Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12: Chapter V: Cities and Towns of Sind and the Punjab
Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12
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- c12.s1 Notes to Chapter V — 7 parts
Chapter V: Cities and Towns of Sind and the Punjab
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Now the land between the Jhelum and the Beas is said to hold nine nations and five thousand cities, every one of them as large as Kos; but I think this is exaggerated.
Strabo, *xv*, *fr.* 701.
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FROM the hills to the plains; from a difficult mountainous country where each secluded valley is cut off from its neighbours to a great region linked from north to south by a river system forming a natural highway of communication; from villages, or at the most rustic market-towns, to cities which in size and organization rank high among the urban achievements of the whole Ancient Orient; this is the transition we make in turning from Baluchistan, and the prehistoric communities described in the last chapter, to the plains through which flow the Five Rivers of the Punjab and, to the south, the Indus. In this great area, where India really begins, eastward of the Baluchi mountain barrier, we encounter another group of prehistoric settlements which, though they share with the Baluchistan villages a common agricultural background and certain features of cultural affinity, yet in most respects present a contrast rather than a similarity
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The variety in styles and techniques among the products of the Baluchistan communities – the strongly individualized groups of pottery types, for instance – permits us to visualize the existence of little peasant states, each more or less self-contained, within a natural area such as the Zhob Valley, or those of the Kolwa and Maskai. The similarities we can detect between the localized cultures are the outcome of common necessities among farming peoples working a difficult land; there is no evidence of any uniform arbitrary standards accepted or imposed throughout the territory. The settlements of the Amri folk in Sind repeat the story of Baluchistan - another localized culture with its own traditions in the household crafts and, one suspects, in other less tangible aspects of its life as well.
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But, as we shall see, these very Amri settlements are succeeded by those of folk whose allegiance is not to a petty state, but to an empire. Diversity is replaced by uniformity over an area incomparably vaster than anything we have yet seen in prehistoric India; a complete agreement in details of material culture is found over an area stretching from the Makran coast to Kathiawar, and northwards to the Himalayan foothills: a huge irregular triangle with the sides measuring 950 by 700 by 550 miles. From end to end of this territory, from some forty settlement-sites, come pottery vessels of identical mass-produced types; houses are built of baked bricks of standard dimensions; stamp-seals are used engraved with similar scenes and a uniform script, as yet unread; a standard system of weights is recognizable. While some sites are villages, others are small towns, and 350 miles apart stand two cities, each covering at least a square mile of ground, twin capitals of an empire. To a British archaeologist the inevitable parallel is the Roman Empire supervening upon the prehistoric Iron Age barbarian settlements of his own country. Under the jejune archaeological nomenclature of the ‘Harappā Culture’ there lies concealed one of the greatest nameless kingdoms of Western Asia.
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The natural conditions of the area within the bounds of the Harappā Culture in ancient times are of some interest. Today the Punjab is one of the greatest corn-growing areas of Asia, but Sind is a desert reclaimed only by the elaborate irrigation works which utilize the waters of the Indus. The main weight of settlement, as known by field-work up to the present, seems to have been in Sind, west of the Indus, but there are a dozen sites of settlements, some evidently of quite large towns, along the line of the now-dry Ghaggar River in the desert areas of Bahawalpur State. The northern ‘capital’, Harappā, is in the Punjab, about 100 miles south-west of Lahore; the southern city, Mohenjo-daro, is on the Indus in Sind, nearly 200 miles north of Karachi. The very existence of these large cities, and of the bigger towns as well, must presuppose a considerable agricultural population producing an adequate surplus beyond its immediate needs for sale to the towns, and the invariable use of burnt clay bricks throughout the Harappā Culture must imply far greater timber resources for firing the kilns than the present vegetation of tamarisk and scrub would afford. Under the present climatic conditions of Sind the Harappā state as we can infer it from the tangible remains could hardly have been achieved. Yet it was brought into being and survived for centuries in this very region, and we can look only to changing natural conditions for an explanation.
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Fortunately, we have a rather remarkable amount of evidence for conditions in the third millennium B.C. in this area. The Harappā Culture counted among its achievements a representational art which concerned itself largely with animals and natural forms, and these representations of the contemporary wild and domesticated animals are amplified by the actual remains of animal bones recovered from the excavations. From these we see that the climatic conditions were such as to favour a suitable habitat for the rhinoceros and the tiger as well as the water-buffalo and the elephant, none of which survives as wild species in the region today (except the tiger, sometimes found in Sind). But on one of the ancient engraved stamp-seals all these animals surround a deity who appears as a lord of beasts with the main species in his domains. Many other representations of these beasts are known from Harappā art, and bones of all except the tiger have in fact been found at either Mohenjo-daro or Harappā.
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Among other wild animals known from one or both of these sources, we may notice the river-crocodile of gharial type, still an inhabitant of the Indus; some species of bear, monkey, squirrel, and parrot; the Barasingha deer and the horns at least of the Kashmir, spotted, Sambhur and hog deer - but these may have been imported. The jackal and the wolf were there, not far from the edges of the towns; rats, mongoose, lizards, and tortoises must have been familiar in street or courtyard; and fish from the rivers was eaten. Direct evidence of trees is confined to the lucky survival of a few charred beams, of which those of deodar must have been brought down from the hills to the north, though sissoo still grows in Sind; the cloying sweet smell of its freshly-sawn wood is an essential part of life in North-Western India today.
