Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.22

c12.22

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.