The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  15 See a summary in Weiner, Sheila, ‘Hypotheses Regarding the Development and Chronology of the Art of the Indus Valley Civilization’, in Lal, B.B. & S.P. Gupta, (eds), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization°, pp. 396 & 413, and in Lal, B.B., The Earliest Civilization of South Asia°, pp. 188-190.

  16 Good, Irene L., J. Mark Kenoyer & Richard H. Meadow, ‘New Evidence for Early Silk in the Indus Civilization’, available online at www.harappa.com/har/early-indus-silk.pdf (accessed 31 January 2009).

  17 A survey of Harappan metallurgy can be found in Agrawal, D.P., Indus Civilization°, chapter 6, section II.

  18 Lal, B.B., India 1947-1997°, pp. 57 ff.

  19 Mughal, M. Rafique, ‘Evidence of Rice and Ragi at Harappa in the Context of South Asian Prehistory’, ch. 5, in Misra, V.N. & M.D. Kajale, (eds), Introduction of African Crops into South Asia, Indian Society for Prehistoric and Quaternary Studies, Pune, 2003.

  20 Allchin, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization°, p. 190.

  21 Ibid., p. 187.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Jarrige, Jean-François, ‘Du néolithique à la civilisation de l’Inde ancienne’, op. cit., p. 14.

  24 Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology°, p. 187.

  25 Shaffer, Jim G. & Diane A. Lichtenstein, ‘Ethnicity and Change in the Indus Valley Cultural Traditions’, op. cit., pp. 123-24.

  26 Possehl, Gregory L., The Indus Civilization°, pp. 6, 57 & 247.

  27 Lal, B.B., The Earliest Civilization of South Asia°.

  28 Ibid., p. 236.

  29 Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology°, p. 188.

  30 Kenoyer Jonathan Mark, ‘Early City-States in South Asia: Comparing the Harappan Phase and Early Historic Period’, in Nichols, D.L. & T.H. Charlton, (eds), The Archaeology of City-States: Cross-Cultural Approaches, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1997, pp. 51-70.

  31 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, ‘Indus Valley Tradition of Pakistan and Western India’, Journal of World Prehistory, vol. 5, 1995, pp. 369.

  32 Kenoyer Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization°, p. 81.

  33 Wright, Rita P., ‘The Indus Valley and Mesopotamian Civilizations: A Comparative View of Ceramic Technology’, in Old Problems and New Perspectives in the Archaeology of South Asia, op. cit., pp. 153-54.

  34 Agrawal, D.P., ‘The Harappan Legacy: Break and Continuity’, in Possehl, Gregory L., (ed.), Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective, sec. edn, Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1993, p. 452.

  35 McIntosh, Jane R., A Peaceful Realm°, p. 177.

  36 See, for instance, Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization”, pp. 55-56.

  37 To be precise, 97 out of 1052 Mature sites have been excavated, according to Possehl, Gregory L., The Indus Civilization°, p. 65.

  6. From the Indus to the Sarasvatī

  1 Lahiri, Nayanjot, Finding Forgotten Cities°, chapters 6 & 7.

  2 Tessitori, L.P., ‘Progress Report on the Work Done during the Year 1917 in Cconnection with the Bardic & Historical Survey of Rajputana’, Journal & Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, vol. XV, 1919, p. 7.

  3 Tessitori, Luigi, ‘A Report on Tours in Search of Archaeological Remains Made in Bikaner State during the Years 1916-17 & 1917-18’, p. 8. I am indebted to Prof. Nayanjot Lahiri for kindly communicating this extract.

  4 Ibid. (This portion is quoted in Lahiri, Nayanjot, Finding Forgotten Cities°, pp. 144-45.)

  5 Ibid., p. 150.

  6 Stein, Sir Aurel, ‘A Survey of Ancient Sites along the “Lost” Sarasvatī River’, The Geographical Journal, vol. 99, 1942, pp. 173-182 (‘A Survey’ in the following notes).