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Though none of the evidence is conclusive, yet the inference from the fauna, the wood needed to burn so many million bricks, and the implication of a flourishing agricultural background, all suggest a climate different from that of today, when at Mohenjo-daro the range in annual temperature is between 120° F. in summer to frost in winter, with a rainfall of less than 6 inches in the year. The very use of burnt brick as a building material instead of the sun-dried mud brick common to the Ancient East may imply the necessity of finding something more durable under conditions of frequent or considerable rainfall, and the elaborate system of drains in the cities may also be explained in connexion with a greater volume of rain-water.
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The record of the chroniclers of Alexander the Great’s campaigns suggests that in the fourth century B.C. Sind (the region of Mousikanos) was still a fertile tract of country, and there is even evidence of the persistence of conditions kinder than now up to the time of the Moghuls. The most reasonable explanation of the climatic deterioration within comparatively recent times is the supposition that the edge of the south-western monsoon area has shifted eastwards, and that the Indus was formerly within the area of monsoon rains. On the whole this explanation seems more likely than the alternative view that the northern storm-belt was deflected southwards by conditions in immediately post-glacial times, and that the effect persisted after the establishment of otherwise normal climatic conditions. Though South Baluchistan had certainly reached its present conditions of arid climate by the time of Alexander's retreat, the Indus region may have preserved its moister climate within the western fringe of the monsoon until later centuries.
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Within the area already described, the uniform products of the Harappā civilization can be traced with the monotonous regularity of a highly-organized community under some strong system of centralized government, controlling production and distribution and no doubt levying a system of tolls and customs throughout the territory under its rule. As we shall see, there is no evidence to imply that the cities of Harappā and Mohenjo-daro were not contemporary: laid out to a common ground-plan, each with its defenced citadel towering above the rest of the town, they seem to have been twin capitals, a northern and a southern, of one united kingdom. One is reminded of historical parallels in North-West India, when Sakas and Kushanas ruled from Taxila or Peshawar in the north, and Muttra in the south, over a single state.
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In the region which might reasonably be considered the Northern Kingdom, fourteen village or small town sites are known in addition to Harappā, and one suspects that fieldwork would produce more in the Punjab, where only two are now known, the remainder being concentrated east of the Indus and Sutlej in Bhawalpur State (Fig. 17). In the Southern Kingdom of Mohenjo-daro there are about seventeen such subsidiary settlements, many occupying sites already lived on by peasants of the Amri and related cultures.
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The site at Rangpur in Kathiawar looks like an outlying trading-post, as does that at Dabarkot on the eastern edge of the North Baluchistan hills; sites in South Baluchistan, notably Mehi, show clear indications of trading with the Harappā people, and at Sutkagen-dor near the Makran coast is what must be a fortified citadel of Harappā traders, perhaps connected with a port on the shore of the Arabian Sea.
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FIG. 17. (after Wheeler)
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These settlements (such sites as that last mentioned excepted) do not seem to have been laid out for defence, and at the capital cities the defences of the citadels alone have been proved to exist, though town walls are by no means unlikely. Communication by the river would provide a great natural thoroughfare north and south linking the capitals – Harappā on the banks of the Ravi and Mohenjo-daro on the Indus – and pack-trails over the passes into Baluchistan would serve the traders into those parts.
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The absolute uniformity in the products of the Harappā Culture cannot wholly be explained by a rigidly enforced set of laws. There must have been a strongly established commercial code and a standardized technique of production which could control the sizes of bricks, the capacity and type of pots (turned out on the wheel in a variety of depressingly utilitarian forms), and the system of weights and measures. At Mohenjo-daro itself the strict observance of street frontages through successive centuries of the town’s rebuilding implies heredity of land tenure and trade such as might lie in guilds and a caste system. At Harappā we shall see that the agricultural output was under municipal control, with great granaries strangely foreshadowing those of the Roman Army. In the absence of any effective grinding machinery, flour was produced by organized grain-pounding by coolie labour, which was housed in miserable rows of identically planned two-roomed cottages. There is a terrible efficiency about the Harappā civilization which recalls all the worst of Rome, but with this elaborately contrived system goes an isolation and a stagnation hard to parallel in any known civilization of the Old World, though perhaps not without comparable situations in the New, among the ancient South and Central American civilizations.
