can be called a civilization? And what exactly do we mean by ‘civilization’ anyway? Why do we often proclaim that the Indian civilization is about 5000 years old and not, say, 9000 years old when agriculture began, or, say, about 2300 years old when the Mauryas built the first Indian empire?