The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c12: Chanhu-daro
The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c12
- Language
- English
Chanhu-daro
c12.1
Some 80 miles south of Mohenjo-daro and about half a mile south of the village of Jamal-Kirio, near Sakrand, three adjacent mounds or tells constitute an ancient site known as Chanhu-daro. It is thought to have consisted originally of a single mound which has been subdivided by erosion; for at one time it stood on or near the left bank of the Indus, now 12 miles away.
c12.2
The site was discovered in 1931, when three weeks' digging revealed objects mostly of Harappan type but including a few sherds which suggested a post-Harappan culture.² In 1935-6 considerable further work was carried out,³ with the result that the general character of the occupation was roughly determined down to the water-level which, as at Mohenjo-daro, has risen considerably since Harappan times. The nature of the beginning of the occupation is still unknown. As exposed, three building-levels were found in association with the Harappā culture and, above them, two successive cultures similar to those first identified respectively at the Sindhi sites of Jhukar and Jhangar.⁴ As reclassified by Professor Piggott,⁵ the series reads from bottom to top as follows:
c12.3
² N. G. Majumdar, *Explorations in Sind* (Mem. of the Arch. Surv. of India, no. 48, 1934), pp. 35 ff.
c12.4
³ E. J. H. Mackay, *Chanhu-daro Excavations 1935-36* (American Or. Soc., New Haven, Connecticut, 1943); summary in *Journ. Roy. Soc. Arts*, LXXXV (London, 1937), 527 ff.
c12.5
⁴ Majumdar, *op. cit.* pp. 5, 68, etc.
c12.6
⁵ In *Antiquity*, XVII (1943), p. 179, and *Ancient India*, no. 1 (Delhi, 1946), p. 13; also Piggott, *Prehistoric India*, p. 222.
c12.7
Chanhu-daro Ia Chanhu-daro Ib } Harappā culture, Chanhu-daro Ic Chanhu-daro II Jhukar culture, Chanhu-daro III Jhangar culture,
c12.8
with the proviso that below Chanhu-daro Ia is still an unknown quantity.
c12.9
In the principal mound (Mound II), the three Harappan occupations were separated by layers of debris and silt and bore no structural relationship to one another. It was inferred that the town had been twice destroyed by inundations and twice rebuilt on a fresh plan. At the lowest level (Piggott's Ia or Mackay's Harappā III), parts of three or four small brick houses and a well perhaps of earlier origin were identified. The site was then apparently deserted for a time and was subsequently rebuilt, with an extensive use of mud-brick platforms, presumably designed to raise the structures above flood-level. The principal buildings in the excavated area were grouped about a street 25 ft. wide which was crossed by lanes at right angles, both street and lanes being marked by well-built drains of normal Harappan type and showing characteristic evidence of regular maintenance. Most of the inhabitants hereabouts are thought to have been artisans. Many bronze or copper tools and implements, some of them unfinished castings, were found both in isolation and in considerable hoards; and there was evidence of bead-making, shell and bone-working, and seal-making. With bead-making is thought to have been associated a remarkable brick floor provided with a criss-cross of underlying flues. It was noted that the walls of the building were too thin to have been those of a sweating-chamber, neither was there ash or other evidence of any considerable heat in the flues. A number of beads, many unfinished and including a concreted mass of minute steatite beads, lay on the adjacent earth floor, and suggested to the excavator that the floor with flues had been built for glazing them but had never been used. Indeed, the general abundance of objects on the floors of the whole group of structures was thought to indicate a hasty evacuation.
c12.10
Of the latest Harappan phase (Ic), only isolated walls remained, apparently representing small and unimportant houses. Mound I, to the south-west of Mound II, showed vestiges of further houses and streets, with the usual drains, and had evidently remained "Harappan" until the end. More interesting was a part of a massive, well-built brick wall, 4¾ ft.–5 ft. 4½ ins. wide and upwards of 80 ft. in length, with a lighter return-wall at its southern end, which was partially uncovered on the level ground immediately north of Mound II. The fact that the interior face of the wall was rough showed that the surviving fragment had revetted an internal platform, such as that which carried the granaries at Harappā. The scale and excellence of the work indicates an important structure worthy of further exploration.
