The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c8: Climate
The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c8
- Language
- English
Contents
- c8.3 — 3 parts
Climate
c8.1
Before we consider these and other matters in greater detail, and indeed before we approach the general structure of the Indus civilization, something must be said of its antecedents and its cultural environment. Reference has already been made to the villages which were scattered amongst the adjacent Baluchistan hills and are found sporadically upon the river-plain itself. Fieldwork by Sir Aurel Stein, N. G. Majumdar and H. Hargreaves, and more recently by Miss B. de Cardi, Leslie Alcock and A. Ghosh, has hinted at the extent and diversity of these village-cultures, and recensions of the evidence by Stuart Piggott and Donald McCown have indicated that they fall into coherent local assemblages, sometimes of considerable extent. But the scientific examination of the cultures and the classification of them on a sound stratigraphical basis has barely yet begun, and any interpretation of their sequence and interaction is necessarily sketchy and provisional. The summary survey which follows in the next section is mainly that of Piggott, with such slight additions as have accrued from subsequent work.
c8.2
The Baluchistan hills, which form the south-eastern framework of the Irano-Afghan plateau, are to-day a bare and cheerless region with rare oases in the valleys and a meagre rainfall which ill nourishes the intermittent patches of village agriculture. In consequence, a considerable portion of their scanty population, as that of the plateau itself, is nomadic; and year by year in the cold weather groups of Baluch and Afghan tribesmen move down with their families to the Indus plain in Sind and the Punjab. There they sell their labour to the less vigorous lowlanders, whom they overawe with their wild and formidable aspect and their innumerable and voracious dogs. Three or four thousand years ago a somewhat different social system prevailed. The sharp differentiation of many of the upland cultures from one another, and the considerable height (up to 100 ft. or more) attained by the accumulations which represent their little towns and villages, imply a higher measure of stability, without, be it added, ruling out altogether a certain element of seasonal migration. This relative stability in turn implies a somewhat moister, more congenial and more reliable climate than at present, and raises at once a problem which will become acute when the Indus civilization itself is considered. The problem is a controversial one in its ultimate analysis, though indeed we are less concerned here with cause than with effect. Briefly, the main points are these.
c8.3.1
It is, with all safeguards, sufficiently clear that the rainfall in the Indus zone was somewhat more ample and equable in the third millennium B.C. than it is to-day. Indications from the upland have just been given. On the river-plain, almost the whole terrain, except for the riverine strips and artificially irrigated areas, is now sandy desert with, at the most, a covering of desert-scrub or small bushy trees such as the tamarisk. The subterranean salt, dragged to the surface by the unimpeded evaporation of such moisture as the soil contains, forms a crust which has been well described as "a satanic mockery of snow".¹ It would be hard to imagine a more repelling environment for great cities such as Mohenjo-daro or Harappā, each of these more than three miles in circumference. But we know that in fact their environment was of a very different kind.² The millions of baked bricks of which they are built suggest former vast reserves of local fuel other than scrub though they do not firmly prove this inference; we have to remember that sites on or near the great rivers could be supplied in part by timber floated down, then as to-day, from the Himalayan forests, and it is noteworthy that burnt bricks are especially characteristic of those sites—Harappā, Mohenjo-daro, Chanhu-daro, Sutkagēn-dōr—which are accessible by water, whilst other sites, less accessible, were seemingly content with stone and mud-brick.
c8.3.2
But the very use of costly baked bricks in lieu of the cheap mud-bricks usual in protohistoric Asia may be supposed to reflect a climate wet enough to necessitate the more durable material.¹ The Indus seals, with their vivid representations of tiger, buffalo, rhinoceros and elephant, are the work of artists to whom these marsh- or jungle-animals were familiar; alternatively, the extreme scarcity of evidence for the camel (p. 60) is consistent with non-desert conditions. The mere existence of the cities is indeed conditional upon a local fertility out of all relation to the present landscape and not wholly explicable by the possibility of elaborate former irrigation systems of which not a trace can be expected to survive on the present aggraded surface. A certain degree of climatic change is beyond dispute; but how far that change is due to "natural causes" and how far to sheer human improvidence (if that be other than a "natural cause") is less easy to say. History would suggest that the process of desiccation was already far advanced by the time of Alexander the Great, whose returning army was decimated in the cheerless wastes of Makrān. And it may be that an increasing aridity had already contributed to the downfall of the Indus cities. When we turn from fact to cause, difficulties accumulate.
