clear local roots even at Amri and Kot Diji, and simply seems to have chosen the fertile banks of a major navigable river as new home for a branch of an old powerful dynasty. Civilization in Mesopotamia, too, began with settlers who knew how to cast bronze from imported copper and tin, and who bm-ied four-wheeled carts with a troika of harnessed bullocks in royal tombs full of other evidence of a level of civilization which neither Babylonians nor Assyrians later surpassed.
In searching for the home of the inventors who first gave us a script and the wheel, we find that the Indus civilization was not only strikingly similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also suspiciously contemporary. The difference of a century or so in such important human mileposts is neghgible when today we have to revise former thinking and measure human accompHshments on a scale of over two miUion years. With the total collapse of accepted dogmas concerning man's antiquity as a species, we have to move on tiptoe and not be blindly wedded to existing assumptions on the age and spread of civihzation. We know too httle. And new discoveries are constantly changing a still unclear picture. What we know for sure is that the founders of the Egyptian and Sumerian dynasties began to leave their traces on their riverbanks—and to illustrate the large reed ships of their ancestors—just when the Indus Valley was settled by a third civihzation. All three estabhshed themselves in the three major river valleys centering upon the Arabian peninsula.
The Indus Valley excavations, hke those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, have far from exhausted the siuprises in store for those who still seem to think that history began with Columbus or maybe the early Greeks and Romans. Although attention was naturally first turned inland, where Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were first found, it has gradually become clear that the people of the Indus civilization had a predilection for waterfronts. The American geologist L. R. Raikes^ reconstructed the sea level and major river courses at the time of the ancient Indus cultiu-e and found that practically all the sites of this civilization would have been on the sea or on a river. Scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the seaboard sites, since the importance of shipping and maritime trade to the earhest Indus people has become evident. A pioneer in
this respect has been S. R. Rao,^ a noted Indian archaeologist who has uncovered a large number of the Indus Valley settlements, and gradually moved to the ocean coast. He says:
Until recently it was generally beheved that the Indus civihza-tion was land-locked . . . Recent explorations have, however, brought to hght several Harappan ports giving a coastal aspect to the Indus civihzation and suggesting a brisk sea-borne trade between the Indus people and the Sumerians in the late third and early second millenniums B.C. . . . Thus, the entire coast-hne of Kutch, Kathiawar, and South Gujarat, covering a distance of 1,400 kilometers, was studded with Harappan ports in the second millennium B.C. Some were already estabhshed as early as the third millennium. ... No inland station of the Harappa culture is as early in date as Lothal. . . . The largest structure of baked bricks ever constructed by the Harappans is the one laid bare at Lothal on the eastern margin of the township to serve as a dock for berthing ships and handling cargo.
This prehistoric port with its large brick-built dock is perhaps the most thought-compelling discovery with bearing on the Indus civilization. Built about 2300 b.c, it consists of an enormous excavated basin enclosed by thick embankment walls of baked bricks. The well-preserved remains of these baked-brick walls still stand 10 feet high and are reinforced behind by a mud-brick wharf 43 to 66 feet wide. The basin is about 709 feet long and about 122 feet wide, and was designed to take ships about 59 to 65 feet long and 13 to nearly 20 feet in width, which is in excess of the size of Tigris. Rao states that two ships could pass simultaneously through the forty-foot-wide inlet gap in the embankment, and he concludes:
The high degree of engineering skill achieved by the Lothal folk can be understood from the ingenious way in which they could regulate the flow of water into the dock at high and low tides. They could ensure flotation of ships in the basin by sliding a door in the vertical grooves of the flanking walls of the spillway at low water. Excess water was allowed to escape by keeping the spillway open at high water. In no other port of the Bronze Age, early or late, has an artificial dock with water-
locking arrangements been found. In fact, in India itself, hydraulic engineering made no further progress in post-Harappan times4