c12.11
All the structures and levels mentioned so far were associated with a typical undifferentiated Harappā culture. But above these remains on Mound II were relics of another culture which had already been identified at Jhukar and elsewhere in Sind. The "Jhukar" folk occupied the Chanhu-daro mound "after it had been deserted by the Harappā people; indeed, they took up residence in some of the deserted houses of the (latest) Harappā period, after raising the walls in many cases with generally indifferent masonry constructed with Harappā bricks. The poorer people, however, seem to have lived in square or rectangular huts of matting which they paved with broken brick; their fireplaces they made outside their huts with low roughly built walls to protect them from the wind.”¹ Where these intruders came from is not yet known. Their arrival would appear to have been separated from the departure of the Harappans by no long interval of time.
c12.12
¹ Mackay, *Chanhu-daro Excavations*, p. 24.
c12.13
Mackay tabulates some of the distinctive features of the Jhukar pottery as follows:
c12.14
(1) On the painted wares (about one-third of the total), two colours—red and black or purplish black—are commonly used on the slip, whereas the local Harappan pottery bears always a monochrome decoration, i.e. black on a red slip.
c12.15
(2) The Jhukar patterns are mostly geometric (though conventional leaves and fronds are included), whereas the Harappan are inclined to be naturalistic.
c12.16
(3) The fabrics of the Jhukar pottery are coarser, more porous, and less well fired than are those of the Harappan wares.
c12.17
(4) The red slips employed on some of the Jhukar pottery are not always polished; when a polished slip is used, it lacks the careful Harappan finish, and the pigment used is of a much brighter tint. The cream-coloured slips, which are used more freely than the red on the Jhukar pottery are always thickly laid and have a peculiar straw-pitted surface which is entirely absent from the Harappan wares.
c12.18
The wheel was normal for potting, as at Harappā, but both the Harappans and the Jhukar folk sometimes used hand-made vessels.
c12.19
The excavator points out that, whilst occasional borrowing between the Jhukar and Harappā ceramics is not precluded, they are essentially divergent; and that there is more to be said for an affinity between the Jhukar pottery and the Amrī wares which preceded and overlapped the Harappan.² On this view, the Harappan culture is an intrusion into a local continuum, but much more evidence is required.
c12.20
² Majumdar, *op. cit.* pp. 26, 81.
c12.21
No less distinctive of the Jhukar culture are the “button-seals” or seal-amulets, usually circular, which differ radically from the familiar square Harappan type.³ They are alternatively of pottery or faïence, and are for the most part coarsely made. The rare human or animal figures are crude and lack all the delicate realism of the Harappan series. The more usual design is a radiate “solar” pattern, and there are several specimens of the quartered or “compartmented” type,⁴ which seem to bring Chanhu-daro II (Jhukar) into line with Anau III and Hissar III, i.e. perhaps down to the beginning of the second millennium B.C.⁵
c12.22
³ Piggott in *Antiquity*, XVII (1943), 179.
c12.23
⁴ Piggott in *Antiquity*, XVII (1943), pp. 179-80. See also E. E. Herzfeld, *Iran in the Ancient East* (Oxford, 1941), p. 70.
c12.24
⁵ The absolute chronology of these phases is disputed, and need not in any case be identical in north-east Iran on the one hand and the Indus valley on the other.
c12.25
A bronze or copper pin with a double spiral head was found near the edge of the mound in a context which might be either late Harappan or Jhukar. It is of considerable though at present imponderable value as representing a type widespread in space and time, though its “pull” is towards the second millennium (see p. 88). Of the same general period is a bronze shaft-hole axe, which, in view of the extreme scarcity of socketed implements in the Indus valley, must be regarded as a foreign product from Mesopotamia or Iran (p. 89).
c12.26
The uppermost prehistoric occupation of Mound II, now labelled “Chanhu-daro III” or “Jhangar”, was represented by a distinctive ceramic left “by a small group of people whose habitations had entirely disappeared”. The high level at which this pottery occurred shows that “the people who made it occupied Mound II after the Jhukar people had deserted it. In some cases the wares lay just above the Jhukar stratum, in others there was a little overlapping probably the result of the soil being disturbed by later searchers for building material.”
c12.27
The “Jhangar” potters used the slow wheel or *tournette* and were evidently ignorant of the fast wheel. Their ware was grey or black (rarely red), and was decorated with simple incised chevrons, herringbone pattern, or hatched triangles. A distinctive type is that of three small conjoined bowls, similar in form to a painted example found with a different ceramic industry at Shahi-Tump in southern Baluchistan. Of the distribution and cultural setting of the Jhangar pottery, nothing is at present known.