c8.3.3
The present aridity may have been induced wholly or in part by a northward movement of the Atlantic cyclones, on the hypothesis that these were at one time deflected southwards to the latitude of northern Africa and extended to Arabia, Persia and India. Or it may be that the south-western monsoon then touched the Indus valley. We do not know. In Algeria a similar and perhaps indeed related problem confronts the student of the Roman remains which now lie derelict in a desert environment, and there is a wide agreement that man rather than unaided climate has there been responsible for the deterioration.² In central Asia, Aurel Stein, who was always attracted by this problem in his far-flung fieldwork, similarly regarded destructive barbarian inroads as the major cause. On the other hand, in Kalāt and Makrān the phenomena left him in some doubt as to the bias of the evidence; at one point he observes that the evidence "distinctly pointed to the local climate having undergone a great change since chalcolithic times in its effect upon cultivation", whilst elsewhere he remarks upon an agricultural decadence, even in the vicinity of water, "illustrating once more how in an arid land human factors can within certain limits produce results which centuries hence might easily be mistaken for those of true 'desiccation'".³
c8.4
¹ Piggott, *Prehistoric India*, p. 67.
c8.5
² J. Marshall, *Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization* (London, 1931), I, 2-5. This work is hereafter cited as "Marshall".
c8.6
¹ Whether the baking of bricks was a Harappan innovation, we cannot at present guess. Probably not. Certainly baked bricks were used, though not abundantly, in Sumer in the Early Dynastic period and probably as early as that of Jamdat Nasr, e.g. at Khafaje (H. Frankfort, *Or. Inst. Discoveries in Iraq*, 1933-4, p. 34); at Ur in Royal Tomb PG 789 (Woolley); and in Nineveh 4 (*Liverpool Annals*, xx, 1933, p. 134).
c8.7
² Views collected by J. Baradez, *Fossatum Africae* (Paris, 1949), pp. 171 f.
c8.8
³ *An Archaeological Tour in Gedrosia* (Calcutta, 1931), pp. 34, 185, etc.
c8.9
The problem does not in fact lend itself readily to objective argument. The presence of ruined dams or *gabarbands* in the vicinity of some of the south Baluch chalcolithic sites suggests the likelihood of significant association, and, since these dams are numerous, stone-built, up to 8 ft. wide and 300 yds. or more in length,¹ they represent a sustained attempt to restrain and pond back seasonal drainage, implying on the one hand that the rainfall was somewhat more abundant there than to-day and on the other hand that it was sufficiently precarious to necessitate careful hoarding and control. Here it is clear that a disturbance of the settled population and interruption of its routine would at once deprive a district of much of its verdure, and, in view of the high importance of plant-life in the transpiration of moisture, would be expected to have some considerable reaction upon the local climate.² To balance one factor fairly against another is not an easy task. It may be suspected that flood-water farming played at one time an important part not unlike that of a traditional "Indian" system still available for study in the western United States.³ In this system crop-areas are chosen so that the local rainfall may be reinforced by the overflow of water derived from higher ground, care being taken that the flood-water neither attains such a velocity as to wash out the crop nor carries such a load of detritus as to smother it. The selected area is at a point where waters derived from a stream-channel spread out in a sheet, producing an expanse of moist and fertile alluvium. The main element of uncertainty lies in the varying depth and extent of the stream-channel from season to season, the eroding force of flood-water, and the consequent shifting or even obliteration of the cultivation area, with the result that once thriving farms and even small towns in New Mexico have not infrequently had to be abandoned. It is possible that some of the Baluch hill-villages may have ended in comparable circumstances, and alternatively that the *gabarbands* were a more or less effective counter-measure. In similar fashion the Spanish settlers, with their superior equipment, attempted to control the "Indian" flood-farming methods by damming and ditching, with variable success.⁴
c8.10
¹ Ibid. pp. 7, 24, etc.