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The remarkable uniformity of the Harappā Culture is in fact expressed not only spatially, but also in the dimension of time. At Harappā itself the first town on the site, overlying a peasant settlement related to the North Baluchistan culture area, is already in all its known respects typical of the culture in its full maturity. But here and at Mohenjo-daro, where the greatest depth of accumulated strata has been recorded, there is hereafter no change. In the latter site there were at least nine phases of rebuilding in the city’s history, often interrupted by disastrous river floods, but from top to bottom of the accumulated layers of debris no change can be detected in the content of the material culture, and it is reasonable to suppose that the less tangible elements of the people’s lives were similarly unmodified. Certainly the script, which should be an index to changing modes of thought, is totally unchanged throughout. As we look today at the unvarying succession of building phases at Mohenjo-daro, towering 30 feet above us as we stand on the lowest street-level, we encounter in monumental form the first instance in the story of India of the innate conservatism of thought that is repeated through the centuries; conservatism that may so easily become stagnation, especially when developed in isolation.*
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Although the duration of time implied by this long succession of rebuildings must be at least seven hundred years or more, yet there are no material changes perceptible save in archaeological minutiae. Curiously primitive features, such as the type of flat bronze axe or the spear without midrib, persist unchanged and unimproved. Although there is good evidence of trade between the Harappā kingdom and those of Sumer and Akkad, yet the decisive technological advance marked by the making of axes and other tools with sockets for the handle, known in Mesopotamia from the beginning of the third millennium, never reached the metalsmiths of the Indus and the Punjab. Indeed, so far as we can tell, it is likely that the first shaft-hole axe seen at Mohenjo-daro was brandished by an invader from the west who took part in the sacking of the city, perhaps about the middle of the second millennium B.C.
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∗ As already mentioned on p. 53, the excavation reports on Mohenjo-daro and Harappā use an extraordinary notation in distinguishing the successive phases (true stratigraphy was not recorded). There are three main ‘periods,’ Early, Intermediate and Late, each divided into three but with the subdivisions numbered in *reverse* order, so that ‘Early Period Phase I’ is followed by ‘Intermediate Period Phase III.’ This impossible system is ignored in the following account.
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This stagnation and uniformity in the Harappā Culture throughout its known duration renders it peculiarly difficult to assess not only the sequence in the larger towns but also their relationship one to another. It is improbable that the nine building phases known at Mohenjo-daro (where virgin soil has not been reached) are all subsequent to the six identified at Harappā, but such a transference of the seat of government to a southern site (or indeed the reverse process, with Mohenjo-daro the earlier site) and a total duration of the two cities between for over a thousand years, is theoretically not impossible. The Harappā Culture is known only in its mature form; it has no known beginnings, no tentative early phases before the outlines are firmly fixed. An origin outside India is inherently improbable, but where and in what form this origin was is quite unknown.
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The combination of elaborate social and economic organization over a huge empire with an isolation which rendered many of its technological processes astonishingly primitive makes one think not so much of contemporary Sumer or Egypt, but rather of the Central American pre-Columban civilizations. Here similarly one finds great architectural achievement (far surpassing that of the Harappā civilization indeed); the rigorously authoritarian rule and elaborate religious conceptions that we may be permitted to infer from the Harappā evidence; a primitive hieratic script, and a technological backwardness which in America was so extreme that the use of metals for tools was still unknown. But America in the twelfth century A.D. had more excuse for isolation than Western India in the twentieth century B.C.
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In many respects, then, the Harappā civilization is enigmatic to a degree surpassing its contemporaries in Western Asia. In so far as it is an urban and literate culture, using copper and bronze but not iron for tools and weapons, it is comparable with the civilizations known in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia in the third millennium B.C. It is indeed unlikely that it springs from any separate ultimate origin – somewhere behind it lie the peasant cultures of the type of Mehi or Rana-Ghundai – and again, in its use of a written script it is likely to be dependent, in the last resort, on the inventions of late fourth-millennium date in Mesopotamia, which seem to have given an impetus to writing not only in Sumer but also in Early Dynastic Egypt. But as soon as it had reached the mature form in which alone we know it, it had become something essentially apart, essentially Indian too. As we examine its various features in detail in the following pages we shall encounter again and again significant parallels with contemporary Hindu Culture, and almost certainly these links were stronger in medieval Indian times.
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But before we come to a detailed description of the various features of this extraordinary civilization we may indicate in outline its position in time in relation to the peasant communities of Baluchistan, and of the other cultures of the Ancient Orient in countries lying farther to the west. After a thorough examination of all the evidence this chronological problem is treated in detail at the close of this chapter, but some idea of the general position is necessary to appreciate the setting of the culture as a whole.
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In the first place, there is a certain proportion of painted pottery in the Harappā Culture side by side with the mass-produced utilitarian pots of unpainted wares, and these painted wares, with the designs in black on a deep, lustrous red background, suggest that the main relationships should lie with the red-ware group of cultures in North Baluchistan, rather than those using the buff wares of the southern region. But direct connexion is in the present state of our knowledge impossible to prove, though the small amount of material available from the recent (1946) excavations at Harappā shows that the first town on that site overlies a settlement of people using pottery which appears to belong to the North Baluchistan group, in that phase of development seen in the IIIc phase at Rana Ghundai (Fig. 20). The mature Harappā Culture in the Punjab, then, is subsequent to RG IIIc.