  7 Stein, Marc Aurel, An Archaeological Tour along the Ghaggar-Hakra River° (An Archaeological Tour° in the following notes).

  8 Stein, Sir Aurel, ‘On Some River Names in the Rigveda’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1917, pp. 91-99.

  9 ‘A Survey’, p. 173.

  10 Ibid., p. 175.

  11 ‘A Survey’, p. 178.

  12 Ibid.

  13 An Archaeological Tour°, p. 96.

  14 ‘A Survey’, p. 176.

  15 Ibid., p. 173.

  16 Ibid.

  17 An Archaeological Tour°, p. 11.

  18 ‘A Survey’, p. 179.

  19 Thapar, B.K., ‘Discovery and Previous Work’ in Lal, B.B., et al. Excavations at Kalibangan, vol. 1, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 2003, p. 14.

  20 An Archaeological Tour°, p. 46.

  21 ‘A Survey’, p. 180.

  22 Ibid., p. 179-80.

  23 Ibid., p. 182.

  24 An Archaeological Tour°, p. 3.

  25 Deva, Krishna, ‘Contributions of Aurel Stein and N.G. Majumdar to Research into the Harappan Civilization with Special Reference to their Methodology’, in Possehl, G.L., (ed.), Harappan Civilization : A contemporary perspective, Oxford & IBH and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Delhi, 1982, p. 392. (Krishna Deva was so modest that nowhere in this account of Stein’s work did he mention his own participation in the Sarasvatī expedition.)

  26 Quoted by Lahiri, Nayanjot, ‘What Lies Beneath’, Hindustan Times, New Delhi edn, 16 February 2008.

  27 A. Ghosh’s assistants were kindly identified by Prof. B.B. Lal on my request.

  28 Ghosh, A., ‘The Rajputana Desert: Its Archaeological Aspect’, in Bulletin of the National Institute of Sciences in India, 1952, vol. I, pp. 37-42, reproduced in An Archaeological Tour°, p. 101.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid., p. 105.

  31 See Suraj Bhan’s entries ‘Drsadvatī valley’, and ‘Sarasvatī valley’ (the latter jointly authored with A. Ghosh), in Ghosh, A., (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1989, vol. 2, pp. 131 & 394-95. I should add, however, that Bhan appears to have rejected those identifications in recent years.

  32 Bhan, Suraj, ‘Changes in the Course of the Yamuna and their Bearing on the Protohistoric Cultures of Haryana’, in Deo, S.B., (ed.), Archaeological Congress and Seminar Papers, Nagpur, 1972, pp. 125-28, noted by Misra, V.N., ‘Indus Civilization and the Rgvedic Sarasvatī’, op. cit., p. 521.

  33 See Joshi, J.P., Madhu Bala & Jassu Ram, ‘The Indus Civilization: A Reconsideration on the Basis of Distribution Maps’, in Lal, B.B. & S.P. Gupta, (eds), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization°, pp. 511-530.

  34 Mughal, M.R., Ancient Cholistan : Archaeology and Architectur°.

  35 Most figures in Tables 6.1 and 6.3 were graciously communicated to me in April 2006 by Dr. S.P. Gupta, who, before his demise in October 2007, was working on a comprehensive Archaeological Atlas of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization which takes into account all recent discoveries of Harappan sites. I am however solely responsible for arranging the figures as shown, and have made a few changes in them. See the following note.

  36 In Table 6.1, the row titled ‘Cholistan (Pakistan)’ is drawn from Mughal, M.R., Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture°, p. 40; as explained in the text, the figure of 40 Early Harappan sites does not include sites of the Hakra Ware phase.