c8.11
² Moisture must of course go up into the atmosphere before it can descend as rain, and plant-life plays a major part as a donor or transpirer in this process.
c8.12
³ Kirk Bryan in *The Geographical Review*, XIX (New York, 1929), 444 ff.
c8.13
⁴ Ibid. p. 453.
c8.14
In summary, it is at least evident that basic climatic change is unlikely to have been the sole or even the main cause in the deterioration of the agricultural conditions of the Indus Valley and its environs. Some reduction in the volume of rainfall within the last 4000 years may indeed be postulated, but there can be little doubt that human neglect or interference was an important contributory factor. Excessive deforestation⁵—possibly effected in part by the Indus brick-makers—inadequate maintenance of such dams and irrigation channels as may have been found necessary, a falling-off in agricultural standards, are all familiar economic and social factors which would result in the reduction of the precipitation of moisture; and, if we add to these domestic potentials the likelihood of ultimate invasion by uncivilized nomads such as the Āryans of the second millennium B.C. and the consequent break-up of organized agriculture altogether, we may safely blame human agency as a major element in the problem. Even the salt-incrustation already referred to is attributable at least in part to human action or inaction: for, if the subsoil-water were absorbed, as it once must have been, by the roots of trees and crops instead of being constantly lifted to the surface by unimpeded solar action, the crust would not be formed to anything like its present deleterious extent.
c8.15
⁵ Cf. R. B. Whitehead in *The Indian Antiquary*, LXI, 163: "The Ambala Siwaliks, when they came under British administration, were thrown open to unrestrained wood-cutting and grazing, and the imprudent activities of the peasant proprietors have turned the range into a desert."
c8.16
*The hill-villages* (figs. 2 and 3)
c8.17
The upland valleys and the plains alike, therefore, must in the third millennium B.C. have presented a more congenial background for human society than do the same tracts at the present day. It is sufficiently obvious, however, that the two milieus themselves afforded a very differing range of possibilities, which fundamentally affect their status in the long view of history. A relatively fertile upland valley provides the optimum conditions for the earlier essays in communal life within the boundaries of an easy rural self-sufficiency. The riverine plains, on the other hand, throw out a challenge. The dangerous annual flood can only be constrained or utilized by combined effort on a large scale. The river itself and its flanking lowlands facilitate and stimulate traffic, commercial or military, and at once enlarge human relations far beyond the precedent of the upland valley. The opportunities and difficulties implicit in civilization are present and insistent. Village life of the kind perfected in the hills is urged forward to success or failure amidst these new horizons, and becomes in perspective an introductory or transitional phase.
c8.18
A study of the hill societies, with their lowland extensions, is therefore a necessary preliminary to the social study alike of the Indus and of the Mesopotamian civilizations. But to the archaeologist it has further values in compensation for the strenuous and often uncomfortable fieldwork involved. Amidst the cultural diversity of the Baluch hills and of the plateau behind them, it is gradually becoming possible to trace interconnexions which will ultimately (after much further research) give an element of cohesion both to the village-cultures themselves and to the two riverine civilizations which are in part rooted in them. How far cultural equations may reflect chronological equations is matter for constant and cautious consideration in view of the almost unpredictable durability of some of these mountain communities. But it may be that in chronology also it will be possible eventually to use the upland cultures as elements in an objective time-scale, anchored primarily to the hardening historical sequence of Mesopotamia.
c8.19
Recent cuttings at Kile Gul Mohammed, a mound 3½ miles north-west of Quetta, have revealed traces of what may be the earliest village-culture yet identified in Baluchistan.¹ The lowest levels of the mound were marked by chert tools and mud-brick houses but were devoid of pottery. Bones of sheep or goat were present, and some sort of crop-production is a likely postulate. Comparable pre-pottery (or non-pottery) village-cultures have been identified recently further west, notably at Jarmo in the foothills of northern Iraq and at Jericho in Jordan, where the early village lay beneath a deep pottery-bearing neolithic and was fortified. Radio-carbon datings have given 5000 B.C. or a little later as an approximate date for Jarmo, but much further work is required before a western Asiatic pre-pottery phase of village-life can be defined.
c8.20
¹ W. A. Fairservis, *American Museum Novitates*, no. 1587, Sept. 1952, p. 18.