What did the Indus empire have at Lothal? Rao shows that this was the warehouse of a rich rice-, cotton- and wheat-growing hinterland. Besides, the port had its own bead factories and was also an important center for ivory working. CameUan was imported from inland, but finds of tusks and elephant bones indicate that elephants were reared on the spot. The principal exports of Lothal, says Rao, were ivory, beads of camehan and steatite, shell inlays and, perhaps, cotton and cotton goods. With Lothal as a major port, the Indus civihzation qualifies well as Meluhha from where the carnehan beads, ivory and steatite reached ancient Mesopotamia, directly or indirectly by way of Bahrain. Rao also uncovered a terracotta head of "a bearded man with Sumerian features" which to him indicated contacts to the west, and in a merchant's house in Lothal's bazaar street he excavated "eight gold pendants similar to those found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur." All this, he says, adds weight to the eighteen seals of Indian origin aheady found at Ur, besides those found at Susa, Kish, Asmar, Hama, Lagash and Tepe Gawra, all in Mesopotamia. At Lothal he even found a circular steatite seal neither wholly Indian nor Sumerian in workmanship, but almost identical with those excavated by the Danes from the Dilmun level on Bahrain. Dealing with this "Persian Gulf' seal in a special report,^ Rao concludes:
Indus seals and other knick-knacks could not have travelled to Ur, Kish, Lagash, Tell Asmar, Brak, Diyala and further beyond but for a flourishing trade in which merchants from India and the Persian Gulf took an active part. The use of special types of seals in different regions suggests the existence of merchant middle-men who maintained accounts, documented con-
t After this book went to press, I had a chance to visit the impressive Lothal site on the Indian side of the Pakistani border and found reason to suspect that this large structure, built as a port in the earliest period of the Indus Valley civilization, was subsequentiy left dry when the sea level sank, just as we had witnessed also from the geological terracing in the Ormara Bay. The subsequent generations in the region had refitted the original sailing channel to utilize the dried-up port as a colossal water reservoir filled by a nearby river in the svimmer floods. The Indian government has taken interest in the problem, and excavations will be started at strategic points outside the present locks in the immediate future.
tracts and despatched sealed packages of goods. Their main centres were southern Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the west coast of India extending into the Indus valley on the one hand and as far as the Gulf of Cambay on the other.
A few model boats were also excavated at Lothal, crudely made from terracotta, some flat-bottomed and others with keel, all possibly votive or good-luck objects such as the small terracotta, asphalt or silver boats common in Mesopotamian excavations. Commonly crude and symboHc, there is nothing in these small pottery boats to indicate dimensions or details of a true seagoing merchant ship. Since the real ships were not of clay but of perishable, buoyant material, we can only judge from the magnificent port facilities and the finds of a seal of distant island type that merchant mariners of Lothal had proper, long-range watercraft.
Since we ourselves had come to the former territory of the Indus people in a berdi ship of Sumerian type and had found bim-dle boats surviving en route in both Dilmun and Makan, we were probably more ciuious than anyone who had come here before as to what kind of seagoing ship the Indus people had possessed. As if intending to help posterity with a hint, a citizen of Mohenjo-Daro had left behind another seal, another tiny chip of durable stone, which happened to be just what we most needed. Tiny as it was, it filled a huge gap in the puzzle we were trying to disen
tangle with the Tigris experiment. I had seen objects excavated from the Indus civilization in major museimis in Asia, Europe and America, but it was in a small field exhibit at the foot of the Mohenjo-Daro ruins that I was to get the greatest surprise.
"Here is a shipl* said Toru as he pulled me by the sleeve while I was admiring a stone image with sheU-inlaid eyes, just as in Mesopotamia. He dragged me over to the next showcase, where we had to stoop down and press our noses against the glass to see what was there: a tiny yellowish steatite seal, a rectangular piece of soap-stone no bigger than my own thumb. The label merely said: "Seal with house boat." And there was the boat indeed, engraved on the flat surface. The httle stone had been broken in two and carefully mended by its finder. The symbol chosen by the original owner was that of a ship, a seagoing ma-gur of typical sickle shape, designed to ride the ocean swells. Cross-lashings characteristic of a reed craft were clearly shown, with double rudder oars astern and a deck cabin between two masts. Both seemed to be straddling bipod
masts, and at least one clearly showed the rungs of the mast ladder of the kind copied by us on Ra and Tigris from Egyptian designs.
