Harappa presents a more complex picture with four mounds, some of which were surrounded by walls as thick as 14 m at the base, with impressive gateways controlling access to the city. Unfortunately, the site was too badly plundered to give us a fair idea of the overall plan of the fortifications, except in the case of the acropolis (‘mound AB’, Fig. 5.3), which interestingly has the same dimensions as Mohenjo-daro’s: about 400 x 200 m. There are fewer large structures in Harappa than at Mohenjo-daro, the main one being an imposing ‘granary’, 50 x 40 m, consisting of two rows of six large rooms (6 x 15 m each). As far as excavations have shown, the four mounds were occupied simultaneously and formed a single city.
One thing to note is that designations like ‘citadel’, ‘college’, ‘assembly hall’ or ‘granary’ used in the preceding paragraphs are, quite simply, arbitrary. Most of them were proposed by the British archaeologist R.E. Mortimer Wheeler. Given the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944, when he was a brigadier in the British army fighting in North Africa, he revived the ASI and institutionalized a more rigorous stratigraphic method designed to record a site’s evolution period after period. Irascible but magnanimous, theatrical but hard-working, Wheeler energetically put his stamp on Indian archaeology. But having received his archaeological training in the context of the Roman Empire, he transferred its terminology wholesale to the Harappan cities, which thus became peppered with ‘citadels’, ‘granaries’, ‘colleges’, ‘defence walls’, etc., when no one, in reality, had a clue to the precise purpose of the massive structures that had emerged from the thick layers of accumulated mud.
In recent years, for instance, some archaeologists have disputed the existence of huge granaries such as those identified by Wheeler at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, pointing out that there is no hard evidence for such an identification, and that in the region, grain was traditionally stored in bins.1 Also, it is less than clear whether the massive ‘citadels’ and fortifications had a military purpose, as we will discuss shortly.
None of the larger structures (Mohenjo-daro’s ‘college’ measures 70 x 24 m!) were clearly palaces, either. Unlike in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, where the residence of the pharaoh or king is conspicuous enough, Indus cities do not seem to have assigned magnified quarters to their rulers. Rather, a concern for the ordinary citizen is what impressed the early archaeologists.
PAMPERED CITIZENS
Indeed, most houses, even modest ones, had their own bathrooms, an unprecedented luxury in that age; the bathroom generally consisted of a sloping platform of close-fitting fired bricks, with a drain through the outer wall taking waste waters to a collective sewer; this, in turn, was connected to a network of drains made of carefully aligned baked bricks (Fig. 5.4), with cesspits or soak jars provided at regular intervals to collect sullage. In a few houses of Mohenjo-daro’s lower town, vertical terracotta pipes embedded in the walls point to bathrooms located on the first floor!
Such a sanitary system, unrivalled in the ancient world till the Roman Empire—which developed some 2000 years later—could function only on the basis of certain conditions. First, the slope of every drain had to be rigorously calculated, which implies that the houses were, initially at least, built on specific levels. As a matter of fact, blocks of neighbouring houses were often erected on massive common platforms of bricks. A second condition was the presence of ‘municipal workers’ to inspect the soak pits regularly and remove the sullage or other obstruction. The drainage system is thus proof of considerable planning, careful execution, and an efficient civic order. Needless to say, the average ‘modern’ Indian city is far from meeting those standards!
A third essential condition was the availability of plentiful water supply. The solutions for ensuring this varied from city to city: Mohenjo-daro had an estimated 600 to 700 wells, a huge number by today’s standards, and Michael Jansen2 calculated that an inhabitant of that city could get water at an average distance of 35 m, again something that his or her counterpart in the less privileged parts of our cities can only dream of. The cylindrical wells, 15 to 20 m deep, were carefully constructed with special trapezoid (that is, wedge-shaped) bricks (Fig. 5.5); owing to their shape, the bricks would lock together if water or loose soil pressed on the well’s outer sides—a remarkably ingenious solution to the problem of inward collapse that plagues stone wells. ‘Two thousand years later,’ Jansen remarks, ‘even the Romans usually used rectangular linings (mostly made of wood) which often collapsed due to the enormous pressure of the soil.’3 Harappa had fewer wells and probably used a large reservoir, while Dholavira diverted water from two neighbouring streams through a series of dams, and preserved it in a complex system of reservoirs. Clearly, Harappans valued both water and cleanliness.
In addition, there is evidence of privies in many houses, and garbage bins in the streets where citizens would come and dump their household refuse. Again, neither could have remained in working order without efficient civic authorities.
Houses were generally built with bricks, sun-dried or kiln-fired (mostly the latter at Mohenjo-daro). I have already mentioned the usual ratios of their dimensions, 1: 2: 4, found in many brick sizes: 7x14x28 cm most commonly for houses, and 10x20x40 cm or a little more for city walls. Such bricks are very close in size and proportion to our modern bricks, in contrast to the bricks of the historical era, which were generally larger and more squarish. Amusingly, this misled some of the early explorers (and brick robbers) of Indus cities into believing that the ruins lying below their feet must have been fairly recent4—a small error of judgement of some four millennia!