c8.21
Meanwhile, information accumulates slowly in regard to the numerous pottery-bearing cultures of Baluchistan. Little enough is at present known about them, but all doors are left open by the provisional and cautious use of the rough basic classification proposed by McCown,² whereby the early cultures of Iran are grouped broadly in accordance with the dominant ground-colour of their pottery—whether *red* or *buff*. This may appear to be an almost frivolous basis for scientific classification, but it seems to have the merit of a measure of geographic cohesion in the earlier periods and has been found of some passing use pending the emergence of more exact criteria. McCown has observed that the red element dominates the northern wares of Iran and that buff dominates the southern;² whilst Piggott has extended this system into Baluchistan with the equivalent observation that red is dominant in north Baluchistan (north of Quetta) and buff in south Baluchistan. Most of Afghanistan is at present an unknown quantity, but should by this rule conform mainly with the northern or red group.
c8.22
² D. E. McCown, *The Comparative Stratigraphy of Early Iran* (Or. Inst. of Chicago, 1942).
c8.23
These northern cultures in Baluchistan have been grouped together by Piggott as the "Zhob cultures", from the Zhob river which flows towards the Indus plain and is roughly axial to the identified sites.³ The only Zhob site which has been submitted to systematic analysis is Rana Ghundai⁴ where, of four main phases of occupation, the earliest seems to represent a period of nomadism, and the second a devolving culture (at least as regards the pottery) having affinities with that of the earliest occupation of Hissar in north-eastern Iran.
c8.24
³ For these and other Baluchistan cultures, see S. Piggott, *Prehistoric India*, chap. IV.
c8.25
⁴ E. J. Ross in *Journ. Near Eastern Studies*, v (Chicago, 1946), 284 ff.
c8.26
The Hissar phase may have begun as early as 3500 B.C., but whether Rana Ghuṇḍai II–III (the culture now in question) was of the same
c8.27
NAL ▲ & AMRI ● WARES
c8.28
ZHOB ▲ & TOGAU ● WARES
c8.29
FIG. 2. Maps of village-cultures of Baluchistan.
c8.30
early date is another matter. On the whole, it would appear probable that the red-ware pottery characteristic of the Zhob cultures was in a large measure earlier than the Harappā culture, which it appears indeed to precede under the citadel of Harappā itself.¹
c8.31
¹ Ancient India, no. 3 (1947), pp. 91 ff.
c8.32
But although the great bulk of the red wares of Baluchistan lie in the north, the rule is far from invariable. In particular, a red ware
c8.33
[Figure: QUETTA WARE Scale 50 0 50 100 150 Miles H = HARAPPA M = MOHENJO-DARO QUETTA R. INDUS KARACHI ARABIAN SEA]
c8.34
[Figure: KULLI WARE QUETTA H M]
c8.35
FIG. 3. Maps of village-cultures of Baluchistan.
c8.36
has been identified¹ near Quetta and further south at its type-site, Togau, in a valley 12 miles north-west of Kalāt in the state of that name. Thence over twenty sites at which this ware is represented spread unexpectedly southwards, fanning out in conformity with the valley-system to the limits of the south Baluch upland and even on to the Indus plain. The ware is wheel-turned with a red slip and geometric and animal-patterns in black, including caprids in various stages of devolution from complete animals to a mere fringe of detached horns. Friezes of birds and schematic human beings also occur. At two sites (Amri and Lohri) it has been found with buff wares antedating and possibly overlapping the beginning of the Harappā culture. It may perhaps be ascribed, therefore, to the first half or middle of the third millennium B.C., and, to judge solely by its general appearance and the devolved character of some of its decoration, is unlikely to be earlier than that period. The occurrence of this developed red ware in the heart of the buff-ware country is a warning of the provisional nature of the colour-classification, which certainly does not "work" in India in the third millennium.
c8.37
¹ By Miss B. de Cardi (in 1948), *Art and Letters* (Roy. India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society, London), xxiv (1950), p. 54. Miss de Cardi has kindly prepared the maps in figs. 2 and 3.
