by Tony Joseph
The word ‘civilization’ is etymologically connected to ‘city’, so one could say civilization presupposes an urban transition – or an ‘urban revolution’ as Gordon Childe, the prehistorian admiringly called the ‘great synthesizer’, described it in the 1930s. According to Childe, the earliest cities of the world exhibited the following characteristics: a population that is often hundreds of times larger than any village; full-time specialists such as craftsmen, merchants, officials and transport workers; a ruling class that accumulates the surplus production of the peasants; monumental public buildings; systems of recording and writing without which it would be impossible to manage a city; full-time artists – sculptors, painters, seal engravers – who created things in a style that is unique and specific to a particular civilization; and foreign trade to get materials not available locally. Each of these attributes applies to all the major Harappan sites – from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro to Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan.
The first ‘city’ in the world by this definition would be Uruk in Lower Mesopotamia – perhaps better known as the capital city of Gilgamesh, the mythic hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh. At the height of its power, around 3200 BCE, Uruk would have had tens of thousands of people within its walls, much like Harappa or Mohenjo-daro around 2600 BCE.
So when we say the Indian civilization is 5000 years old, what we mean is that the first cities of the Harappan Civilization were going up around then. This is broadly correct, though what is usually called the Mature Harappan phase of the civilization began only around 2600 BCE, that is, about 4600 years ago. It is around this time that the usage of a common script and common seals became prevalent across the cities of the civilization, but many elements that go into the making of a civilization were already in process by then.
For example, we see the first markings on post-fired pottery that would later develop into a script as early as 3300 BCE in Harappa, around the same time when early writing begins in Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. We also see the first massive walls being built around two separate areas adjacent to each other in Harappa around 2800 BCE. It would have taken 450 men around three months to build these walls and these could not have been constructed without the ability to make and transport bricks on a very large scale. There is indeed evidence to suggest that by this time ox carts and bullock carts were in extensive use. There are terracotta toy-cart fragments from Harappa and cartwheels from Girawad in Haryana dated to around 3700 BCE. This is around the same time that wheeled carts start making an appearance in Mesopotamia and elsewhere.
If you want to get a sense of the grandeur that was the Harappan Civilization, the one place in India where you need to go is Dholavira in the Great Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, a seven-hour drive from Ahmedabad or a distance of about 350 kilometres. It is situated on the island of Khadir, surrounded by salt plains, and you have to drive through the stunning landscape of the White Rann to reach there. The long, straight, almost empty road cuts through the flat land, with the sunlight reflecting off the unending terrain of white salt on both sides. You begin to wonder ‘Why did anyone bother to build a city in such a remote place?’ before you remember the answer: what are today salt marshes were about four metres under water when the city was thriving, thus making the city a crucial hub for the Harappan Civilization’s substantial overseas trade with Mesopotamia.
Once you reach Dholavira, you feel you have fallen down a wormhole and have emerged on the other side of space-time. It is the grandest Harappan site on Indian soil and your heart beats faster as you walk around the ruins and see what your ancestors were up to some 4500 years ago (yes, it is right to call them our ancestors, and we will come to that later in this chapter). More than anything else, it is the scale of the ruins and the perfection and robustness of the walls and foundations that are still standing that strikes one. The ruins are spread over nearly 100 hectares, with the fortified city – divided into a ‘citadel’ on a raised platform, a ‘middle town’ and a ‘lower town’ – occupying about half of it.
The ‘citadel’, with its own additional fortification, is further divided into a ‘castle’, which may have been where the ruling elite lived, and a ‘bailey’, which seems to have been the quarters for important officials. Of course, these names were given by archaeologists and we do not know what the residents called them, and we are not even fully sure that the buildings were put to the kind of use that we think they were. For example, there is a large stadium that separates the citadel from the middle town and which has stands for seating spectators. It is reasonable to think that this might have been used for public ceremonies or spectacles of some kind. Of course, it could have been used as a market on some days too. There are also several large reservoirs, three of which have been excavated. Dholavira, like other Harappan sites in Gujarat but unlike sites elsewhere, made extensive use of sandstone in its architecture, along with mud brick. Most Harappan cities, by contrast, are built with sun-baked or fire-burnt bricks.
It is clear that the city was built to a plan (like many other Harappan sites) and did not haphazardly evolve over time. The archaeologist R.S. Bisht, who headed the Dholavira excavation, describes the city thus: ‘Excellent town planning with mathematical precision. The entire site was mapped out and divided into squares and triangles and there was a definite ratio and proportion to each minor or major division.’ The people who conceived of the city and built it seem to have thought and acted on such a scale that after Dholavira went into decline around 1900 BCE, like the rest of the Harappan cities, we had to wait for another millennium and a half or so, until the Mauryas came along, to see architecture of such scale and ambition again.
