1.
Indus Civilisation
References : Dilip Chakrabarti, Oxford Companion: Ch 8
Shireen Ratnagar: Understanding Harappa: ch 9
Origins of the Indus Civilisation: A Historical Perspective
In 1931, John Marshal did not have any problem about the origin of this civilisation. Impressed
both by its distinct form and the ‘Indian’ character of many of its basic features he took it for
granted that this must have had a long and antecedent history on the soil of India. Gordon
Childe wrote that the Indus Civilisation represented adjustments made by people to a
specific environment and could have resulted only from patient effort.
The first support for Marshal and Childe’s premise that the Indus Civilisation had a long
antecedent history in India came from N.G Majumdar.
As part of his explorations in Sind, he found an Archaeological level with distinctive pottery
below the Harappan level at the site of Amri and noted the similar stratigraphic position of
Sind sites including Ghazi Shah(The Ghazi Shah Mound is most ancient archaeological site
located in Johi Tehsil Dadu District Sindh, Pakistan). He argued that the Amri (Sindh Province of
Pakistan) pottery should be looked upon as representing an earlier phase of the chalcolithic
than that represented by Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
Wheeler, in 1947 reported his own find of a level earlier than the Harappan level (mature phase)
at Harappa, he thought that the idea of a civilisation in the Indus plain was derived from
Mesopotamia. This in contrast to Stuart Piggot’s opinion that an origin outside India was
‘inherently improbable’. Wheeler’s ‘Mesopotamian origin theory’ which soon witnessed
adherents who refered to the Indus cities as Mesopotamian ‘colonial cities’ or spoke of
piecemeal migration of people from Mesopotamia to the Indus by sea.
In 1955 and 1957, F A khan excavated Kot Diji in Sind and formed a fortified citadel complex
below the Harappan Level of the site. In its citadel with pottery showing shapes like dish on
stand and artefacts like ‘terracotta cakes’, this earlier foreshadowed in some important detail
the later Indus development. It represented some important characteristics of the later Indus
period.
J-M Cassal's (1959-62) work at Amri, supported Majumdar's find of a pre-Indus level but also
identified a transitional period between the earlier ‘Amri Culture' and the later Indus
Civilisation.
In 1960, excavations began at Kalibangan (Ghaggar valley) under BB Lal and BK Thapar. A
fortified and planned pre-Indus settlement with an extensive range of pottery was found in
the western sector of the site.
(to be discussed together)
The pottery identified by A Ghosh at sites like Sothi, were explored by him in the Ghaggar
valley, was found to match the pottery from pre-Indus Kalibangan. On the basis of pottery of
pre-indus Kalibangan, Ghost postulated a firm sothi sub-stratum in the make up of the Indus
Civilisation. He thought that it was justified to regard Sothi as proto – Harappan.
W.A. Fairservis – The area along the southern border of the Kachi plain and the foothills of the
Kit that range could have an early Harappan level related to the urbanized phase of the
culture. He claimed that the elaboration of the Harappan Civilisation was due to
Mesopotamian Contact, although it could have achieved its characteristic style individual.
B and R Allchin wrote that a large element in the Harappan Civilisation must derive from the
pre-Harappan culture of the Indus Valley itself. It was similar to fairservis's approach of an
indigenous stratum fertilised by a different element.
In 1970, M.R. Mughal used the term early Harappan and emphasised features like the growth of
the Indus Civilisation, permanent occupation and elaborate architecture, emergence of
administrative centres as suggested by fortification walls, common knowledge and use of
copper, steatite and Lapis Lazuli, specialised crafts and distribution of identical forms of
pottery. He called this phase as incipient urbanisation, which subsequently crystallised into
homogeneity and standardisation of artefacts during the Mature Harappan period- due to
increase in trade and population.
Dilip Chakrabarti: There is no evidence from Mesopotamia that before the growth of the Mature
Harappan Civilisation there was any trade link with India. In 1995, he argued : two reasons
behind the origin of the Mature Indus Civilisation
a. An increasing level of craft specialisation
b. Extensive irrigation system.
S Ratnagar: Archaeology and the State
Very little has been written on the origins of the Harappan Great Tradition in contrast to
the many writings on its decline. For instance could be suggested that Harappan
metallurgy ended because of a disruption of routes to the sources of copper and tin,
however it is difficult to suggest how the alloying of copper and tin and it’s utilisation for
tools and weapons began.
There is a second kind of problem, the sources. Level I D at Nausharo (located in
Balochistan, Pakistan) is important, as it represents a time after the early Indus culture
and before the Mature Phase Culture of level II of the same site. Even though the pottery
constitutes the major database.