The walls of houses were usually 70 cm thick, which points to one, sometimes possibly two, upper storeys. Larger houses—with as many as seven rooms on the ground floor—probably belonged to rich traders or officials, but are often found next to much more modest dwellings.
Writing in 1926, as he was beginning his own large-scale excavation at Mohenjo-daro, Marshall’s imagination was fired by the realization that the city testified to ‘a social condition of the people far in advance of what was then prevailing in Mesopotamia and Egypt’.5 Five years later, he summed up his impression of the care lavished on the average Indus citizen:
There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens.6
A PROSPEROUS CIVILIZATION
During its Mature phase, the Indus civilization had, from all available evidence, a flourishing and varied industry. Towns, both big and small, had manufacturing units: smithies for the production of copper and bronze tools, weapons and other objects; kilns for the firing of bricks and pots; workshops for the cutting of stone tools and the manufacture of beads and other ornaments; and also units for potters, carpenters, weavers or seal makers. Many of those activities depended on materials that were not available locally and, therefore, on a brisk internal trade: copper and tin, gold and silver, semi-precious stones, timber and cotton must have been among the most valued commodities. Such exchanges necessarily involved diverse communities, some specialized in the extraction of metal ore or semi-precious stones, others in agriculture or in transport along the waterways; in fact, for centuries or more, today’s fishing community of the Mohanas (or Muhannas) has been engaged in this last activity along the Indus. It is even likely that nomadic groups took part in the movements of resources and helped establish trade routes between distant regions.
Indeed, a striking trait of the Harappan character is an eagerness to reach out (Fig. 5.6) : we have already noted a few outposts along the Makran coast as well as in Afghanista
n, but merchant colonies were most likely established in Oman (called Magan in ancient times), Bahrain (ancient Dilmun), and Failakah (an island of Kuwait, also part of Dilmun). In all those places, evidences of Mature Harappan pottery, seals, beads, weights and other objects (such as combs of ivory) have surfaced in recent decades, some of them going back to 2500 BCE or, possibly, a few centuries earlier.7
Further up, Ur, Kish and other Mesopotamian sites, as well as Elam’s Susa, have together yielded some forty Indus seals. Besides other Harappan articles, characteristic long carnelian beads as well as shorter beads with designs of white lines bleached onto the surface (or ‘etched beads’) were found in Ur’s royal cemetery. It appears that Mesopotamian rulers were particularly fond of Harappan jewellery. But not just that: Mesopotamian tablets mention wood, copper, tin, carnelian, shell, ivory, as well as peacocks and monkeys, as coming from a region called ‘Meluhha’. The listed items fit perfectly with goods from the Indus civilization, which is why most scholars have identified ‘Meluhha’ with it. The illustrious founder of the Akkadian dynasty, Sargon, who ruled in the twenty-third century BCE, proudly recorded in tablets how ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha, richly loaded with exotic goods, would lay anchor at the harbour of his capital Akkad, which was, at least, 300 km upstream from Ur on the Euphrates. Ur being the usual port for disembarkation, this additional journey points to the special importance or prestige attached to the merchandise brought from these distant regions.8
The evidence, however, is strangely one-sided: hardly any object of Mesopotamian origin has emerged from the Indus cities. Various hypotheses have been advanced about the raw materials or finished goods, perishable or not, that Harappan traders might have brought back home, with guesses ranging from silver and copper to wool, incense and dates; but without firm evidence, they remain guesses. Let us hope that some Harappan shipwreck will, one day, emerge from the Persian Gulf.
Archaeologists also disagree on how far this external trade might have contributed to the overall prosperity of Harappan society, but it does seem likely that workshops or small industrial settlements were set up particularly for the export of goods, especially along the coast. This seems to have been the chief function of Balakot, a small site west of the Indus delta which specialized in shell bangles, or of the town of Lothal (near Ahmedabad), and it might be the reason why Dholavira, a major production centre of beads and other crafts, was located in the Rann of Kachchh. Some scholars have also argued that small colonies for the manufacture of trade goods must have been located right in Dilmun, or even in Mesopotamia.
Although no directly Mesopotamian artefact has been found in the Indus civilization, a few objects (such as cylinder seals from Mohenjo-daro or Kalibangan) and art motifs (notably a deity controlling two standing tigers) reflect some Mesopotamian influence and confirm long-standing contacts. In the opinion of the archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti, ‘this contact lasted from c. 2600 BC—1300 BC’;9 the first date, which emerged from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, neatly coincides with the beginning of the Mature Harappan phase. Recent finds of remains of seafaring boats in Kuwait, dated to the six millennium BCE,10 suggest that contacts with the region may have started much earlier, but precise evidence is lacking.
Traders are thought to have followed a sea route that hugged the Makran coast and, with likely halts in Oman and Bahrain, continued all the way to the top of the Persian Gulf—a 2500-km voyage that implies no mean ship-making and sailing skills. While flat-bottomed river boats have been depicted on a few seals and tablets, nothing is known of the Harappan seafaring boats or ships.