Rarely can the artless scratches on a tiny piece of stone have impressed seafarers more than this rehc from an ancient mariner or merchant, left for thousands of years in the refuse of Mohenjo-Daro. The former owner could not have fancied that every Httle furrow he had cut out into his httle piece of steatite would be studied with such care and cause so much excitement. But we were not the first to see the impHcations of this find. In his report on the actual discovery, Ernest J. H. Mackay wrote:
The vessel portrayed on this seal is boldly but roughly cut, apparently with a triangular burin, and is apparently not the work of an experienced seal-cutter; hence its interest, because, probably in consequence of inexperience, the motif is not a stereotyped one. The boat has a sharply upturned prow and stem, a feature which is present in nearly all archaic representations of boats; for example, the same type of boat appears on Early Minoan seals, on the Predynastic pottery of Egypt, and on the cyhnder seals of Sumer. In the last mentioned country this type of boat was used down to Assyrian times.^
Mackay realized that the parallel hatchings indicate lashings of a boat "made of reeds hke the primitive boats of Egypt and the craft that were used in the swamps of southern Babylonia." He stated that this seal indicates a type of vessel that was in use in ancient Mohenjo-Daro, and proposed that its owner was perhaps connected with shipping of some kind, for so much attention had been paid to detail.
Not much attention was paid to Mackay*s discovery, and he found only one other and much cruder ship scratched on a pottery shard, which at least showed a strongly arched hull, double mast with a pair of yards, and a rudder oar with tiller in the stem. But scholars who have subsequently referred to the discovery agree in their verdict: "The boat from the seal is without doubt a papyrus boat,"* and "This is a splendid seal . . . there is an echo of prehistoric Egypt. . . ."^*
§ Did the ancient Indus people actually have access to papyrus? Papyrus was an African plant. The early ships of Egypt were indeed made from papyrus. At that time papyrus grew in abundance all along the Nile and in wide areas of adjacent Africa. It spread to the Mediterranean side of Asia Minor, where rare patches of papyrus plants have survived into modem times, where reed ships are incised on walls of ancient caves in Israel and on Hittite seals at Gaziantep, and where the prophet Isaiah (i8:ii) speaks of reed ships arriving
There seems to be no record or trace of papyrus growths in Mesopotamia. The first reed-built ma-gur must therefore have been lashed together from berdi, as we had done. And as we were still afloat in Pakistan, berdi had proved suitable for building seagoing craft.
It was not very far from the desert landscape around Mohenjo-Daro to the green belt where the Indus winds its long joinney to the mangrove swamps and the sea. From the httle museum by the ruins we wasted no time in getting to the riverbanks, which in former times had run past the walls of the city.
with messengers from Egypt. Papyrus must have been known in Corfu at one time, where fishermen made bulrush boats until recently and called them papyreUa. It has survived since antiquity on the island of Sicily, while reed boats (but no papyrus) have survived on nearby Sardinia. It was brought by early seafarers beyond Gibraltar and planted on the Canary Islands, where Romans to their surprise foimd papyrus growing in the rivers.^ Who brought rootstocks of this difficult freshwater plant to those far Atlantic islands is not known, but the Phoenicians were there. They left reed ship designs on one of their most beautiful vases recently found on the ocean floor off their former Atlantic port of Cddiz in Spain, but no papyrus. At the former Phoenician port of Lixus, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, the Berbers built reed boats imtil recently, but of an inferior river grass through local lack of papyrus. Papyrus on the Canary Islands has long since disappeared, and when the medieval Portuguese rediscovered the islands a couple of millennia after the Phoenicians, the blond Guanche islanders did not know how to build watercraft of any material whatever, though they made plank coffins for their mummies and practiced cranial trepanation and other arts that clearly revealed their former contact with sailors from the far comer of the Mediterranean. And together with fragments of tripod vases of Phoenician origin, archaeologists have found terracotta seals indistinguishable in type and decor from specffic Mesopotamian seals; they are on exhibition in the Gran Canaria Museimi, together with a selection of typical Mexican terracotta seals to show their striking similarity.