c8.38
The southern buff-ware cultures begin as far north as the neighbourhood of Quetta, where Piggott was the first to identify a ceramic industry ("Quetta ware") early in appearance though not necessarily of a correspondingly early date. It occurs on some twenty sites extending from Quetta southwards to the Kalāt region on village-mounds or tells ranging up to 200 yds. in diameter and 50 ft. in height. It is painted in a "fine, assured, free style" with occasional stylized animal designs (especially caprids) but more normally with geometric designs amongst which indented or stepped and oval motives are the most distinctive. Its discoverer has compared it with wares from a number of Iranian sites (Tal-i-Bakun A, Susa I, Giyan V, Sialk III), where a date soon after the middle of the fourth millennium seems likely, but more recent excavation in the Quetta region suggests that in its later stages it tends towards a florid extravagance reminiscent of Nineveh V (mid third millennium). Be it repeated, however, that the extension of Mesopotamian dating to Baluchistan is at present fraught with uncertainty.
c8.39
Other buff-ware groups include a complex to which the name "Amri-Nal" has been given by Piggott from two type-sites: Amri on the Indus plain south of Mohenjo-daro, and Nal, near Kalāt in the heart of the Baluch hills. At Kile Gul Mohammed (mentioned above) and at another site, Damb Saadat, Amri-ware underlay the Quetta-Zhob group, but at Amri itself the ware was found underneath the Harappā culture, to which the complex would there appear to be immediately antecedent with an approximate date in the earlier half of the third millennium. On the whole it is perhaps preferable, however, to divide and treat separately the two main components, and they are here separately mapped (fig. 2).¹ An extensive cemetery at Nal showed that the dominant rite was that of "fractional" burial, or the burial of fragments of the skeleton after exposure elsewhere. This differs from the known burials of the Harappā culture, where complete inhumations are normal. The characteristic ware is buff with a white slip, on which the design is painted in brownish black occasionally augmented by red, yellow, blue or green to form an extremely gay polychrome. Multiple lines are favoured, and the "omega" and stepped patterns are characteristic, often on small straight-sided vessels. At Amri a more normal type is the beaker, with footstand or pedestal; and both looped bands and chequered panels are common. The animal designs found on Nal ware are almost entirely absent from the Amri series. Finally, Amri ware occurs only sporadically in the hills; its main distribution lies on the plain between the Kirthār Range and the Indus. On the other hand, the Nal wares occur abundantly in the upland valleys and extend far down them towards Makrān. Neither culture has yet been linked satisfactorily with the Iranian series, and the individual and attractive features of the Nal in particular may at present claim a substantially local origin.
c8.40
¹ Piggott regards them as "parallel, slightly divergent products of a single culture". The classification depends at present upon emphasis rather than upon clear categorical factors.
c8.41
Less provincial is the culture-group associated with Kulli, a site in the southern foothills of the Baluch mountains. With it is sometimes combined the name of Mehi, further to the north-east in the valley of the Mashkai, giving the double-barrelled name Kulli-Mehi to the group. Upwards of twenty-five of these buff-ware sites are known, extending southwards and westwards from the vicinity of Nal but not intruding into the Indus plain. Cremation-burials have been found at Mehi (unlike Harappā), and at both sites houses were built of plastered stone and mud-brick, not of Harappan baked bricks. The pottery has not been stratified and the interrelationship of its various elements is conjectural. Some of it shows clear Harappan motives, including black-on-red decoration, pipal leaves and even the Harappan "sacred brazier" (p. 77), though whether this affinity is due to interaction between the Kulli-Mehi and the Harappā cultures or whether the former is in a true sense antecedent and proto-Harappan cannot at present be decided. Non-Harappan features of Kulli-Mehi include friezes of elongated animals, particularly bulls, with strongly outlined and vertically striped bodies and large circular eyes. Small caprids, plants, dots-and-circles, comb-patterns and other objects crowd the background, recalling the same *horror vacui* in the "scarlet ware" of the Diyala region near Baghdad in Early Dynastic times, after *c.* 2800 B.C. The designs are mostly in black paint, but a red line is occasionally added in the framework. From Mehi comes a group of stone pots, possibly unguent-pots, either square or circular on plan and sometimes subdivided into four compartments. They commonly bear friezes of incised and hatched triangles. One is unfinished, so that some at least of them were made on the spot. Similar stone pots have been found at Mohenjo-daro to the east and in southern Iran (Persian Makrān), Mesopotamia and eastern Syria (Mari) to the west, and are comparable with small stone "house-urns" which occur throughout the same zone, perhaps at a somewhat earlier date (see below, p. 87). Piggott has conjectured that Makrān was the main centre of dispersal, and that the Kulli-Mehi culture is an integral part of a creative complex with wide commercial contacts (possibly a partly sea-borne trade in unguents) rather than close cultural links, as far as the Indus and Euphrates valleys. These links suggest fairly accurately an Early Dynastic date, and reinforce the vaguer hint noted above in connexion with the decorated pottery.