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Similar evidence is available from sites farther south. One of the Bahawalpur towns of the Harappā Culture overlies a settlement with black-on-buff ware, although this does not seem to be closely allied to any of the Baluchistan wares known to us at present, but at three prehistoric villages in Sind, settlements with pottery of the Amri class have been superseded by those of Harappā folk: this evidence fits in with what we know, or suspect, of the chronological position of Amri in the buff-ware sequence. There is further evidence that Harappā traders, and probably colonists, were in South Baluchistan at the time the Kulli Culture was flourishing there, and the cemetery at Nal seems to be that of people having some contacts with the civilization of the Indus and the Punjab. As this cemetery was dug into the ruins of a settlement of RG IIIc folk, this again fits in well with the evidence of stratigraphy at Harappā itself. It looks as though the urban culture of the plains was approximately contemporary with the hill peasantries making pottery in the style of Kulli, Nal, and Periano Ghundai; only approximately contemporary, as the Kulli style seems to have started before Harappā folk arrived in South Baluchistan, and that of Nal is likely to have gone on rather longer than the period of maximum prosperity of the Harappā kingdom.
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At three sites in Sind, on the top of ruined and deserted Harappā towns or villages, settlements were found which contained evidence of the arrival in the region of new peoples with an alien and more barbaric way of life than that of the complex urban pattern of Harappā. There is a little evidence that similar folk came to Mohenjo-daro in the days of its decline, and at Harappā, as at Chanhu-daro in Sind, there was a final occupation of people building rough huts on top of the ruins of the defences and structures of the citadel, and burying their dead in a cemetery dug into the rubbish-tips of the deserted city. In Baluchistan what seems to be a contemporary cemetery was dug into the ruins of a Kulli settlement containing evidence of Harappā contacts: again the evidence is consistent.
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These newcomers, who coincide so suspiciously with the end of the Harappā civilization, came to India from the west. To understand them and to assess the probable date of their arrival we must turn to the countries west of India, with which the Harappā traders had contacts. Here again the detailed evidence will be reviewed at a later stage, when we discuss the relations of the Harappā kingdom with foreign powers, but for the present we may look to Mesopotamia for evidence of connexions between the Indian civilization, prehistoric by reason of its undeciphered script, and those of the Tigris and Euphrates, where some form of written record enables us to regard them as historic from a date not long after 3000 B.C.
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As we saw in the previous chapter, there is good evidence for trading contacts between South Baluchistan, and the folk of the Kulli Culture, and Sumer in the Early Dynastic period, about 2800 B.C. That the trade contacts of South Baluchistan were not westwards by sea routes is shown by the abundant evidence at such sites as Mehi of reciprocal mercantile relations eastwards and overland with the Indus Valley and the Harappā Culture. The shifting shoals and the mangrove swamps of the Indus mouths can never have encouraged the establishment of a port there, and the Kulli merchants may have been middle-men in the original trade between Harappā and the west, sailing from harbours on the Makran coast. At all events, there is no absolutely certain evidence that Sumer and the Harappā empire were in touch in Early Dynastic times: clear signs of contact first appear in Akkadian times - that is, about 2300 B.C. In Northern Persia there are certain points of evidence suggesting that some phase of the Harappā civilization was contemporary with the Hissar III period, and at Anau, in Russian Turkestan, Harappā contacts seem perceptible in Anau III - on independent showing contemporary with Hissar III. The dating of these phases is still somewhat controversial, but some time between 2300 and 2000 B.C. seems probable.
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The intrusive barbarians responsible for the final occupation of the ruined Harappā sites at Chanhu-daro, Harappā, and elsewhere seem also to have connexions with the Hissar III-Anau III complex of cultures, perhaps indeed representing their final stages, and a migration eastwards from the North Iranian-Turkestan regions. On the whole their arrival in India is not likely to have been until two or three centuries after 2000 - the round figure of 1500 B.C. is conveniently approximate. So the evidence from the west suggests that the mature Harappā civilization - and it must be repeated that this is the only phase of the culture we know at present - flourished within the millennium 2500-1500 B.C. Of its end we are more certain than of its beginning, but we can say that during that millennium there was little appreciable change in the fabric and pattern of this enigmatic civilization. In the following pages, therefore, we are less hampered than we might be by methods of excavation which were stratigraphically uncritical, and we can use the whole body of evidence to build up a picture of the Harappā people and their achievements.
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And so, first, the people themselves. For evidence of the physical type and personal appearance of the Harappā folk we can turn to two sources – the actual remains of skeletons and the representations in stone sculpture and bronze-casting found on the excavated sites. About fifty skeletons or fragments of skeletons have been found at Mohenjo-daro, Harappā, and Chanhu-daro, in conditions which vary from ritual deposits to violent massacres in the final stages of the cities' history, and of these a certain number have been reported upon by anthropologists and anatomists. At Harappā the ‘R 37’ cemetery, belonging to the period of the city's flourishing occupation, has produced about 60 burials, but the anatomical reports on these have not yet appeared. But from the available evidence, mainly from Mohenjo-daro, we can see that more than one ethnic strain was present in the population.