From farmers to city dwellers
Historians divide the period from the beginnings of agriculture in places such as Mehrgarh (7000 BCE) to the disintegration of the Harappan Civilization (five millennia later) into four broad stages: the Early Food Producing Era (7000–5500 BCE), Regionalization or Early Harappan Era (5500–2600 BCE), Integration or Mature Harappan Era (2600–1900 BCE) and Localization or Late Harappan Era (1900–1300 BCE).
The first stage, the Early Food Producing Era, is easy enough to track. The Mehrgarh settlement lasted from around 7000 BCE to around 2600 BCE, but during this period we can see numerous other settlements springing up. The population was exploding as agriculture spread, which has happened in every part of the world that took to cultivating cereals. Some examples of new agricultural settlements are Kili Gul Mohammed in the Quetta valley, which could have begun around 5000 BCE; Damb Sadaat in Balochistan, which may go back to 3500 BCE; and Mundigak in south-eastern Afghanistan, which dates back to 4000–3500 BCE. Apart from Balochistan and nearby areas the agricultural revolution was taking place in Amri in the Indus plains in Sindh, which goes back to 3600 BCE; Rahman Dheri in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which dates back to 3300 BCE; Kunal and Rakhigarhi in Haryana, which go back to anywhere from 4500 BCE to 3600 BCE; and Bhirrana in Haryana’s Fatehabad district, which goes back even further. Many more such sites today stand as evidence that from around 7000 BCE onward the practice of agriculture was spreading rapidly in north-western India, followed by urbanization.
It would be wrong to think, though, that the population of this rapidly transforming region was formed entirely of settled farmers and city dwellers. The farmers themselves were dependent on some level of hunting and gathering still, but, more importantly, there is clear evidence of nomadic herders living in the same areas. Ratnagar says, ‘Mehrgarh lies on the frontier between Sindh and Balochistan. The lower Indus plain is primarily agricultural, but over much of the broken mountain terrain of Balochistan, it is animal-herding that has prevailed over farming, which latter is confined to the narrow valleys of Balochistan . . . The Kacchi plain is a “permeable frontier” in the sense that pastoralists from the mountains around Kalat, Quetta and Loralai, who need to move their sheep from the snow-bound mountain slopes, descend on the Kacchi plain in November with their tents and animals, and sojour
n amongst the local sedentary agriculturists until about February. They return to the mountains in the warmer weather.’
Even now there are many, like the Brahuis of Balochistan, who continue the pastoral tradition. Many historians believe that pastoralists were crucial participants in the emerging farming economies, both by playing a role in the exchange networks and by conveying plants and animals, new information and new inventions from one place to another, and sometimes even settling down in new areas to become farmers themselves. For many hunter-gatherers in regions far away from the two main river valleys, these nomadic herders would probably have been their first contact with a different way of living.
The next stage, the Regionalization or Early Harappan Era, is also easily graspable from the archaeological records. This is when, as the burgeoning population kept expanding into new areas, regional differences in style and culture began to become evident. Some of the bigger settlements of this period, such as Kalibangan, Banawali and Rahman Dheri, were fortified. The cultural differences were most visible in the pottery styles bearing names such as Hakra, Ravi, Balakot, Amri, Kot Diji, Nal and Sothi. An amateur may perhaps not notice the differences between these pottery types, but an archaeologist will be able to pick them out and classify them even from a jumbled pile.
The most fascinating stage to enquire into, however, is the transition to the Integration Period or the Mature Harappan Era. This is when we see many Harappan sites being newly built or rebuilt and many existing sites being abandoned, thus indicating a major realignment of population and settlements. This is also when we see a higher level of standardization, with a common script, seals, motifs and weights, spreading across the region. Overseas trade with west Asia gained significant momentum during this period as well. ‘In the Mature Harappan period, local or regional culture traditions lost their distinctiveness as the metropolitan material culture engulfed the regions,’ writes Ratnagar in Understanding Harappa.
In A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India, Upinder Singh points out that many Mature Harappan sites had no Early Harappan level, while many early Harappan sites had no Mature Harappan levels. And some of the sites that had both Early Harappan and Mature Harappan levels had some suggestion of an upheaval during the transition – Kot Diji, Gumla, Amri and Nausharo, for instance, had evidence of a major fire or burning between the two levels.
In short, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the transition to the Mature Harappan Era – which archaeologists say happened over a period of four or five generations or 100 to 150 years – could not have happened without a central authority of some kind making decisions that were applied and accepted across the region, by persuasion or otherwise.
The Uruk example
We have a pretty clear idea of what happened during a similar transition at Uruk in Lower Mesopotamia because of the extensive excavations over decades that have thrown up written records relating to administrative and legal matters. In Uruk: The First City Liverani dissects the process in detail.
According to him, it was the need for coordinated group action to create irrigation in southern Lower Mesopotamia that ultimately led to urbanization. The irrigation system was needed because of the specific geography of southern Lower Mesopotamia, as opposed to northern Lower Mesopotamia. The northern region was a valley with narrow fields on both sides of the river, while the southern region was a delta, with broad fields on either side of the river. Irrigation in the valley did not require anything more than occasional ‘submersion’ of the fields from the overflow of the river, something that could be managed by a single family. In the delta, on the other hand, there was a huge opportunity to increase production by creating irrigation canals that took the water from the river to deeper inside, which required coordinated action by groups of people.