Jarrige and Quivron (2011) placed emphasis on pottery or that period I D reveals the
‘origins of Harappa culture’, because earlier ceramic forms and the prototypes of
Harappan ceramic forms appear. A civilisation or a state system that encompasses several
local communities, has rich and multifaceted content: technologies, the layout of living
spaces, codes of personal ornamentation, modes of depiction of the sacra, the
organisation of the duality of kinship and kingship, and so on. These elements are
structured in such a way that they give the civilisation a recognisable form.
Nature of the Transition and Possible Factors:
Two factors could have played a major role in bringing about the process which led to the
transition. It is assumed that the basic feature of this process was the increasing degree of
social differentiation. This differentiation was likely to have been accelerated by the
ongoing intensification of different craft activities including the use of a wide range of
raw materials. Example from early Harappa.
Another factor was irrigation. The highly important role which an organised irrigation
system must have played in the Indus Civilisation. Two points: Firstly, both spring and
autumn crops used to be grown in Sind. The Sind crops included wheat, barley, gram,
vetches, oilseeds and vegetables sown in September to November and harvested in
February to April: and the autumn crops of the two millets of Bajra and Jowar, rice,
pulses and cotton which were sown during the floods of the river between May and
August and reaped between October and November. This kind of multi-cropping would
have been impossible without an irrigation system.
Second, it was forgotten that the location of the most important Harappan site in Sind,
Mohemjodaro is in a traditional rice bowl of the province which used to produce three
crops in a year. Sind was considered to be a highly productive agricultural area, and no
hypothesis of climatic change is necessary to explain the location of Harappan sites in
Sind.
The importance of agriculture based on network of canal irrigation in the opening of the
20th century has been adequately pointed out by David Cheesman on the basis of the
relevant archival sources.
RS Bisht (1982) put forward an idea in the context of Haryana on the basis of the
distribution of the Harappan sites in that region. He noticed the existence of a network of
abandoned canals and river beds with a large number of associated prehistoric sites in
Haryana. Bisht’s field observations have found have found an echo in the study by H-P
Francfort.
Shireen Ratnagar:
The major evidence for the sequence of development from the earliest village life to the
beginning of the Harappan urban period comes from a single site, Mehrgarh.
Mehrgarh lies on the frontier between Sind and Baluchistan. The lower Indus plain is
primarily agricultural, but over much of the broken mountain terrain of Baluchistan it is
animal herding that has prevailed over farming. The Kacchi plain is a permeable frontier
in the sense that the 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 plains in November with their tents and animals, and sojourn amongst the local
sedentary agriculturalists until February. They return to the mountains in the warmer
weather. Mehrgarh and the groups of sites near Dera Ismail Khan and on the Bannu plain
take on special significance.
The Kacchi plain is a frontier in another way as well. It lies on the eastern terminus of a
major world route connecting Kandahar, Quetta and the Indus plains. The plants and
animals domesticated by the villagers at Mehrgarh from 6500 BCE onwards are species
less at home in monsoon India with wet summers, than in the uplands of western Asia,
Afghanistanand Northwest Frontier Province, and northern Baluchistan with wet winters.
In Afghanistan, the domestication of wheat, barley, sheep and goat appears to have begun
early, after 8000 BCE. Cultivation of barley began as a result of experimentation and
cattle subsequently animal domestication began.
Additional testimony to the significance of the location of Mehrgarh is its lapis lazuli, turquoise
and sea-shell. Lapis Lazuli was found among the grave goods and thus indicates that the
stone carried symbolic meaning. Mehrgarh stands on a plain in which several mountain
streams like the Bolan river divide into multiple branches and then dissipate into the soil,
making possible a kind of wet patch cultivation. Also, small bunds could have been
constructed across, to make water available where it was needed. This village took
advantage of its ‘ecotone’ location, its inhabitants having access to resources of different
niches of upland and lowland.
Along with the later levels at Mehrgarh, many small villages had also been found on the Indus
plains, for example at Amri in the south on the right bank of the Indus, and at about 40 sites
around the medieval Derawar fort on the now dry Hakra. The many mounds on the Hakra
have on their surface a range of ceramics, basket-impressed, black-slipped, appliqued and so
on. On the whole, material culture comprised coarse and fine pottery, some times wheel-
turned, ground stone and flaked stone tools, bone tools, baked clay figurines and mud or
mud-brick houses with cooking places. Lapis-Lazuli has also been found at some sites.
