The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c8.44

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.