Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.164

c12.164

The metal industry of Harappā has many curious and interesting features. Like all the early urban civilizations of Western Asia, that of Harappā was formally a ‘Bronze Age’ in that copper and bronze were the only metals used for making tools and weapons. In Chapter III we saw how the use of copper seems to have been discovered among the makers of painted pottery in the Persian highlands or some adjacent region, first by using natural pieces of raw metal and hammering them into shape, and later by smelting it from the ore and melting it so that it could be cast. Analysis of the metal from which Harappā tools were made shows certain significant impurities accidentally included which give an indication of the possible sources of the natural ores from which it was obtained, for there is no reason to think that smelting was not known to the Harappā folk from the earliest phase at which we know the culture. In the Harappā copper there is normally a little nickel (usually below 0·5 per cent. and seldom above 1·0 per cent.), but the proportion of arsenic is higher and is sometimes excessive. Now this presence of arsenic shows that it is unlikely that the Harappā people were obtaining their copper from the same sources as the Sumerians, who were working ores with a slight nickel content, but with no significant arsenic, and which may have been obtained in Oman on the south-west side of the Persian Gulf. The Harappā copper most likely came from Indian ores in the Rajputana district, though Persian sources are not absolutely ruled out.