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We shall discuss the circumstance in which the Mohenjo-daro people, whose remains were found in houses or in the lanes of the final phase of the city's occupation, met their death, in the next chapter. For the present we are concerned with their appearance in life. Nearly half the skulls which could be classified belonged to a more or less homogeneous group, into which, incidentally, also comes the only well-preserved skull from the Nal cemetery in Baluchistan. This group is that classed as the Mediterranean type, and at the present day includes a large number of groups of peoples stretching from Iberia to India. The characteristic type appears in late Natufian times in Palestine (a Mesolithic phase referred to in Chapter II and perhaps dating back to the ninth or tenth millennium B.C.) and may have been differentiated in the southern steppes of Northern Africa and in Asia, and spread westwards and eastwards. The pre-dynastic Egyptians certainly belonged to this stock, and the purest representatives at the present day are to be found in the Arabian Peninsula. In India it forms today a dominant element in the population of the north and is widespread elsewhere among the upper social classes. Such people are medium to tall in stature, with a complexion ranging from dark to light olive-brown, a long head and face, and a narrow and relatively pronounced nose; black hair, and eyes ranging from black to brown and characteristically large and open. The body is slenderly built.
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The archaeological evidence shows that this long-headed Mediterranean type is everywhere in Western Asia associated with the earliest agricultural settlements: at Sialk or Al 'Ubaid, Anau or Alishar. The Al 'Ubaid skulls show singularly close analogies to those from Mohenjo-daro, and their 'Afghanian' characteristics have been remarked upon. Just as the evidence from the painted pottery of Baluchistan and that lying behind the painted wares in the Harappā Culture points to an eventual homogeneity among these various simple agricultural economies, so the actual physical type shows an essential ethnic community over the whole area, and the appearance of these early 'Mediterranean' folk in prehistoric India must be related to expansion from the west.
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But there is another and a more primitive element represented in the Mohenjo-daro people. Three skulls belong to what has been classed as the Proto-Australoid group (the Veddoid type of some writers), and these have some claim to represent the aboriginal inhabitants of the country. Here, analogies lie with the Australian blackfellows and the Veddahs of Ceylon: current opinion tends to the view that Australia received her aboriginal population by migration through Ceylon and Melanesia from Southern India, where the type is well represented today. Of small stature, with a dark skin-colour approaching black, wavy or curly (but never frizzy) black hair, long heads, broad flat nose and fleshy, protruding lips, these people form the main element in the South and Central Indian aboriginal tribes of the present day, as well as largely constituting the so-called ‘exterior castes’ of Hindu society.
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The remaining skulls from the Harappā Culture include one (from a burial which may be later than the main occupation of Mohenjo-daro) of a person of typically Mongolian type – by no means surprising, of course: the type has been present in China since Upper Palaeolithic times – and certainly one, perhaps as many as four, which were short-headed and comparable with the so-called Alpine type. This physical type is represented at Sialk as a small proportion of the population during periods II, III, and IV, and its origin has been much discussed; but these round-headed folk may have their origins in an Upper Palaeolithic survival, with reduced head and face size, and parallel to the emergence of the specialized round-headed Mongoloid form. The Sialk evidence suggests that such cranial types may also occur in the Iranian plateau in the third and fourth millennia B.C. The Indian skulls are more likely to be related to a physical type probably indigenous, if rare in Western Asia, than to afford evidence of racial movement from the west towards the valley of the Indus at this time. There is a related short-headed element in the Indian population today, scattered through many regions, and some anthropologists would include in this group the Brahuis of Baluchistan, though others regard them as the result of a mixture between Proto-Australoid and Mediterranean types. In general, however, the Alpine types tend to have a lighter pigmentation than these races, with abundant body hair and a roundish face with strong nose.
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The sum of the evidence from the skulls, then, shows that in the Harappā Culture there was, first, the aboriginal Proto-Australoid type, perhaps then, as now, ranking among the ‘under-dogs’ of the social system; second, the predominant Mediterraneans, presumably the main contributors of the agricultural and urban features of the whole Western Indian prehistoric world, and with them probably the short-headed Alpine element; thirdly, an occasional ‘foreigner’ from the north-east – the hill-country of Nepal or Assam, or beyond, possibly from China itself – but he is perhaps present as an invader.
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The evidence from sculptured representations must, of course, be handled with some reserve, but it is at least not incompatible with the knowledge gained from the skulls themselves. Four works of art from Mohenjo-daro can really be taken into consideration, and of these the first is the little bronze statuette of a girl, already referred to in Chapter IV as showing close similarities in hair-dressing and adornment to the clay figurines in the Kulli Culture of South Baluchistan. This girl seems certainly of the Proto-Australoid type, with full lips, and if, as seems likely, she is indeed a representation of a Baluchistan type, one may note in passing that the very dark complexion associated with the Proto-Australoid group would be in accord with the name given to Southern Baluchistan in classical times – Gedrosia, the country of the dark folk.
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A sculptured limestone head showing a man with a beard and an elaborate coiffure, with a ‘bun’ at the back, bound round by a fillet, would fit well enough into the Mediterranean facial type, while the treatment of the eyes in another rather similar head might indicate a Mongolian cast of countenance; but this resemblance should not be stressed unduly. But the most important piece of sculpture, that of the well-known bearded man wearing a trefoil-decorated robe, is rather puzzling from an ethnic point of view. It has been suggested that one should see in this sculpture a representation of an Armenoid type with short head – a physical type which appears to be present in Mesopotamia from Early Dynastic times onwards as an ingredient of the population, but which at Sialk is known only from the late Cemetery B, not likely to be earlier than 1000 B.C., and in the main some centuries later. But it is always dangerous to argue from ancient sculpture to ancient skulls, and, as we have seen, there is an earlier short-headed element present at Sialk, and at Mohenjo-daro, in the so-called Alpine types of skull. As many anthropologists regard the Armenoid type as a stable hybrid between the Alpine stock and the Indo-Iranian branch of the Mediterranean race, the early and perhaps sporadic appearance of the type in the third millennium is by no means impossible.