The prelude to Urbanism
The next period, beginning around 3300 BCE, is one of significant developments. In the high-
altitude valleys there were by now villages of mud or mud-brick houses, occasionally on
stone rubble foundations, large storage vessels, grinding stones, ground stone axes, a rich
variety of flaked stone tools and clay slingstones for hunting or warfare. Stone seals came
into use. Many sites including Mehrgarh have yielded lapis lazuli and shankh-shell artefacts.
Fine textured grey pottery made on the wheel and with naturalistic motifs painted black, was
fired at very high temperatures under both oxidizing and reducing conditions. It occurs at
Mundigak, in the Quetta valley, in Zhob and Loralai, in central Baluchistan and also at
Mehrgarh. There was also ‘Quetta’ pottery, light coloured, buff to red, painted with
geometric motifs.
An oxidizing agent (oxidant), gains electrons and is reduced in a chemical reaction. It is also known as
electron acceptor. The oxidizing agent is usually in one of its higher possible oxidation states as it
will gain electrons and be reduced.
Reduction refers to removal of oxygen from a compound
She turns to Turkmenia to place this pottery in context:
In the small river valleys along the foothills of the Kopet dag range, and later and further east in
the inland delta of the Tezden or Hari Rud river (which forms an oasis in an arid zone), after
the establishment of agricultural villages (7000 – 6000 BC) there was gradual development
until the Bronze Age (2500-2000 BCE) when the fortified city of Altyn – depe flourished.
As we have seen, the subsistence economy was based on wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, goat
and pig, and later camel, chickpea and grape also came to be domesticated.
From about 4000 BCE there was utilisation of lapis lazuli and turquoise at these sites. Shankh-
shells from Indian waters came to be used later. Metallurgy involved a wide range of
experimental alloys. The Bactrian camel drew two-wheeled carts. There were terracotta and
bead-making crafts.
At one stage in the Chalcolithic Namazga III period (3500-3000 BCE) there appeared new forms
of disposal of the dead (collective burials in round brick structures, partially under the
ground) and a new polychrome pottery.
All Namazga III period sites in the delta of the Hari Rud, except two, were abandoned. The delta
was shifting eastward. Then archaeologists discovered the site of Shahr I Sokhta, which
marks the first settlement of Seistan around 3200 BCE. This site lies on the margins of
another and much larger in-land drainage basin, the Hamun-i-Helmand.
Forty percent of the painted pottery of earliest Shahr-I Sokhta has unmistakanle affinity with the
painted pottery of the Namazga III sites of the abandoned Hari Rud delta. The
compartmental seals found here also had strong affinities with Turkmenian seals. Mundigak,
northwest of Kandahar, also saw in the third period of its occupation this new pottery of
Central Asian derivation, and the distinctive seals.
The 2 sites later took on urban characteristics, with Shahr-I Sokta expanding to 150 hectares.
Both centres were to develop extensive bead-making industries, with an accent on lapis
lazuli. Map 1 shows that the lapis of Chagai was the most accessible to Mundigak
and Shahr-I Sokta. There are old pastoral routes which link these hills, to the region around
Kandahar.
It was realised that the light-slipped painted pottery called ‘Quetta’ ware in northern Baluchistan
was the same as the ceramics of the Turkmenistan, Seistan and Kandahar regions, and for central
and northern Baluchistan this was a period of a four-fold increase in the number of village sites.
It could be inferred that there was migration into the hill zone from the regions to the north-west
and west.
In the period 3300-2600 BCE there were significant interactions also on the plains, between the
distinct cultures that had by now taken shape: the Kot Dijian, the Amrian and the Sothi-
Siswal. All portions of the greater Indus valley were now settled, from the Potwar plateau in
the north to Amri in the South.
In this period too the largest cluster of known sites lies along the now-dry stretch of the Hakra,
there being thirty-seven downstream of the Pakistan- India boundary. The kot Dijian pottery
is being excavated at Harappa and is also known in the Bannu basin and in the Gomal valley
sites of Gumla and Rehman Dheri.
By this time the subsistence base of the Indus civilization was in place. Wheat, barley, lentil,
peas, sesamum, linseed, dates and grapes were being cultivated. Sheep, goat and two kinds
of cattle are attested. The surface of a ploughed field was sealed under early Indus habitation
layers at Kalibangan.
As cross furrows were visible, we can infer that two crops were raised in the field, indicating
intensive agriculture. Early Kalibangan testifies to the utilisation of copper in the Sothi-
Siswal culture, as far as we can make out from preliminary reports. There was only
occasional use of baked brick, the walls were not as thick as Mohenjodaro.