  For the same reason, in Table 6.3, 281 sites of other pre-Harappan phases (Burj Basket, Kili Ghul Mohammad, Kechi Beg, Togau), most of them located in Baluchistan, are not counted. On the other hand, I included 97 Amri-Nal sites in the Early Harappan category of ‘Indus basin & western parts of Pakistan’, as that culture is now regarded as Early Harappan. In the same Table, I added a row ‘Himachal, Jammu & Delhi’ borrowed from figures published earlier by Joshi, J.P., Madhu Bala, and Jassu Ram, ‘The Indus Civilization: A Reconsideration on the Basis of Distribution Maps’, op. cit. I did not include Maharashtra’s Late Harappan sites (said to number over 20), as I could not find reliable figures for them. Finally, S.P. Gupta’s numbers for Gujarat’s Mature and Late sites were 205 and 182 respectively, but Possehl has 310 and 198 instead (The Indus Civilization°, p. 241), which I have adopted.

  37
See the above note. I have added 18 Early Harappan and 22 Mature Harappan sites discovered in Sind after 2002 (date of Possehl’s tables), see Mallah, Qasid H., ‘Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Sindh, Pakistan’, in Osada, Toshiki & Akinori Uesugi, (eds), Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past, Occasional Paper 3, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, 2008 (see Appendix).

  38 Mughal gives the following proportions of ‘camp sites’ : 7.5% for the Early phase, 6% for the Mature phase, and 26% for the Late phase (see Mughal, M.R., Ancient Cholistan : Archaeology and Architecture°, p. 53).

  39 For instance, recent surveys in Haryana by Surender Singh (in 1989), Manmohan Kumar (in 2006) and Vivek Dangi (in 2006) have brought to light new Harappan sites, but I have been unable to locate phase-wise details.

  40 Possehl, Gregory, The Indus Civilization°, p. 241.

  41 This figure is read from Fig. 2.19 in ibid., p. 49 (phase ‘Harappa’); it may not be very accurate.

  42 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization°, pp. 27 & 29.

  43 McIntosh, Jane R., A Peaceful Realm°, p. 24.

  44 Ratnagar, Shereen, Understanding Harappa: Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley”, pp. 7-8. In fact, Ratnagar only acknowledges ‘83 habitation sites’ (p. 21), from Mughal’s survey of 174 Mature Harappan sites (Table 6.1), after excluding sites marked as ‘industrial’ by Mughal (that is, with a special concentration on production of pottery, metallurgical installations, etc.). There is however no logic in such an exclusion: a Harappan ‘industrial’ site is first and foremost Harappan, and would have necessarily included residential areas; no one has suggested excluding industrial sites from other regions, such as Chanhu-daro or Balakot, from the list of Harappan settlements.

  45 Ibid., p. 24.

  46 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, ‘Culture and Societies of the Indus Tradition’, in India : Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan°, p. 47.

  47 Possehl, Gregory, The Indus Civilization°, p. 241.

  48 Ibid., p. 45.

  49 Mughal, M.R., Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture°, p. 22.

  50 To draw Figs 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, I combined the sites of V.N. Misra’s map in ‘Indus Civilization and the Rgvedic Sarasvatī’, op. cit., p. 515, with those of M.R. Mughal’s Figs 5 & 6 in Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture°, pp. 24 & 25. I separated the three phases in Misra’s map; I similarly separated the Early and Mature sites in Mughal’s Fig. 5 and omitted the pgw sites in his Fig. 6. (I used standard methods of digital photography, such as layering and superimposition, to place all sites on the maps as precisely as possible.)

  51 Misra, V.N., ‘Indus Civilization and the Rgvedic Sarasvatī’, op. cit., p. 515.

  52 Mughal, M.R., Ancient Cholistan : Archaeology and Architecture°, pp. 20 & 22-23.

  53 Mughal, M. Rafique, ‘Recent Archaeological Research in the Cholistan Desert’, in Possehl, Gregory L., (ed.), Harappan Civilization : A Recent Perspective, op. cit., p. 94.

  54 Ibid., p. 26.

  55 Shinde, Vasant, et al., ‘Exploration in the Ghaggar Basin and Excavations at Girawad, Farmana (Rohtak District) and Mitathal (Bhiwani District), Haryana’, in Osada, Toshiki & Akinori Uesugi, (eds), Occasional Paper 3, Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, 2008, p. 82.