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The distribution of Harappā settlements in North-Western India has already been commented on in general terms. Like the contemporary settlements of Sumer and Egypt, the Harappā Culture is essentially linked by great rivers, which have obviously been the decisive geographical factors in its expansion and in the subsequent preservation of its unity over so large an area. The two main cities lie, like the foci of an ellipse, one to the north and the other to the south of the known area of settlement – Mohenjo-daro on the right bank of the Indus in Sind and Harappā on the left bank of the Ravi in the Punjab. Extensive field-work has been carried out in Sind, and we probably have a fairly complete idea of the distribution of settlements there, except those later covered by medieval and modern towns or villages. It seems probable that intensive field-work in the Punjab would bring to light a great many more sites there; at present there is one village known not far from Harappā itself, and another in the Himalayan foothills at Rupar on the Sutlej River. But east of the Indus in Bahawalpur State and along the course of the now dry Ghaggar River, the Sarasvati of early Indian literature, are a dozen sites of villages or towns which, by their position, would seem politically to come within the ambit of the ruler of Harappā, and which might be taken as evidence of a northerly kingdom, to be amplified no doubt by further undiscovered sites in the Punjab (Fig. 17).
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Between the most southerly site in Bahawalpur and the nearest site farther south, in Khairpur State, is an interval of 150 miles - but this lacuna may be due to incomplete field-work over the intervening area, and settlement may be virtually continuous. However, from this point southwards and south-westwards nearly to Karachi are clustered settlements of which the chief is the city of Mohenjo-daro, near the northern limit of the area of concentration, suggesting a population owing allegiance to the ruling powers in that city.
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It is, I think, improbable that further field-work will bring to light more cities of the first rank, such as the two already known - improbable, though of course not impossible. On the evidence as it stands at present, we are entitled to regard the Harappā kingdom as governed from two capital cities 350 miles apart, but linked by a continuous river thoroughfare. That the Northern and Southern kingdoms, if we like to separate them in this manner, were in fact only subdivisions of a unit is shown by the complete uniformity in material culture from the most northerly to the most southerly site, ignoring any imaginary boundary we may draw between Bahawalpur and Khairpur, for instance. Whatever the system of rule and however enforced, it can hardly be that of two competing city-states, but must represent a common authority having a dual seat of government.
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The archaeological evidence of continuous occupation of the city-sites over centuries, with at Mohenjo-daro at least the preservation of the initial street-plan from first to last, with practically no encroachment on the building-lines of houses where they faced upon main streets or subsidiary lanes, shows that continuity of government was somehow assured throughout this long time, and that whatever the changes of dynasty or of individuals in power, the tradition was transmitted unimpaired and of constant validity. While it is dangerous to make deductions from the evidence with any confidence, one can nevertheless suggest that such a continuity over generations is likely to have been enforced by religious sanctions, and that, in its remarkable conservatism and scrupulous preservation of even the details of everyday life intact for centuries, the texture of the Harappā civilization has a strongly theocratic tinge, and surely implies a social system wherein the unchanging traditions of the temple were of more account than the ambitions of an individual ruler or the secular instability of the court, and in which the form of land tenure was dictated by the priestly hierarchy.
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In the two cities the impression of centralized power, already implicit in the distribution and character of the settlements as a whole, is immediately and overwhelmingly apparent. The two sites are laid out to a common ground-plan, in which, on the western edge of the city, rose an impressive citadel, an approximate rectangle or parallelogram with its long axis north and south, and measuring about 400 by 200 yards (Fig. 18). This was formed of an artificial platform over 30 feet high, of mud brick faced with burnt brick revetments and strong defensive walls, carrying on its fortified summit a group of buildings which, as we shall see later, are not private houses, but houses with a ceremonial or public character. To this high defended citadel belonged processional terraces and monumental gateways; below it lay the streets and houses of the town, and the industrial quarters of a semi-servile labouring class (Fig. 19).
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Here, to quote Wheeler, whose work at Harappā has so forcibly demonstrated the essential character of the cities and their rulers,
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'whatever the source of their authority - and a dominant religious element may fairly be assumed - the lords of Harappā administered their city in a fashion not remote from that of the priest-kings or governors of Sumer and Akkad ... In Sumer, the wealth and discipline of the
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SITE PLAN OF MOHENJO-DARO
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SITE PLAN OF HARAPPA
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BLACK AREAS DEFENCES HATCHED AREAS EXCAVATED
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SCALE OF FEET 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
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L.P.V
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FIG. 18. Site plans of Mohenjo-daro and Harappā (after Wheeler)
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city-state were vested in the chief deity, i.e. in the priesthood or a priest-king. The civic focus was the exalted temple, centre of an elaborate and carefully ordered secular administration under divine sanction ... In essence, the picture is one of a rigid and highly evolved bureaucratic machine, capable of organizing and distributing surplus wealth and defending it, but little conducive to the political liberty of the individual.’
