The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c14.10

c14.10

Arrowheads are fairly numerous and are invariably of copper or bronze (fig. 10, 11). They are thin and flat, with long narrow barbs and no tang, resembling the swallow-tailed flint arrowheads of Egypt and northern Iran. The metal type does not occur in Egypt or Sumer, but is found in Minoan Crete.¹ On the other hand, flint or chert examples are unknown in the Indus valley: the nearest seems to be a leaf-shaped chert arrowhead from Pērīāno-ghuṇḍai in northern Baluchistan.² Copper or bronze axes (fig. 10, 1-2) are flat, without the shaft-hole which had early developed elsewhere in western Asia. They were presumably hafted in a split and bound handle. Some of the axe-blades are long and narrow, with nearly parallel sides and may sometimes have been used in prolongation of the haft; others are short and relatively wide, with boldly expanded edge. The general absence of the shaft-hole is the more remarkable in that examples of this superior method of hafting did on rare occasions reach the Indus. Two pottery models of shaft-hole axes are recorded from Mohenjo-daro,³ recalling the occurrence of similar clay models as early as the al'Ubaid period in Mesopotamia;⁴ and a bronze example was found at Chanhu-daro in a late Harappan or Jhukar layer.⁵ More elaborate is a fine copper axe-adze from a late level at Mohenjo-daro (fig. 10, 13), of a type with analogies in northern Persia (Hissar IIIc, Shah Tepe, Turang Tepe), at Faskan and Maikop in North Caucasia, and, in miniature, under the foundations of the Anu-Adad temple at Assur, erected by the Assyrian king Salmanassar III (859-824 B.C.), and in the B cemetery at Sialk about the same time. Farther west, the type is found in Crete (c. 2000-1900 B.C.), in the Balkans, and in the regions north of the lower Danube and as far afield as the Ukraine (perhaps towards the middle of the second millennium B.C.). The dating of Hissar IIIc and the relevant "Astrabad Treasure" of Turang Tepe is disputed; the weight of opinion is at present on the side of a terminus at or shortly after 2000 B.C.,⁶ but some writers would make it up to a thousand years later.⁷ It may be agreed provisionally to ascribe the Mohenjo-daro axe-adze to an unresolved date in the second millennium and, with Heine-Geldern, to regard it as an intrusive type initially popularized in the Caucasian or South Russian region.⁸ Its associations combine to suggest that its dispersal may have been incidental less to trade than to the widespread folk-wanderings of that millennium (see p. 90).