The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c13: Sutkagēn-dor and other sites
The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c13
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Sutkagēn-dor and other sites
c13.1
Rather more than 300 miles west of Karachi and 25 miles from the shore of the Arabian Sea, the site known as Sutkagēn-dor occupies two small sandstone ridges and a tiny intervening plateau. Remains of substantial fortifications join and outline the ridges, forming an oblong enclosure about 170 yds. from north to south and 125 yds. from east to west. The defensive wall is built of large roughly squared stone slabs set in clay, and appears to be not less than 30 ft. wide at the base, though the outer face slopes inward at the steep angle of about 40 degrees. Near the western end of the southern side is an entrance 8 ft. wide, flanked apparently by massive rectangular towers. Towards the north a lighter wall extends the main fortification for about 40 yds., presumably as part of a former annexe. A few exploratory trenches cut by Sir Aurel Stein¹ revealed 8 or 9 ft. of debris in the interior of the enclosure but no recognizable structure.
c13.2
¹ An Archaeological Tour in Gedrosia (Mem. Arch. Surv. of India, no. 43, 1931), pp. 60 ff. The name is corrected from “Suktagēn-dōr” in Aurel Stein, Arch. Reconnaissances in N.W. India and S.E. Iran (London, 1937), pp. 70-1.
c13.3
Fragments of stone buildings were, however, detected outside both on the northern and the southern slopes. Near the former was found a large pot containing ashes thought to represent a human cremation, and three similar cinerary deposits were found in urns outside the eastern defence. The finds generally included numerous chert blades of the normal chalcolithic type of the Indus and its environs, a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead (unusual in these parts—see p. 55), a flat copper axe with slightly expanded edge, bangles of clay and one of glass (the latter presumably intrusive, if correctly described), part of an alabaster pot, and much pottery, including perforated vessels of a kind common in the Harappan culture. Few decorated sherds were found, but as a whole the ceramic would appear to be provincial Harappan. There were no terra-cotta figurines, but a characteristic Harappan pottery bird-whistle is recorded. Baked bricks are noted, measuring 16 × 6 × 2½ ins.
c13.4
It would appear, then, that the site is a strongly fortified outpost of the Harappan or a closely allied culture, situated at a nodal point upon which, as on a delta-head, a number of tracks converged from the neighbouring coast. Whether the place was of more than local importance—whether, for example, it played any part in a coastal trade with Babylonia—can only be conjectured after further digging.
c13.5
More wholeheartedly Harappan is the culture of another fortified site, at Ali Murad, on a sandy plain some 20 miles south-west of Dadu in Sind. There a mound 27 ft. high was encompassed by a stone defensive wall enclosing an irregular squarish area, about 250 yds. each way. The wall was built of roughly dressed stone blocks, each about 2 ft. long and 1 ft. square in cross-section, and was approximately 5 ft. thick. A gap in the south side probably represented an entrance. The enclosure contained a well and “visible traces of innumerable stone walls”,¹ and there were traces of a structure outside the southern defences. Decorated black-on-red pottery with hatched patterns, including pipal leaves, of normal Harappan type were found; together with terra-cotta figurines of bull and probably pig, chert flakes, a small bronze or copper flat-axe, beads of steatite, agate and carnelian, and “thousands of terra-cotta ‘imitation cakes’” (see p. 69).
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¹ N. G. Majumdar, “Explorations in Sind”, *Mem. Arch. Surv. of India*, no. 48, 1934, pp. 89 ff.
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The general *raison d’être* of this little fortress or fortified village was doubtless the reasonable proximity of the outlet of the Phusi Pass, opening from the Kirthār Range on to the lowland. But, as at Sutkagēn-dōr, only further excavation can be expected to suggest a more precise function.
c13.8
It must suffice here to remark upon two other sites which have produced Harappan material and are in other respects notable. On the west bank of the Indus, 80 miles south of Mohenjo-daro and 20 miles west of Chanhu-daro, two mounds adjoining the village of Amrī were briefly examined in 1929.¹ Two trenches in the smaller (western) mound yielded results out of all proportion to their extent, and well illustrate the possibilities of such trenching when wisely conducted. Both trenches showed the stone foundations of buildings of undetermined extent, one including a range of small rooms; but, more immediately important, two clearly distinguished occupations were revealed and were assignable to two quite different cultures. The upper and later, to which the foundations appear to have belonged, was fully developed Harappan. The lower stratum, “a darker soil unlike that of the upper levels”, was marked by a ceramic totally different in fabric and decoration. Like the Harappan it is wheel-made, but it is notably thin and porous, its paste and ground are of a buff, cream or pink colour, and the colour-decoration seems often to have been applied after firing. Like the related pottery of Nal in southern Baluchistan, the decoration tends to be polychrome, a reddish band being introduced amongst the black or chocolate decoration. The latter is all geometrical and is characterized by rows of lozenges, either solid or hatched, chevrons, rectangles within rectangles, rows of “sigmas”, pendant loops, and panels of chequer-pattern. Naturalistic Harappan motifs such as the pipal, and even highly stylized bulls, ibex or fish such as occasionally occur on the Nal pottery, are entirely absent. The “Amrī ware”, as it has been called, has roots in the Baluch hills but is essentially characteristic of the plain which lies between them and the Indus. After more than twenty years, it is still the only well-defined ceramic which has been shown on clear stratigraphical evidence to precede the Harappan.