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A state ruled over by priest-kings, wielding autocratic and absolute power from two main seats of government, and with the main artery of communication between the capital cities provided by a great navigable river, seems, then, to be the reasonable deduction from the archaeological evidence of the civilization of Harappā. To maintain the populations of such cities, and of the smaller towns to a large extent as well, an agrarian system sufficiently well organized to produce the necessary surplus must have existed, but there is no direct evidence of its nature, or of the systems of artificial irrigation which might well be expected to accompany it. We know that bread wheat (*Triticum compactum* and *sphaerococcum*) and barley (*Hordeum vulgare* and the *hexastichum* variety) were grown, as well as sesamum and field peas (*Pisum arvensis*), and a species of *Brassica* (perhaps *B. juncea*, the modern Indian *rai*). The cereal crops are of sufficient interest to merit further discussion.
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Barley is a grain which has been cultivated from very early times in Western Asia; it is attested to in Tell Halaf times at Arpachiyah in Northern Mesopotamia, and in the Egyptian Fayum at a time probably contemporary with the Uruk phase of ancient Mesopotamia. The Egyptian finds include, significantly enough, the *hexastichum* (six-row) variety of barley, as in prehistoric India, and the wild varieties of the grass from which the cultivated grain was produced still grow in Turkestan, Persia, and North Afghanistan. The wild ancestors of what is known as bread wheat (with 21 chromosomes as against 14 and 7 in the other two main wheat groups) are unknown, but it is interesting to note that the most primitive forms of the cultivated varieties are grown today in Persia, Afghanistan, the region around Bokhara, Kashmir, and Western India, and there is some reason to think that the *sphaerococcum* and *compactum* forms may be the earliest forms of bread wheat, arising out of hybridization of the other wheats with kindred grasses. On botanical grounds such workers as Vavilov have suggested that bread wheat originated on the Himalayan edge of Afghanistan; others have looked to the region between the Zagros Mountains and the Caspian. The archaeological evidence is slight, but impressions of bread wheat grains of the *Triticum vulgare* group were found in potsherds from Anau I in Turkestan, and point to the early emergence of the type in regions not too remote from Western India, where the Harappā Culture evidence shows that bread wheats were being grown in the third millennium B.C.
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We shall see that the storage of grain was, at Harappā at least, and by inference at Mohenjo-daro as well, carried out as part of a government agricultural policy, and that, adjacent to the municipal granaries, the preparation of flour – the equivalent of corn-milling – was also part of a controlled economy using organized labour. It is to be presumed that other state-controlled industries would be brick-manufacture, and that the supply of wood fuel for this and for pottery-baking, both in terms of mass-production, would involve some sort of forestry force. No brick kilns have so far been discovered; as these are likely to have been large, they would certainly have been set outside the main occupied area of the city, where the smoke would not offend the inhabitants. Pottery-kilns are known only in the latest phase of the city at Mohenjo-daro, and bespeak decadence: even quite small pottery-kilns are today set outside the town walls in India - partly to avoid the smoke and partly to obviate the risk of fire to adjacent premises. But in the degenerate days at Mohenjo-daro they were built in the town - even in the street.
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One of the most interesting crops grown by the people of the Harappā civilization was cotton, of which a fortunate single find at Mohenjo-daro has given conclusive evidence. Fragments of a true cotton textile, dyed red with madder, were found sticking to the side of a silver vase, and it is clear that the plant which produced the fibre is of the *Gossypium* arboreum type - that grown today as a cultivated form, and not one of the wild cottons. Cotton cloth is likely to have been an important article of commerce for the Harappā civilization, and it is probable that some at least of the trade with Mesopotamia was in cotton goods. By later historic times in that country Indian cotton was known under the name of *sindhu*, and this in the form *sindon* passed into Greek.
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In addition to vegetable crops, the farming economy which lay behind the Harappā kingdom’s prosperity naturally included various domestic animals. We are fortunate in having an admirable series of zoological reports on the animal bones from Harappā to form the basis of a detailed survey. The Indian humped bull, or zebu (*Bos indicus*), was domesticated as in Baluchistan; so too was a smaller, short-horned, humpless species. The origin of the humped bull is obscure: wild species are not known, and one can regard it only as a domesticated variety which ultimately goes back to the common stock represented by the Pleistocene *Bos namadicus*. It is a breed specifically Indian in ancient times, the characteristic hump differentiating it from contemporary domesticated breeds elsewhere in Western Asia; and, as we have seen, it certainly goes back to the Rana Ghundai II phase of North Baluchistan, perhaps contemporary with Hissar I and Jemdet Nasr at least.