c8.42
Such are the scrappy, ill-documented materials which for the time being have to serve as an introduction to the Indus civilization. Village-cultures or bare pottery-groups—Zhob, Togau, Quetta, Nal, Amri, Kulli-Mehi—some isolated, some linked more or less recognizably with plateau-cultures or even with the plains beyond, are a curtain-raiser rather than a first act for the drama which must now unfold before us. For, unless doubtfully at Mehi and a few related sites, there is little yet that anticipates the Indus civilization in its cultural details, and we have still to admit that only in the most general terms can we trace the beginnings of the great civilization to which we must now turn. Exploration in northern Baluchistan, in the North-west Frontier Province, in Afghanistan and, not least, in the profoundest depths of Mohenjo-daro itself are the necessary preliminaries to enlightenment.
c8.43
*The Indus civilization*
c8.44
At present, the Indus civilization appears to spring into being fully grown, and, though the further exploration called for in the last paragraph must tell us much, we may still expect a high measure of suddenness in the actual genesis of the great cities. The geographical opportunities to which reference has been made (p. 8) were an immediate challenge to any folk sufficiently gifted with the creative imagination to take it up, and *without* that creative imagination no stretch of time could have provided a substitute. The Indus civilization, like other great revolutions, may best be visualized as the sudden offspring of opportunity and genius, and much playing with potsherds and culture-spreads may help a little to define the opportunity but cannot explain the genius. As the evidence stands, civilization emerged in Mesopotamia before it emerged in the Punjab or Sind, though, be it added, we still know little enough of the beginning of Harappā and nothing of the beginning of Mohenjo-daro. It is difficult to suppose that, in spite of the parallelism of opportunity, so complex a conception can have arisen independently in both regions, related as they are to a common stem on the Irano-Afghan plateau. On the other hand, contacts between the two civilizations—and then of a commercial rather than a cultural kind—are rare before the Sargonid period, about 2300 B.C., and notable differentiations in script, metalwork and pottery indicate an essentially divergent development. A partial resolution of the problem may perhaps be found by analogy with another transfer of ideas in the full light of the historic period. The *idea* of the Islamic mosque and domed tomb and diwan came to India largely from Persia; but a comparison, for example, of the Isfahān of Shāh Abbās with the contemporary Fathpur Sikri of Akbar the Great reveals the almost fantastic extent to which the same idea, even at a time of close political interchange, may be differentiated in its local manifestation. On this showing a far closer and more persistent interrelationship between the Indus and Mesopotamia than appears actually to have obtained might be postulated without the necessary implication of anything approaching cultural identity. It is legitimate to affirm that the *idea* of civilization came to the land of the Indus from the land of the Twin Rivers, whilst recognizing that the essential self-sufficiency of each of the two civilizations induced a strongly localized and specialized cultural expression of that idea in each region.
c8.45
The general characters of the Indus civilization have been reviewed on more than one occasion,¹ but a categorical reconsideration of them is justified by gradually accruing evidence. Our procedure will be to summarize the structural evidence from the partially excavated sites—Harappā, Mohenjo-daro, Chanhu-daro and others; and the evidence of burials, of soldiering, commerce and farming, of arts and crafts, of writing and of religion. Thereafter some attempt must be made to define the present basis of chronology.
c8.46
¹ Notably by E. Mackay, *Early Indus Civilizations*, 2nd ed. (London, 1948), and by S. Piggott, *Prehistoric India*, pp. 132 ff.