The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c21: Conclusion
The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c21
- Language
- English
Conclusion
c21.1
Any attempt to appreciate the general position of the Harappans in the history of civilization as a whole must be based on an evaluation of three factors: the contribution of the seemingly earlier civilization of Mesopotamia, the initiative of the constituent Indus population, and the debt of both to a pre-existing or underlying continuum of ideas. The civilizations alike of the Twin Rivers and of the Indus converge retrospectively in the vast massif which extends from the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush westwards across Iran into Anatolia. In this mountainous zone, broken by patches of steppe and stony plateau, a great variety of small related cultures developed in the fifth millennium to the capacity of a restricting environment; and from that zone in the fourth millennium certain of the more enterprising of them began to escape southwards and south-westwards into the riverine plains, there to encounter simultaneously unprecedented problems and opportunities. The rapid consequence was a social co-ordination which by the latter half of the millennium was already, in Mesopotamia, worthy of the name of civilization.
c21.2
It is to be supposed that the Indus civilization, too exotic to be regarded merely as a Mesopotamian colony, was essentially the parallel product of similar stimuli at a somewhat later date. It is equally to be supposed that the primary struggles of the proto-Sumerians towards civilization had provided a pattern which was now ready to the hands of the evolving Harappans and helped them to an early and easy maturity. For it is the likelihood of an early and easy maturity that has, above all things, impressed the excavators of the Harappan sites. True, there are matters which require further examination before this impression hardens. There is that unknown quantity, the unsounded depths of Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro. There is the suspicion that the citadel-builders of Mohenjo-daro and of Harappā were innovators, arriving with architectural traditions founded elsewhere upon the manipulation of mud-brick and timber, and imposing themselves upon a pre-existing urban population. The high-built citadels seem indeed to be frowning upon their cities with a hint of alien domination. If so, at Mohenjo-daro that domination must have been dynastic rather than cultural, for the excavations of 1950 indicated a substantial continuity of culture from the pre-citadel into the early citadel phase. These and other possibilities must be given provisional weight without undue emphasis. But it can at least be averred that, however translated, the *idea* of civilization came to the Indus from the Euphrates and the Tigris, and gave the Harappans their initial direction or at least informed their purpose.
c21.3
Between the two civilizations ensued a sufficiently active interrelationship to carry seals and other knick-knacks westwards to Sumer and, more rarely, Sumerian or Iranian objects eastwards to the Indus. At the back of this trifling interchange was presumably a more ample trade in perishable commodities such as incense, cotton, perhaps slaves and timber; the unsuitability of both climates for the preservation of organic material prevents certainty. But the surviving evidence of this interchange is not impressive in bulk, and it is likely enough that many of the inter-regional resemblances, particularly in matters of religion (pp. 80 and 84), owe more to community of inheritance than to trade. It is improbable that Gilgamesh, for example, was carried from Sumer to Mohenjo-daro like so much merchandise and there equipped, as we seem to find him, with adopted tigers instead of lions; certainly it is easier to postulate an ancestral Gilgamesh native to both civilizations and absorbed independently into the two environments. For there is on the whole a notable absence of intellectual borrowing between the material cultures of the two regions. In a vague sense the artificial mountain of the ziggurat and the artificial mountain of the Indus citadel may be thought to reflect a comparable hierarchical polity. The regimented cantonment of Harappā may suggest the priest-controlled industries of Sumer. It may even be permissible to propose a priest-king for Mohenjo-daro. But all these points of resemblance, real or imagined, may be ascribed rather to the inherent cousinship of a social phase than to literal, local interchange. They are common generalities, the product of stray seeds readily fertilized in similar historical and geographical settings. The particularities, on the other hand, show abundant and significant local variation. In such sculptural art as the Indus has produced there is no real affinity with the sculpture of Sumer. No one would mistake a stone carving from Mohenjo-daro for one from Tell Asmar. The Indus terra-cottas are in a different world from those of Mesopotamia. The art of the Harappan seals has no close parallel in the whole history of glyptic. And the Indus language, in so far as its features may be dimly determined through the veil of its unread script, differed as its script differed from that of Sumer and owed no more to this than the basic *idea*, perhaps, of written record. The integrity of the Indus civilization stands unchallenged.
c21.4
Such integrity itself, however, implies an isolation which raises the further and final question: How far did the Indus civilization contribute to the enduring sum-total of human achievement? It is not difficult to relate the civilization of Mesopotamia to the general development of civilization in the West. There the Harappans have at present small claim to partnership. Nor at first sight have they any great claim to their own sub-continent. Their cities decayed and were, it seems, obliterated in their decadence by an insurgent barbarism, instinct with the heroic qualities which barbarism is liable to assume but not sympathetic to the vestiges of urban discipline. Slaughtered Harappans lay unburied amidst their streets and drains. Did all that they represented perish with them? Their plumbing at least and their special artistry they failed to bequeath to later ages. What of their less tangible qualities, their philosophy and their beliefs? Here archaeology is of necessity an insensitive medium. But reason has been shown to suspect that the later Hinduism, in spite of its Āryan garb, did in fact retain not a little of the non-Āryan, Harappan mentality and relationships, perhaps to a far greater extent than can now be proved. The recurrent figures of a proto-Śiva, seated in sinister state or possibly dancing as triumphant Natarāja, the evidence of phallic worship, of reverence paid to animals, particularly of the cult of the bull, have nothing to do with Vedic faith but anticipate dominant elements of the historic Brahmanism. Paradoxically it would appear that the Indus civilization transmitted to its successors a metaphysics that endured, whilst it failed utterly to transmit the physical civilization which is its present monument. Our appreciation of its achievement must in the end depend upon a marshalling of values which lies outside the scope of this chapter.