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¹ Majumdar, *op. cit.* pp. 24 ff.
c13.10
Lastly, by reason of its situation, its size and its archaeological potentiality, Dābarkot south of Loralai, on the edge of the northern Baluch hills 125 miles from the Indus, stands out amongst the unexcavated Harappan tells.² It is 113 ft. high, and has a basal diameter of about 1200 ft. It lies on an ancient trade-route from the Indus valley in the direction of Kandahār. But its potentiality lies largely in the fact that the Harappan occupation seems to occur at the top of this tall mound, so that a careful excavation of it in depth may be expected to reveal the local antecedents of the Indus civilization to an extent perhaps unparalleled elsewhere. Such a certainty may be regarded as compensation for the remoteness of the site and the consequent difficulties which will confront the excavator.
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² A. Stein, “An Archaeological Tour in Waziristan and N. Baluchistan”, *Mem. Arch. Surv. of India*, no. 37, 1929, pp. 55 ff.
c13.12
A list of known Harappan sites will be found on p. 95.
c13.13
Only one regular cemetery (recorded as R37) of the Indus period has been brought to light: at Harappā itself where, to the south of the citadel on slightly rising ground, fifty-seven graves of the mature Harappan period were identified between 1937 and 1946.¹ With rare exceptions, the bodies were extended from north to south, the head towards the north, and lay in graves each large enough to contain also an average of fifteen to twenty pots, occasionally as many as forty. Personal ornaments were sometimes worn by the dead: shell bangles, necklaces and anklets of steatite or paste beads, a copper finger-ring, an ear-ring of thin copper wire. Furthermore, toilet and other objects were occasionally included: handled copper mirrors, mother-of-pearl shells, an antimony stick, a large shell spoon. In one grave a pottery lamp and bones of a fowl were found at the foot. But on the whole, the grave-goods were of a poor order, and it is clear that, as explored, the cemetery represents the average citizen of the later period of the civilization.²
c13.14
¹ *Ancient India*, no. 3 (1947), pp. 83 ff. Whilst this chapter was in the press, Mr A. Ghosh, of the Indian Archaeological Department, reported cremations in the latest Harappan level of a site, Tarkhānawāla Derā, discovered by him a few miles north of Anūpgarh in north-west Bikaner. It remains to be seen whether these burials are Harappan or intrusive.
c13.15
² The pointed goblet characteristic of the late Harappan phase occurs in several of the graves.
c13.16
The filling of some at least of the graves was heaped up above the surface-level, and was in one instance actually built up of mud bricks; and superficially it may be supposed that the appearance of the cemetery, with its low north-south mounds, was that of a modern Muslim graveyard, such as to-day in fact occupies the summit and environs of the neighbouring citadel.
c13.17
Two of the graves call for special mention. One of them was outlined internally with mud bricks, which thus formed a sort of structural coffin (pl. XVA), a procedure with analogies at Nal in southern Baluchistan, possibly at a somewhat earlier period.³ The other grave was notable for the fact that the body, probably of a female, had been buried in a wooden coffin, 7 ft. long and 2 to 2½ ft. wide, widening towards the head (pl. XVB). The thickness of the timbering of the coffin, as represented by a clear stain in the sandy soil, was 1½ in. Traces of the lid on the sandy material immediately overlying the skeleton were identifiable as deodar,⁴ such as grows abundantly on the foothills of the Himalaya and may have been river-borne to Harappā, and there was an ashy grey deposit on the bones which may represent a reed shroud of the kind that occurs with, or as an alternative to, wooden coffins in Sumer.¹ On the middle finger of the right hand was a plain copper ring, whilst a shell ring (probably an ear-ring) lay to the left of the skull and two others above the left shoulder. Of thirty-seven pots in the grave, only one had been inside the coffin; the majority lay huddled near and against its head. At present the burial is unique in India and the significance, if any, of its similarity with coffin-burials of the Sargonid and pre-Sargonid periods in Mesopotamia cannot be appraised, but the resemblance is worth noting.
