Harappan civilisation: enigma remains even after 100 years of exploration

September 20, 2024 marks the centenary of the announcement of the discovery of the Indus Valley civilisation, which now spans 2,000 sites across 1.5 million sq. km in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan

Exactly 100 years ago, on September 20, 1924, The Illustrated London News published an article containing explosive news, which has reverberated down the decades and continues to cast a long shadow in South Asia even a century later. Headlined, First Light on a Long-forgotten Civilisation: New Discoveries of an Unknown Prehistoric Past, the article authored by John Marshall, then-Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), announced the discovery of what he called the “civilisation of the Indus Valley”.

A century later, this Bronze Age civilisation is called the Harappan civilisation, named after Harappa, now in Pakistan, which was the first site to be discovered in the area. For the past 100 years, the Harappan civilisation has mesmerised and baffled town planners, epigraphists, metallurgists, hydrologists, specialists in ceramics, mathematicians, astronomers, and others. Its enigmas have intrigued them.

At the apogee of its prosperity, it was a “technological powerhouse” that excelled in town planning, harvesting water, building reservoirs, stadia, warehouses, underground sullage systems, massive fortification walls and building seafaring boats, fabricating bronze and copper artefacts, and in making beads, exquisite painted pottery, and terracotta products. Its craftsman made seals of steatite and carved them with realistic human and animal motifs and a script within a cramped space of 2 cm by 1.5 cm.

Uncanny similarity

Two ASI archaeologists were instrumental in the discovery, and were credited by Marshall in his article. Daya Ram Sahni first excavated Harappa in 1921-22, finding seals, painted pottery, and beads. Known as an “industrious, accurate and modest” man, Sahni later became the ASI’s first Indian Director-General. The other key player was Rakhal Das Banerji. In 1922, he started excavating Mohenjo-daro, also located in modern-day Pakistan, and found seals, pottery, copper products, and crucibles at that site.

In June 1924, Marshall summoned Sahni and Banerji to meet him in his office in Shimla with their finds. He was struck by the uncanny similarity in the objects found at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, although the two sites were 640 km apart. Marshall interpreted the similarities and announced the discovery of the “civilisation of the Indus Valley” in the London newspaper.

Vast civilisation

The Harappan civilisation can be divided into an early phase (3200 BCE to 2600 BCE), the mature period (2600 BCE to 1900 BCE), and the late phase (1900 BCE to 1500 BCE), when it decayed and collapsed.

Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Ganweriwala (all now in Pakistan), Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira (both in India) are the five biggest Harappan sites out of about 2,000 sites in the civilisational area, which is spread over 1.5 million sq.km. in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. There are about 1,500 sites in northwestern India, including in Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The village of Daimabad on the banks of the Godavari river in Maharashtra is the southernmost outpost of the Harappan civilisation. There are about 500 sites in Pakistan, and a few in Afghanistan. The civilisation burgeoned on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati rivers, the latter of which is believed to have dried up circa 1900 BCE.

According to Indus civilisation scholar Asko Parpola, “its most characteristic features” were: “the fully developed Indus script; finely carved stamp seals with writing and/or an animal or some other iconographic motif…; standardised measures, including cubic weights made of chert carefully cut and polished, employing a combination of binary and decimal systems…; the large-scale use of burnt brick, standardised in size, with the ratio 1:2:4, the most effective for bonding; exquisite lapidary art, featuring highly developed micro-drilling of very long beads made of hard carnelian, decorated with chemically stained motifs.” (From Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism, The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization, 2015, Oxford University Press).

Filling the gap

Vasant Shinde, who has excavated several Harappan sites in India, noted that the civilisation’s discovery was significant on two counts. First, most historians were of the opinion, before it was discovered, that settled life in this part of the world first occurred around the sixth century BCE, leaving a gap in South Asian history. Historian Vincent Smith had said India jumped from the Stone Age to the [Buddhist] stupas. “The discovery of the Harappan civilisation filled the so-called gap and pushed back in one stroke the antiquity of the settled life in this part of the world by more than 3,000 years,” Dr. Shinde said.

Second, the discovery added one more ancient civilisation in Asia, besides the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian, and unravelled the Harappan civilisation’s maritime contacts with West Asia from 3000 BCE.

Iravatham Mahadevan, who battled for 50 years to decipher the Indus script, had asserted that the civilisation was both pre-Aryan and non-Aryan.

Related Stories

• Who were the first settlers of India?

• Who built the Indus Valley civilisation?

• The first Indians

• How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate

• The problematics of genetics and the Aryan issue

• Too early to settle the Aryan migration debate?

• What does ancient DNA show about history?

• ‘Indus Valley settlers had a distinct genetic lineage’

Mehrgarh, in Balochistan, Pakistan, is where it all began around 7000 BCE. “The roots of the Harappan civilisation lie in Mehrgarh, around eight millennium BCE,” asserted R.S. Bisht, who excavated Dholavira in Gujarat from 1989-90 to 2004-2005.

The book The Wonder that was Harappan Civilisation, brought out by The Hindu, has reproduced Marshall’s story, first published in The Illustrated London News. On January 4, 1928, The Hindu had used a full page to publish a summary of his statement on the subject.

(This article is based partly on extracts from The Wonder that was Harappan Civilisation, curated by Mr. Subramanian.)

Published - September 20, 2024 03:30 am IST