The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c13.32

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.