c13.18
³ H. Hargreaves, *Excavations in Baluchistan*, 1935 (Mem. Arch. Surv. of India, no. 35), pp. 26 f.
c13.19
⁴ *Cedrus deodara*; Dr K. A. Chowdhury, of the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, adds that there is "no doubt" about this identification.
c13.20
¹ C. L. Woolley, *Ur Excavations II: the Royal Cemetery* (London and Philadelphia, 1934), pp. 135 ff.; and E. Mackay, *Report on the Excavation of the “A” Cemetery at Kish, Mesopotamia*, pt. I (Chicago, 1925), p. 13; pt. II (1929), p. 130.
c13.21
Apart from burials of post-Harappan or doubtful date, the only other human bones of consequence from Harappā were found in “Area G” on the south-eastern outskirts of the site as now visible.² Here a tightly packed mass of human skulls (twenty complete and fragments of others), intermixed with a relatively small number of human long bones, some animal bones and Harappan pottery, was discovered between 4 ft. and 5 ft. 10 ins. below the present surface. The collection had obviously been brought together after the previous exposure of the bodies, but in what circumstances cannot be inferred. Its late date is indicated by the abundance of pointed “Indus goblets” in the deposit, and possibly by some slight admixture of “cemetery H” pottery (see below).
c13.22
² Vats, I, 197 ff.
c13.23
At Mohenjo-daro no orderly burials definitely of Harappan date have yet been found. Four groups of skeletons apparently representing slaughter in the last phase of the city are a different matter and will be considered later (pp. 51 and 91). But there can be no doubt that here, as at Harappā, a systematic inhumation-cemetery lies somewhere in the unexplored outskirts of the town. It is no longer necessary to assume that “the complete absence of burials . . . points to cremation as the chief mode of disposal of the dead”.³ In particular, the repeated supposition that certain urns at both sites, containing a mélange of odds and ends “sometimes mingled with ashes and charcoal”,⁴ represent human cremations is unsupported by valid evidence and must be discarded. Chanhu-daro, it may be added, has contributed only a single unburnt skull in a pot, which proves nothing.
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³ Mackay, I, 648.
c13.25
⁴ Marshall, I, 86 ff.
c13.26
To a post-Harappan period belongs an alien cemetery, known as “cemetery H”, to the south of the citadel of Harappā, between it and cemetery R 37. Cemetery H comprised two strata,⁵ a lower and older known as stratum II, about 6 ft. below the present surface, and a higher, stratum I, overlying stratum II and extending beyond it towards the east at a depth of 2 or 3 ft. from the surface. In stratum II about two dozen extended burials were uncovered, in some instances with the knees slightly bent and generally with the heads towards the east or north-east. Some of the burials were regarded as "fractional", i.e. incomplete collections of bones assembled after the exposure of the body, but it is not clear whether these were true fractional burials or whether they were merely fragmentary burials, disturbed by later interments or other agencies. The accompanying red-ware pottery was distinctive, showing no significant affinity with the Harappan unless vaguely in the presence of "cake-stands", squatter and more elaborately moulded than those of the earlier culture. The pedestal foot is a feature of many of the better vessels, and there is a notable series of dish-lids, painted in black on the inside with highly stylized peacocks and other birds, slim-waisted bulls, fish, formalized plant-designs, and occasionally human beings in rigid, hieratic posture. The background is filled with wave-patterns, "eyes", stars and other objects, and the whole effect is completely different from that of the Harappan repertoire. Incidentally, the black paint shows a slight but distinctive tendency to "run" on the bright orange-red background, somewhat as though applied to blotting-paper. The later stratum I consisted of true fractional burials, the skull and a few long bones being enclosed in large urns with openings just large enough to take the separate bones after excarnation. Only babies were enclosed complete, in the "embryonic" position. The openings of the urns were closed by lids or by complete or fragmentary pots. The decoration of the urns, confined to friezes on the upper half, displayed the same general characters as that of the stratum II lids but was considerably more elaborate. Thus one urn depicts a beaked man holding two bulls, of which one is assailed by a dog, with peacocks and a large bull or goat, having trident-standards on its spreading horns, to complete the frieze: a scene which has been related to Vedic ideas of the migration of souls.¹ The slim-waisted animals, crested peacocks (sometimes carrying away little "soul-men") and general horror vacui recall the style of the underlying stratum II pots, and it may be supposed that the difference in scale and the more ambitious iconography of stratum I is due to functional rather than to cultural factors.
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⁵ Vats, I, 203 ff.; Wheeler in *Ancient India*, no. 3 (1947), pp. 84, 89, etc.; Piggott, pp. 231 ff.
