The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c20.54

Language: English

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Where are—or were—these citadels? It has until recently been supposed that they were mythical, or were "merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with palisades and a ditch".³ The discovery of fortified citadels at Harappā and Mohenjo-daro, supplemented by the already identified defences of the Harappan sites of Sutkagēn-dōr in Makrān, Ali Murād in Sind and others of more doubtful period, have changed the picture. Here we have a highly evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type,⁴ now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river system of north-western India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan invasions of that region. What destroyed this firmly settled civilization? Climatic, economic, political deterioration may have weakened it; certainly there was a marked degeneration in civic standards during the later phases of Mohenjo-daro, where the evidence has been most abundantly recoverable. To a height of 20 ft. or more, the great brick podium of the granary on the citadel there was engulfed in debris interleaved with small, untidy buildings (pl. XIA). Everywhere the houses, mounting gradually upon the remains of their predecessors or on platforms of baked and unbaked brick which raised them above the floods,⁵ were carved up by new partitions into warrens for a swarming, lower-grade population.

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Streets were encroached upon, lanes wholly or partly choked with mean structures or even with kilns such as would in better times have been excluded from the residential area. Latter-day Mohenjo-daro, and by inference Harappā and the rest, were poor shadows of their former selves. Nevertheless, the ultimate extinction of such a society would be expected to have come from without. And so it was. In the last phase of Mohenjo-daro, men, women, and children were massacred in the streets and houses, and were left lying there or, at the best, crudely covered without last rites. Thus in a room in HR Area the skeletons of thirteen adult males and females and a child, some wearing bracelets, rings and beads, were found in attitudes suggesting simultaneous death (pl. XXIVA). The bones were in bad condition, but it was noted that one of the skulls bore "a straight cut 146 mm. in length" which "could only have been done during life with a sharp and heavy weapon, such as a sword, and that this was in all probability the cause of death”; and another skull showed similar signs of violence.¹ In a lane in VS Area lay a group of six skeletons, including a child. In another lane in HR Area lay a single skeleton, though the circumstances of death and burial, if any, are obscure. In DK Area was found a group of nine skeletons, amongst them five children, “in strangely contorted attitudes and crowded together”. They seem to have lain in a shallow pit, and with them were two elephant tusks.

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Their excavator suggested that they were “the remains of a family who tried to escape from the city with their belongings at the time of a raid but were stopped and slaughtered by the raiders. One or more of the family may have been ivory-workers, and only the tusks for which the raiders had no use were not taken as loot.”² And yet again, in the same last phase, a public well-room in the DK Area was the scene of a tragedy which involved four deaths. The well was approached from the higher level of the adjacent “Low Lane” by a short flight of brick steps. “On the stairs were found the skeletons of two persons, evidently lying where they died in a vain endeavour with their last remaining strength to climb the stairs to the street.” One of them was probably a woman. It appears that the “second victim fell over backwards just prior to death”. Remains of a third and a fourth body were found close outside. “There seems no doubt that these four people were murdered....It can be regarded as almost certain that these skeletal remains date from the latter end of the occupation of Mohenjo-daro and are not later intrusions. The facts that some of the bones of one of these skeletons rested on the brick pavement of the well-room and that the skull of another lay on the floor of a (brick-lined) sediment-pit (adjoining the entrance) prove beyond doubt that both well-room and pit were in actual use when the tragedy took place.”³