Clearly papyrus was a most useful river plant to ancient deep-sea navigators, and attempts to plant the tubers might have been made with varying success in areas where there is no papyrus today. The marshes surrounding the oldest Mexican pyramid, at La Venta on the Mexican Gulf, are covered by vast stretches of a plant with a flower and stem that are to an amateur's eye indistinguishable in every respect from papyrus. Botanists are now inbreeding the plant, suspecting that it might be a descendant of papyrus, Cyperus papyrus. This important question was recently brought up at an ethnobotany seminar by Professor Donald B. Lawrence of the Department of Botany at the University of Minnesota, who wrote:
"Rediscovery" of Giant sedge (Cyperus giganteus) on the Gulf coast of Tabasco State, Mexico, at the famous Olmec cultin-e site, home of "America's first civilization", and recognition of its similarity to Papyrus, have suggested to this speaker its possible derivation from that Old World plant, its possible introduction to the New World by man in ancient times (3000 or more years ago), and its possible importance for the establishment and development of the Olmec Culture.®
"Reeds! Hey, it's berdil" Norman was first into the marshes to pull up a plant. Indeed, it was berdil The typical oval cross section composed of the crescent-shaped stems of adjoining branches with spongy fill and large-celled, waxy walls was not to be mistaken. This was the plant from which we had built Tigris. Whether it was brought by man or by nature was merely a botanical problem. There were vast stretches of it, and wherever we were in the Indus plains, as soon as there was a vacant area with moisture, we found berdi growing wild. This then, and not papyrus, had been the reed used by the Indus people for building bundle ships of the same type as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Merchants travehng between Ur and the Indus in prehistoric times had ample opportunity to repair or even renew their vessels if their visits should last longer than the reeds would float.
On our way back to Tigris in Karachi harbor we took our time and found ourselves once again in a world where folkways 5,000 years apart five side by side and for us blended into a wealth of profound impressions. While the jet age is well established in cities like Karachi, with everything money can buy in the form of push-button aids and computers, side roads show the traveler all stages in the few long leaps from the Indus Valley Bronze Age to the present. Clearly the Aryan invaders in their early days did not strangle or efiminate the Indus civilization before it had left lasting benefits throughout the territory it dominated. We saw
tribes from the highlands of Baluchistan, the land we had first seen against the sky when approaching Makran from the sea, who had come to settle near the river. Their carts, drawn by pairs of oxen sharing a common pole, conformed in the smallest details with the pottery models from Mohenjo-Daro. Since these hill people had never seen the museum, their carts must have followed a tradition which the Aryans had never disturbed. Some of the perishable wooden wheels were so beautifully carved with relief ornamentation that they could have been used for chandeliers in any modern home. Their houses, as in Ormara, were reminiscent of those of the Iraqi Marsh Arabs who, too, had simply maintained an ancient house form well known from illustrations on the Sumerian seals. Within these homes we found women sitting on the ground grinding flour with stone hand mills, as shown in the pottery models of Mohenjo-Daro and Ur. Ceramic bowls had given way to purchased metalware; otherwise Mohenjo-Daro was reflected in all they possessed. Their animals were those first domesticated by the founders
Captions for the following four pages
4g. Inside the main cabin the author lists the night watches and pins them on a wooden hoard while Carlo watches. Birthday party with Yuri's caviar, celebrated around the deck table lit by the cameraman's battery lamps.
SO-$i. The international crew of Tigris. Left-hand column: navigator Norman Baker, United States, Dr. Yuri Senkevitch, the Soviet Union, and alpinist Carlo Mauri, Italy, all veterans from the two Ra voyages. Above the author at the tiller is student Hans Peter Bohn (alias HP), Norway, and below, student Asbjorn Damhus, Denmark. Above Tigris is scuba diver Toru Suzuki, Japan, and below, student Rashad Nazir Salim, Iraq. Right-hand column: sea captain Detlef Soitzek, West Germany, industrialist Gherman Carrasco, Mexico, and cameraman Norris Brock, United States.
The Tigris Expedition Page 34