Sea voyages always tickle the imagination, but we can also visualize picturesque multi-ethnic caravans plodding rugged overland routes through today’s Afghanistan and Iran. Starting from Mohenjo-daro and climbing the Bolan Pass, merchants, perhaps guided by nomads, would have crossed into the basin of the Helmand river and reached, among other cities, Mundigak, not far from today’s Kandahar. Excavated in the 1950s by the French archaeologist Jean-Marie Casal, Mundigak revealed evidence of Harappan contact, such as humped bulls and pipal leaves painted on pottery.11 It would have been one of the several starting points towards the Iranian plateau, and Harappan artefacts have indeed come up at many Iranian sites,12 such as Tepe Yahya, Shahdad, Hissar, Shah Tepe—or at the fascinating site recently discovered near the southeastern city of Jiroft, where impressions of Indus seals and carnelian beads have been recovered in substantial numbers.13
Strangely, however, as with Mesopotamia, almost no artefacts of clearly Iranian origin made their way to the Indus region. ‘Nearly all the evidence of Harappan relations with the West has been brought to light in foreign territories (the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Iran) and not in the Indus territories,’14 as another French archaeologist, Henri-Paul Francfort, put it. There is no consensus among experts to explain this one-sidedness.
The Harappans adventured not just westward, but also northward. Their presence is visible in the ancient region of Bactria, on the northwestern flank of the Hindu Kush mountain range (Fig. 5.6). We mentioned Shortughai earlier, on the Amu Darya, explored under Francfort’s direction; apart from the likely exploitation of lapis lazuli mines, its location far removed from the Harappan heartland suggests that it may also have been a stage in a westward outreach. Indeed, there are signs of Harappan presence as far as Altyn Tepe, Gonur or Namazga Tepe in Margiana (in today’s Turkmenistan, to the east of the Caspian Sea), and as early as the end of the fourth millennium BCE—in other words, four or five centuries before the start of the urban phase.15 This is an important confirmation of long-standing contacts between faraway regions. Those cities bordering Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert belong to a different civilization altogether, called the ‘Oxus civilization’ or the ‘Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex’ (BMAC), which the Harappans were clearly interacting with, as they were with Dilmun, Magan, Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau. All those civilizations were, in turn, in contact with each other: globalization is not exactly a new concept!
But here again, while Bactria’s presence is visible along the borderlands of the Indus civilization (especially towards the end of the Mature phase), artefacts from Margiana are non-existent. This broad unidirectionality—from the Indus outward—may be interpreted in different ways, but it does suggest that the Harappans were the ones who took the initiative to reach out.
ARTS AND CRAFTS
The trademark Harappan long and slender beads of carnelian, so prized in Mesopotamia, actually involved a technological feat: the length-wise drilling of a small hole for the string, which was done over several days of hard work with drill bits of a specially hardened synthetic stone. Other beads were made of agate, amethyst, turquoise or lapis lazuli; combined with disks and fillets in gold or silver, they permitted the creation of a great variety of ornaments. Bangles constituted another category of highly prized ornaments, whether made of gold, bronze, conch shell, glazed faience or humble terracotta. Many statuettes of women wearing bangles have been unearthed, giving us a fair idea of the various ways in which they were worn. Some of the small sites were wholly dedicated to the bangle industry, perhaps even created for it—for instance, in the coastal areas of Gujarat where shell was easily available.
Harappans produced pottery in large quantities (Fig. 5.7), something archaeologists are grateful for, since almost all objects of a perishable nature (wood, cloth, reed, etc.) have disappeared without a trace in the climate of the Northwest—and, along with them, a whole chunk of Harappan life. Wheel-made and kiln-fired pottery is generally distinguished by designs painted in black on a red background, although numerous variations exist; among the most typical designs are geometric ones such as intersecting circles, fish scales, wavy lines, etc., and realistic ones like pipal leaves, fishes, peacocks, deer or bulls.
This brief survey by no means exhausts the list of crafts: weavers used wheel-spun thread and, besides cotton, evidence of silk came to light recently at two sites;16 other craftsmen exce
lled at stone and ivory carving, carpet-making, inlaid woodwork and decorative architecture.
Bronze has been mentioned a few times as one of the pillars of urban development, and Harappans procured its main ingredient—copper—from mines in Baluchistan and Rajasthan, perhaps through nomads or non-Harappan communities specializing in its extraction. Ingots of smelted copper ore were transported to the smithies located in the towns and cities, where they were purified. Many objects were made directly from pure copper, but a variety of alloys were created through the natural or deliberate addition of tin (for bronze), lead, nickel or zinc; arsenic was another additive, used mostly to make tools with sharper edges. Although a precise understanding of the processes involved remains to be worked out, Harappan coppersmiths must have experimented for centuries before they found the right techniques and proportions to forge bronze chisels that were hard enough to dress stones (on a massive scale at Dholavira), or saws that could neatly cut hard conch shells. They made many other bronze objects, from axes to vessels, razors to mirrors, spears to arrowheads. Some less utilitarian applications included bronze statuettes cast with the ‘lost wax’ technique, such as the famous ‘dancing girl’ (Fig. 5.8).17
The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati Page 9