Liverani says, ‘The long ?elds therefore required the presence of a central coordinating agency for their planning and management. Once installed, they allowed productivity on a large scale, and they were connected to other innovations.’ These innovations include the seeder plough pulled by two or more pairs of oxen that ploughed the field and also sowed the seeds, and the threshing sledge pulled by an ass. Liverani estimates that canal irrigation combined with the use of animal traction would have increased the production of barley, the main crop, by five to ten times, assuming no change in the number of people employed.
During this period of unprecedented plenty, austerity and equality in society, as depicted by the house sizes and burial practices, remained unchanged. But something else did change: the size of the temples. To quote Liverani:
The moment of the enormous increase in the size of temples and their absolute predominance, when compared to domestic dwellings, corresponds clearly to the transition from the chiefdom to the early state. It is thus in the temple that we must look for the institutional organism that gave rise to the transformation. Its growth is the critical factor, the true structural change that transformed the settlements of Lower Mesopotamia from egalitarian communities to complex organisms . . .
The extraction of resources from the producers, and from consumption within the families, and their diversion towards social services, required a strong dose of coercion. Such coercion could be physical, but the use of force is expensive and becomes counterproductive after a while. Therefore, preferably the coercion is ideological. The temple was the only institution that could convince producers to give up substantial parts of their work for the advantage of the community and its administrators . . .
The temple, or ‘the house of god’, as it was called, was now the predominant actor in Uruk, the central agency, in terms of owning a lot of the land, and with the ability to call upon the village communities and family units to provide it almost free labour in return for subsistence food. The ‘servants of god’ who managed the temple and its affairs thus extracted the productive surplus in this new era of plenty and decided how it was to be allocated. This surplus thus accumulated allowed, among other things, the maintenance of an administrative machinery, including accountants who kept track of who was paid how much and owed how much in return; specialist craftsmen; and a long-distance trading system that would bring to Uruk the things it lacked: metals, wood and precious stones.
We have a reasonably good idea of the religious ideology that kept the new societal structure in place. If the farming communities, entirely dependent on their crops and herds, were singularly obsessed with fertility gods and goddesses, the newly emerging urban society felt the need for many more specialist gods and goddesses, each with expertise in a different domain but working well together. The existing ideas of sacrifices and offerings to gods continued into the urban period, with the village communities perhaps seeing the labour they provided to the temple authorities as a form of offering to the gods. ‘Debate poems’ were popular, and showcased arguments between the herder and the farmer, ewe and wheat, summer and winter – all trying to portray the benefits of working together and instilling the wisdom that everything had its right place and role. One myth in particular is very interesting – the myth of Atramhasis. It says that humanity was created to replace the minor gods who were tired of their hard work of farming so that the great gods could be kept well provided for.
Key questions
There are no clear parallels between the evolution of the Harappan Civilization and the Mesopotamian Civilization, but what happened in Uruk perhaps gives one a set of good questions to pursue. For example, was there a period of dramatic agricultural productivity increase in the lead-up to the Mature Harappan period? It is indeed possible that the spread of agriculture from the mountainous valleys of Balochistan to the fertile alluvial plains of the Indus and Ghaggar–Hakra river systems led to a period of significant productivity gains. However, unlike in Uruk, there has been no evidence so far of large-scale canal irrigation in the Harappan Civilization that could have given rise to the emergence of a central agency to coordinate the work of large groups of people.
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p; Perhaps canal irrigation was not necessary in the Indus or Ghaggar–Hakra valleys. Archaeologists believe that the irrigation was done mainly through overbank flooding due to snowmelt or monsoon, with farmers also relying on oxbow lakes (U-shaped lakes) formed during such flooding for irrigation during the dry season. So if large-scale irrigation was not the reason for the emergence of a coordinating central agency and of new power centres, could it have been the need for managing the flood or an environmental challenge of some kind? The close attention paid to water and to civic amenities and the fact that the earliest cities of the Mature Harappan phase, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were built on higher ground and that even now they remain unaffected during the frequent floods on the Indus – such as the one that occurred in 2010 – suggest that this is a possibility. But until archaeology or the Indus script reveals more, this will have to remain unanswered.
What about the ideology, or religion, of the Harappan Civilization that gave legitimacy to the new coordinating agency or authority structure? We do know that there are no identifiable temples within the Harappan Civilization, but that is not to say there was no religious ideology, or myths or fables that supported the power structure. Also, we might have clichéd notions about what a temple, or a palace, should look like. As Ratnagar points out, if you saw the low-slung Padmanabhapuram Palace (of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore, now in the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu), you are unlikely to identify it as one. Second, there are enough indications from seals that there were shared ideological belief systems that underpinned the Harappan Civilization.