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¹ Vats, I, 207 ff.
c13.29
It has sometimes been suggested that the bearers of the cemetery H culture were the destroyers of the older Harappā. This may be so, and the alleged mingling of Harappan and "cemetery H" pottery with the human bones in Area G (p. 49) would support the possibility if the evidence was correctly observed. But the excavations of 1946 tended to indicate a hiatus between the two. The great depth of Harappan debris—up to 7 ft. or more—which intervened between cemetery R 37 and at any rate the later phase of cemetery H may be due in part to the deliberate filling of a hollow here in late Harappan times. The fact that a part of cemetery H cut into the walls of a derelict Harappan building¹ means only that *some* Harappan structures were of earlier date. But the remains of jerry-built houses of the cemetery H culture found against the western defences of the citadel on 4 ft. of debris can scarcely be so summarily explained. Whether indeed this accumulation occurred before the end of the Indus civilization, as may be the fact, or whether it represents a post-Harappan, pre-cemetery H hiatus, cannot yet be determined. The complete absence of true Harappan ceramic from cemetery H tells slightly in favour of the latter alternative. At least it is wiser at present not to assume a temporal continuity between the Harappan culture and that of cemetery H.
c13.30
¹ Vats, II, pl. XLIII.
c13.31
For the rest, very little is known as to the distribution of the cemetery H culture, and nothing as to its antecedents. It has been identified in Bahāwalpur State at Lurewāta and Ratha Thēri, but is not recorded outside the central Indus valley.
c13.32
If we turn now to a consideration of the skeletal remains, we are severely handicapped by the omission of the Indian Anthropological Survey to publish the all-important material from cemetery R 37 at Harappā and the skulls found previously in “Area G”. We are still therefore thrown back principally upon the groups of Indus citizens who were massacred in the streets of Mohenjo-daro during the ultimate attack on their city, and were dug up and published years ago by Marshall, Mackay, Sewell and Guha. Of the skulls from which data were forthcoming, three were defined as proto-Australoid, six as Mediterranean, one as the Mongolian branch of the Alpine stock, and four possibly as Alpine. Too much significance must not be attached to this terminology, but it will serve as a basis for broad classification. The proto-Australoids were, if the measured example was average, a small folk with long, narrow skulls, a somewhat broad nose, and a tendency towards prognathism. These features are at home in peninsular India and Ceylon and recur sporadically in Mesopotamia (Ur, Al-Ubaid) on the one hand and amongst the black fellows of Australia on the other. In modern language, these folk may be classed as an “aboriginal” element in the population, without too much stress upon the meaning of the term. The half-dozen “Mediterraneans” had moderately long skulls, rather short nose with narrow, high-pitched bridge, and fine regular features. The height of one of the men was 5 ft. 4½ ins., and of two of the women 4 ft. 9 ins. and 4 ft. 4½ ins. The type is widespread over western Asia and the coastal tracts of Europe and may well lie at the back of the early developments of agriculture and of social organization: in other words, it more likely than not represents the formative element in the Indus civilization. The single Mongoloid, regarded as “quite characteristic", was presumably an intruder from the hills such as may be found to-day in any sub-Himalayan town or village, or may have come from farther afield—from Turkestan, Assam or China. The broad-headed "Alpine" type may be recognized to-day as a minority element in the Indian population and, as Piggott points out, was represented at Sialk in Iran in the fourth millennium B.C. The term, however, covers a multitude of varieties, and the Mohenjo-daro examples were too fragmentary or immature for analysis. One of them, incidentally, was 5 ft. 5½ ins. high.
c13.33
It will be appreciated that the number of skeletons analysed to date is far too small to support any generalized estimate of the racial characters of the Harappans. All that can be said is that, as might be expected, the population of the Indus cities was as mixed as is that of most of their successors.
c13.34
In view of the distinctiveness of the pottery of cemetery H at Harappa, it is a pity that no proper report on the abundant skeletal material is available. We are merely told that "the racial types represented in the collection comprise a large-headed, dolichocephalic people with well-developed supra-orbital ridges and high cranial roof, long face and prominent nose", and are comparable with the proto-Australoids of Mohenjo-daro. It is vaguely added in amplification that the jar-burials of stratum I indicated "a definite admixture with a small, low-headed race, such as is seen among the present aboriginal population of India.... The Harappā remains also demonstrate the presence of a non-Armenoid, and probably also of an Armenoid-Alpine race in the Indus Valley during chalcolithic times, whose presence was surmised at Mohenjo-daro from the presence of a single skull of a child."¹ It is to be hoped that in the fulness of time a detailed report will be issued.
c13.35
¹ B. S. Guha in Vats, I, 238.