  56 Ibid., p. 84.

  57 Possehl, Gregory L., Indus Age: The Beginnings°, p. 384.

  58 See note 50 above.

  59 Ibid., p. 369.

  60 Ibid., p. 377.

  61 Ibid., pp. 381-83.

  62 Misra, V.N., ‘Indus Civilization and the Rgvedic Sarasvatī’, op. cit., p. 514.

  63 McIntosh, Jane R., The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives°, pp. 20-21.

  64 Allchin, Raymond, ‘The Indus Civilization’ in Encyclopœdia Britannica, 2004 (electronic edition).

  65 Allchin, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization°, p. 220.

  66 Ibid., p. 213.

  67 Misra, V.N., ‘Indus Civilization and the Rgvedic Sarasvatī’, op. cit., p. 524.

  7. New Horizons

  1 Bisht, R.S., ‘Excavations at Banawali: 1974-77’, in Possehl, Gregory L., (ed.), Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective, op. cit., p. 120.

  2 Bisht, R.S., ‘Dholavira and Banawali: Two Different Paradigms of the Harappan Urbis Forma’, Puratattva, no. 29, 1998-99, p. 16.

  3 Possehl, Gregory, The Indus Civilization”, p. 77.

  4 Lal, B.B., India 1947-1997°, p. 93 ff.

  5 Lothal’s data is entirely drawn from the excavation report by Rao, S.R., Lothal: A Harappan Port Town, vol. I, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 1985.

  6 For a fuller discussion, see Lal, B.B., India 1947-1997°, p. 71.

  7 Khadkikar A.S., C. Rajshekhar & K.P.N. Kumaran, ‘Palaeogeography around the Harappan Port of Lothal, Gujarat, Western India’, Antiquity, vol. 78, 2004, no. 302, p. 901.

  8 Rao, S.R., Lothal: A Harappan Port Town, op. cit., p. 21.

  9 Dholavira’s data is mostly from three papers by Bisht, R.S. : ‘Dholavira Excavations: 1990-94’, in Joshi, J.P., (ed.), Facets of Indian Civilization: Essays in Honour of Prof. B.B. Lal, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 1997, vol. I, pp. 107-120; ‘Dholavira and Banawali: Two Different Paradigms of the Harappan Urbis Forma’, op. cit., pp. 14-37; ‘Urban Planning at Dholavira: a Harappan City’, op. cit., pp. 11-23.

  10 Mathur, U.B., ‘Chronology of Harappan Port Towns of Gujarat in the Light of Sea Level Changes during the Holocene’, Man and Environment, vol. XXVII, 2002, no. 2, p. 64. It is doubtful, however, that Dholavira was actually a ‘port town’ as proposed by Mathur, as, unlike Lothal, it does not seem to have had berthing facilities.

  11 Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, see quotation and discussion in Iyengar R.N. & B.P. Radhakrishna, ‘Geographical Location of Vedic Irina in Southern Rajasthan’, Journal of the Geological Society of India, vol. 70, November 2007, pp. 699-705. Also Iyengar, R.N., B.P. Radhakrishna & S.S. Mishra, ‘Vedic Irina and the Rann-of-Kutch’, Puratattva, no. 38, 2008, pp. 170-180.

  12 Allchin, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization°, p. 165.

  13 Bisht, R.S., ‘Dholavira and Banawali: Two Different Paradigms of the Harappan Urbis Forma’, op. cit., p. 28.

  8. When Rivers Go Haywire

  1 These issues are discussed in detail in my Dawn of Indian Civilization and the Elusive Aryans° and other studies of the Aryan issue : see Suggested Further Reading under that heading.

  2 E.g. Ratnagar, Shereen, Understanding Harappa: Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley”, pp. 81, 107, 142.

