INDUS VALLEY

INDUS VALLEY

When 19th century explorers and 20th century archaeologists rediscovered the ancient Indus Valley civilization, the history of the Indian sub-continent had to be rewritten.* Many questions remain unanswered.

The Indus Valley civilization is an ancient one, on the same order as Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China. All these areas relied on important rivers: Egypt relying on the annually flooding Nile, China on the Yellow River, the ancient Indus Valley civilization (aka Harappan, Indus-Sarasvati, or Sarasvati) on the Sarasvati and Indus rivers, and Mesopotamia outlined by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Like the people of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, the people of the Indus civilization were culturally rich and share a claim to the earliest writing. However, there is a problem with the Indus Valley that doesn't exist in such pronounced form elsewhere.

Evidence is missing elsewhere, through the accidental depredations of time and catastrophes or deliberate suppression by human authorities, but to my knowledge, the Indus Valley is unique among major ancient civilizations in having a major river disappear. In place of the Sarasvati is the much smaller Ghaggar stream that ends in the Thar desert. The great Sarasvati once flowed into the Arabian Sea, until it dried up in about 1900 B.C. when the Yamuna changed course and instead flowed into the Ganges. This may correspond with the late period of the Indus Valley civilizations.

• Mohenjo-Daro - From Archaeology at About.com

The mid-second millennium is when the Aryans (Indo-Iranians) may have invaded and possibly conquered the Harappans, according to a very controversial theory. Before then, the great Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization flourished in an area greater than one million square km. It covered "parts of Punjab, Haryana, Sindh, Baluchistan, Gujarat and fringes of Uttar Pradesh"+. On the basis of artifacts of trade, it appears to have flourished at the same time as the Akkadian civilization in Mesopotamia.

Indus Housing

If you look at an Harappan housing plan, you'll see straight lines (a sign of deliberate planning), orientation to the cardinal points, and a sewer system. It held the first great urban settlements on the Indian subcontinent, most notably at the citadel cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

Indus Economy and Subsistence

The people of the Indus Valley farmed, herded, hunted, gathered, and fished. They raised cotton and cattle (and to a lesser extent, water buffalo, sheep, goats, and pigs), barley, wheat, chickpeas, mustard, sesame, and other plants. They had gold, copper, silver, chert, steatite, lapiz lazuli, chalcedony, shells, and timber for trading.

Writing

 

The Indus Valley civilization was literate -- we know this from seals inscribed with a script that is now only in the process of being deciphered. [An aside: When it is finally deciphered, it should be a big deal, as was Sir Arthur Evans' deciphering of Linear B. Linear A still needs deciphering, like the ancient Indus Valley script.] The first literature of the Indian subcontinent came after the Harappan period and is known as Vedic. It doesn't appear to mention the Harappan civilization.

The Indus Valley civilization flourished in the third millennium B.C. and suddenly disappeared, after a millennium, in about 1500 B.C. -- possibly as a result of tectonic/volcanic activity leading to the formation of a city-swallowing lake.

Indus Valley Civilization

Indus Valley Civilization.

The earliest traces of civilization in the Indian subcontinent are to be found in places along, or close, to the Indus river. Excavations first conducted in 1921-22, in the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, both now in Pakistan, pointed to a highly complex civilization that first developed some 4,500-5,000 years ago, and subsequent archaeological and historical research has now furnished us with a more detailed picture of the Indus Valley Civilization and its inhabitants. The Indus Valley people were most likely Dravidians, who may have been pushed down into south India when the Aryans, with their more advanced military technology, commenced their migrations to India around 2,000 BCE. Though the Indus Valley script remains undeciphered down to the present day, the numerous seals discovered during the excavations, as well as statuary and pottery, not to mention the ruins of numerous Indus Valley cities, have enabled scholars to construct a reasonably plausible account of the Indus Valley Civilization. 

Some kind of centralized state, and certainly fairly extensive town planning, is suggested by the layout of the great cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro. The same kind of burnt brick appears to have been used in the construction of buildings in cities that were as much as several hundred miles apart. The weights and measures show a very considerable regularity. The Indus Valley people domesticated animals, and harvested various crops, such as cotton, sesame, peas, barley, and cotton. They may also have been a sea-faring people, and it is rather interesting that Indus Valley seals have been dug up in such places as Sumer. In most respects, the Indus Valley Civilization appears to have been urban, defying both the predominant idea of India as an eternally and essentially agricultural civilization, as well as the notion that the change from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ represents something of a logical progression. The Indus Valley people had a merchant class that, evidence suggests, engaged in extensive trading.
Neither Harappa nor Mohenjodaro show any evidence of fire altars, and consequently one can reasonably conjecture that the various rituals around the fire which are so critical in Hinduism were introduced later by the Aryans. The Indus Valley people do not appear to have been in possession of the horse: there is no osteological evidence of horse remains in the Indian sub-continent before 2,000 BCE, when the Aryans first came to India, and on Harappan seals and terracotta figures, horses do not appear. Other than the archaeological ruins of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, these seals provide the most detailed clues about the character of the Indus Valley people. Bulls and elephants do appear on these seals, but the horned bull, most scholars are agreed, should not be taken to be congruent with Nandi, or Shiva’s bull. The horned bull appears in numerous Central Asian figures as well; it is also important to note that Shiva is not one of the gods invoked in the Rig Veda. The revered cow of the Hindus also does not appear on the seals. The women portrayed on the seals are shown with elaborate coiffures, sporting heavy jewelry, suggesting that the Indus Valley people were an urbane people with cultivated tastes and a refined aesthetic sensibility. A few thousand seals have been discovered in Indus Valley cities, showing some 400 pictographs: too few in number for the language to have been ideographic, and too many for the language to have been phonetic.
The Indus Valley civilization raises a great many, largely unresolved, questions. Why did this civilization, considering its sophistication, not spread beyond the Indus Valley? In general, the area where the Indus valley cities developed is arid, and one can surmise that urban development took place along a river that flew through a virtual desert. The Indus Valley people did not develop agriculture on any large scale, and consequently did not have to clear away a heavy growth of forest. Nor did they have the technology for that, since they were confined to using bronze or stone implements. They did not practice canal irrigation and did not have the heavy plough. Most significantly, under what circumstances did the Indus Valley cities undergo a decline? The first attacks on outlying villages by Aryans appear to have taken place around 2,000 BCE near Baluchistan, and of the major cities, at least Harappa was quite likely over-run by the Aryans. In the Rig Veda there is mention of a Vedic war god, Indra, destroying some forts and citadels, which could have included Harappa and some other Indus Valley cities. The conventional historical narrative speaks of a cataclysmic blow that struck the Indus Valley Civilization around 1,600 BCE, but that would not explain why settlements at a distance of several hundred miles from each other were all eradicated. The most compelling historical narrative still suggests that the demise and eventual disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization, which owed something to internal decline, nonetheless was facilitated by the arrival in India of the Aryans.