Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8.10

c8.10

The Brunton connexion with archaeology does not, however, end here. At Karachi, John Brunton was captain of the Corps of Volunteers, and, himself an excellent shot, he had trained a most efficient rifle team, which competed with the regular Line Regiments stationed there. The general commanding ‘was much annoyed at the repeated victories of the Volunteer Rifle teams’: his name was Cunningham, and when he retired from active service in 1861 he was appointed Director-General of an Archaeological Survey of Northern India. General Cunningham is one of the greatest figures of nineteenth-century Indian archaeology, and he had visited Harappā in 1856, when the Brunton depredation was in progress. He obtained various antiquities from the workmen, including engraved steatite seals of a type which we now know to be characteristic of the prehistoric Indus and Punjab civilization, with the symbols of an unknown script upon them, and the figure of a bull. Cunningham realized that these seals were something quite outside the range of Indian antiquities known to him: he felt they were extremely ancient and important. It was not until seventy years later that their true significance was recognized and the civilization now named from the site of Harappā was identified and defined.