  3 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization°, p. 100.

  4 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, ‘Culture and Societies of the Indus Tradition’ in India : Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan°, p. 68.

  5 Possehl, Gregory, The Indus Civilization”, p. 244.

  6 Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology°, p. 204.

  7 Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, ‘Culture and Societies of the Indus Tradition’, op. cit., p. 68.

  8 Singh, Gurdip, ‘The Indus Valley Culture Seen in the Context of Post-glacial Climate and Ecological Studies in North-west India’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, vol. 6, 1971, no. 2, pp. 177-189.

  9 Misra, V.N., in ‘Climate, a Factor in the Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization : Evidence from Rajasthan and Beyond’, Lal, B.B. & S.P. Gupta, (eds), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization°, pp. 484.

  10 Shaffer, Jim G., and Diane A. Lichtenstein, ‘Ethnicity and Change in the Indus Valley Cultural Tradition’, in Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, (ed.), Old Problems and New Perspectives in the Archaeology of South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, 1989, pp. 117-126.

  11 Bryson, R.A. & A.M. Swain, ‘Holocene Variations of Monsoon Rainfall in Rajasthan’, Quaternary Research, vol. 16, 1981, pp. 135-145.

  12 Madella, Marco & Dorian Q. Fuller, ‘Palaeoecology and the Harapp
an Civilisation of South Asia: A Reconsideration’, Quaternary Science Reviews 25, 2006, p. 1297.

  13 Possehl, Gregory L., The Indus Civilization°, p. 15.

  14 Courty, Marie-Agnès, ‘Integration of Sediment and Soil Information in the Reconstruction of Protohistoric and Historic Landscapes of the Ghaggar Plain (North-West India)’, in Frifelt, Karen & Per Sorensen, (eds), South Asian Archaeology 1985, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, Occasional Papers no. 4, Curzon Press, London, 1989, p. 259.

  15 McKean, M.B., The Palynology of Balakot, a Pre-Harappan and Harappan Age Site in Las Bela, Pakistan, PhD thesis, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, 1983, quoted in Madella, Marco & Dorian Q. Fuller, ‘Palaeoecology and the Harappan Civilisation of South Asia: A Reconsideration’, op. cit., p. 1292.

  16 Enzel, Y., et al., ‘High-Resolution Holocene Environmental Changes in the Thar Desert, Northwestern India’, Science, vol. 284, 2 April 1999, pp. 125-128.

  17 Wasson, R.J., et al., ‘Geomorphology, Late Quaternary Stratigraphy and Palaeoclimatology of the Thar Dune Field’, in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, N.F. Supplementband 45, May 1983, pp. 117-151; partly reproduced in Vedic Sarasvati°, p. 222.

  18 Naidu, P.D., ‘Onset of an Arid Climate at 3.5 ka in the Tropics : Evidence from Monsoon Upwelling Record’, Current Science, vol. 71, 1996, pp. 715-718.

  19 Rad, Ulrich von, et al., ‘A 5000-yr Record of Climate Change in Varved Sediments from the Oxygen Minimum Zone off Pakistan, Northeastern Arabian Sea’, Quaternary Research, vol. 51, 1999, pp. 39-53.

  20 Phadtare, Netajirao R., ‘Sharp Decrease in Summer Monsoon Strength 40003500 cal yr B.P. in the Central Higher Himalaya of India Based on Pollen Evidence from Alpine Peat’, Quaternary Research, vol. 53, 2000, pp. 122-129.

  21 Staubwasser, M., et al., ‘Climate Change at the 4.2 ka BP Termination of the Indus Valley Civilization and Holocene South Asian Monsoon Variability’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 30, 2003, no. 8, p. 1425.

  22 Gupta, Anil K., et al., ‘Adaptation and Human Migration, and Evidence of Agriculture Coincident with Changes in the Indian Summer Monsoon during the Holocene’, Current Science, vol. 90, 25 April 2006, no. 8, pp. 1082-1090.