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Other domestic animals in the Harappā Culture include the Indian domestic buffalo (*Bos bubalis*), goat (*Capra aegagrus*, r. *indicus*), sheep (*Ovis vignei*, r. *domesticus*), and pig (*Sus cristatus* var. *domesticus*). The goats appear to belong to the same group as those of Kashmir which produce the superb wool from which the famous Kashmir shawls are made, and so the possibility of goat wool being used in the Harappā Culture must be borne in mind. The sheep, probably forms domesticated from the wild Urial stock and similar to sheep from Sialk I and Anau, seem likely to belong to a long-legged, long-tailed race which includes various wool-producing forms, and the pigs belong to the lean, brisk, bristly species known in India today.
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There is evidence of the domestication of the dog from the earliest days of the Harappā Culture. This animal had in fact been the earliest in Europe to be domesticated, having been tamed for hunting in post-glacial mesolithic times, by 8000 B.C. or so. The evidence of bones and representations from Harappā sites show at least two types of dog, one akin to the modern pariah and the other a mastiff type. The former (*Canis tenggeranus*, r. *harappensis*) comes near the original ancestral type of dog, derived from some form of medium-sized wolf, probably from Eastern Europe or Western Asia. There is very interesting evidence of domesticated cats as well - bones from Harappā, and from Chanhu-daro a brick over which, when soft and unbaked, a dog had chased a cat, both leaving their characteristic foot-prints - 'the deep impress of the pads and their spread indicate the speed of both animals ... the dog's imprint slightly overlapping the cat's shows that he came second'. The cat from Harappā (*Felis ocreata*, r. *domestica*) seems to have closely resembled the ordinary European domestic cat in appearance.
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The camel is an animal whose early history as a domesticated beast is curiously obscure, though it was extensively used by the Assyrians from the ninth century B.C. onwards. Today no wild camels exist, both species, one-humped and two-humped, being domesticated, and there is a remarkable lack of early representations of the animal in the Ancient East. However, a few camel bones of the Indian one-humped race (*Camelus dromedarius*) were found at Mohenjo-daro and at Harappā, and they have also been found at Anau in Turkestan and in the neolithic Tripolye Culture of South Russia, where they are likely to be approximately contemporary with the Harappā civilization. One of the rare representations of a camel in prehistoric Western Asia comes from a site probably of the second millennium B.C. just over the border of Baluchistan in Persian Makran, at Khurab, where it is modelled in relief on a bronze object.
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The domestic ass (*Equus asinus*) and the horse (*Equus caballus*) are both represented, and we have seen that the latter animal was already known to the first inhabitants of the Rana Ghundai site in North Baluchistan; it was also known from Anau and from the second phase of Sialk. The remains suggest comparison with the modern Indian ‘country-bred’ animal.
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Finally, the elephant should be included among those animals almost certainly domesticated by the Harappā people, and it is possible that the representations on the seals show the two breeds recognized today in India, the Komooria Dhundia with its flat back, square head, and stout legs, and the inferior Meergha, less heavily built and with a sloping back.
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Apart from specifically Indian animals, such as elephants and water-buffaloes, the most interesting feature which differentiates the Harappā assemblage of domesticated beasts from those of other Western Asiatic prehistoric sites is the presence there of the horse and the camel. Ox, goat, sheep, pig, and dog are the familiar domesticated animals of the Old World wherever the adoption of agricultural economies takes over from the hunting stage of human culture – the dog indeed, as we have seen, was domesticated even earlier. But the origin of the camel is an enigma among the beasts of burden and of transport in the Ancient Orient, and the horse is at least not an original inhabitant of Mesopotamia, but is given the significant Sumerian name of the ‘ass of the mountains’ when it first appears, probably in Jemdet Nasr times. It was presumably imported from ‘the mountains’ of Highland Persia or Turkestan, which with Baluchistan formed a common geographical province within which the earliest evidence of horse-taming comes.
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Turning now to a description of the actual cities and towns of the Harappā people, we must obviously first consider the two capitals, at Harappā and Mohenjo-daro. Both sites have certain striking features in common, visible even on the surface before excavation, and these similarities have been confirmed by the work of archaeologists during the past twenty years. The situation of the two sites is essentially similar, each by the side of a river. Harappā lies beside an old confluence of two branches of the River Ravi, a tributary of the Indus, and although at the present time the main river-channel is 6 miles away, in the circumstances of heavier rainfall, which we have seen are likely to have existed in the third millennium B.C.; the city must have stood on ground liable to be flooded, and it seems probable that the great rampart or ‘bund’ of mud and mud-brick which forms the earliest phase of the citadel defences on the site was designed primarily as an embankment to keep out flood-water.
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Mohenjo-daro stands on what is significantly known in the locality as ‘The Island’ – a narrow strip of land between the main bed of the Indus and the Western Nara loop – and was subject to flooding until very recent times, when the building of a long embankment prevented a recurrence of floods. There are remains of a prehistoric embankment between the city and the nearest part of the river, running for at least a mile, and the excavations produced clear evidence of several successive floods in the history of the site, with the consequent deposition of layers of silt. Indeed, so great has the volume of silt brought down by the Indus been that today the surface of the plain is some 30 feet higher than the lowest foundations reached. There is some evidence of an ancient branch of the river washing the edge of the city on the west in prehistoric times. At Harappā evidence for periodic floods is not as clear as at Mohenjo-daro, but there seem to have been traces of a protective embankment on the west of the city here also.
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