Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s1: Further Note on Three Wares of Special Chronological Importance
Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s1
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Further Note on Three Wares of Special Chronological Importance
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Fig. 1
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1. *Painted Grey Ware (P.G. Ware).* This distinctive Bronze Age ware is of fine well-levigated clay, wheel-turned, thin and grey in section, well-fired, and grey to greyish brown, sometimes dark, in surface colour. On the surface are painted linear and dotted patterns, concentric circles, spirals, *signas* and *swastikas*, generally in matt black but occasionally red.
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The commonest forms are straight-sided bowls, and dishes with upright convex sides and sagger-bases.
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The ware is characteristic of the Jumna-Ganges *doāb* but occurs as far west as Bikaner and as far south as Ujjain.
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At Ahichchhatrā in U.P., where the ware was first recognized, it occurred mainly below the Northern Black Polished or N.B.P. Ware (see below), though there was some likelihood of an overlap between the two. At the more carefully excavated Hastināpura on the Ganges, however, there was a stratigraphical gap between the P.G. Ware and the overlying N.B.P. Ware, and there is a hint of a similar gap at Kaushāmbi on the Jumna, though the evidence there is less abundant. Other sites confirm the general sequence of the two wares. Moreover, whilst the N.B.P. Ware is associated with iron implements, the P.G. Ware is found exclusively with copper or bronze: even the stone industries which often accompany the use of copper in India seem to be absent from P.G. Ware levels.
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Fig. 1 Painted grey ware: 1-4, from Ahichchhatrā; 5-9, from Pānipat; 10-12, from Hastināpura. ‡
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If the initial date of the N.B.P. Ware in the Ganges region be placed somewhere in the 5th century B.C. (see below), then the bulk of the P.G. Ware is certainly earlier than that date. At Hastināpura this ware extended downwards through 4-7 feet of occupational strata; what that represents in time can only be conjectured, but two or three centuries are a feasible guess. On this basis, and at this representative site, the beginning of the P.G. Ware might be ascribed to the 8th century B.C. The skilful excavator of Hastināpura would prefer to take it back to 'circa 1100 B.C., with a probable margin on the earlier side'. This estimate is influenced by the fact that the P.G. Ware is the earliest reputable pottery known to us from a number of town-sites—Hastināpura amongst them—mentioned as already established before the Mahābhārata war, for which F. E. Pargiter suggested a date of c. 950 B.C. The equation may be right, but the available archaeological evidence scarcely carries so long a chronology. In any case, the date of the historical elements of the Mahābhārata is highly speculative.
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At the upper limit of the dating, a clear archaeological gap has been established between the end of the Indus Civilization (c. 1500 B.C.?) and the beginning of the P.G. Ware at Rupar and other sites in N.W. India. Nevertheless, if as archaeologists we must be for ever tracing the steam-engine back to the tea-kettle, we may postulate a link, however tenuous, with Baluchistan, where the bowls from the secondary burials at Shāhi Tump seem to have a certain ancestral affinity with the Ganges material; and the Shāhi Tump burials post-dated the Indus Civilization at that spot. Certainly the sudden appearance of the high-class P.G. fabric in the Ganges basin suggests, or even proves, that its technique had already been perfected elsewhere. If Aryans must be dragged into this picture, it is possible to suppose that the P.G. Ware may represent the second phase of their invasion of India, when, from the Punjab, they entered and Aryanized the Middle Country of the Ganges-Jumna doāb, after picking up ideas and doubtless craftsmen in the Indus valley and the Baluch borderland. But see p. 126.
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Northern black polished ware: 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 17, from Rupar; 2, 16, from Rājghāt; 4, 9, 12, 18, from Tripuri; 6, from Bahal; 7, from Taxila (Bhir Mound); 11, 13, from Hastināpura; 14, 15, 19, from Ahichchhatrā
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Briefly, in the following pages the schematic dates for the important Painted Grey Ware will be the 8th–5th centuries B.C.
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Fig. 3
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2. *Northern Black Polished Ware (N.B.P. Ware).* Many sites in northern and central India, occasionally as far south as Amaravati, have produced this Iron Age ware, which is as distinctive in the subcontinent as is *terra sigillata* on European sites. It is wheel-made and normally thin, with a highly lustrous surface ranging from grey or brown to black, and steel-like in quality. The paste is well levigated and is white to reddish. The bright gloss is not a glaze or lacquer. The process of manufacture is doubtful: it has been thought that, after being turned on the wheel, the pots were subjected to elaborate burnishing, and then coated with a finely levigated, highly ferruginous clay, and again burnished; and that they were then fired under reducing conditions to a temperature producing an incipient fusion of the slip, this accounting for their exceptional hardness and lustre. Recently, the laboratory of the British Museum has questioned the burnishing without, as yet, providing any complete alternative explanation. Its present verdict is that 'the unfired pots were dipped in a suspension of a ferruginous inorganic material, probably resembling a red earth; and that, after firing to a temperature of c. 800° C., the kiln was sealed so that the pots cooled in a reducing atmosphere. The mineralogical identity of the "red earth" has not been discovered, and the main problem, namely the precise nature of the surface layer, still remains unsolved.'
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Fig. 3
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The shapes are commonly bowls or convex-sided dishes, with a certain analogy—as, indeed, has the high quality of the fabric—to the P.G. pottery. The two may well represent the same tradition, with the addition of an improved or variant technique in the case of the N.B.P. Ware. The discovery of the new technique may be ascribed to the potters of the Ganges Basin, where the ware is particularly abundant. It may be suggested as an idle guess that the great popularity of the Ware was not altogether unconnected with its superficial resemblance to forged iron, which first appears in northern India shortly before N.B.P. Ware. Alternatively, it may reflect the liking of the Persians for a high metallic polish, as represented very notably in some of their masonry (p. 174).
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The fabric has been dated on the basis of the prolonged excavations at the somewhat peripheral site of Taxila in the Punjab (West Pakistan), which yielded about twenty sherds. Of these, eighteen came from the earliest of the successive sites of the town, the Bhir Mound, which was founded late in the 6th or early in the 5th century B.C. and is thought to have ended about 180 B.C. It was visited by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C., when the average level was about 6 or 7 feet below the present surface. It is noteworthy that sixteen of the Bhīr Mound sherds occurred at depths between 7 and 13 feet, only two being higher than 7 feet (one at 4 feet 10 inches, and one at 6 feet 2 inches). Since Taxila was not dug stratigraphically in the modern usage of the term, these depths are an unreliable guide, but, consistently with them, one of the two sherds found on the succeeding site of Taxila at Sirkap occurred at 18 feet below the surface, and should therefore be early in the history of that site, that is to say, in the first half of the 2nd century B.C. On this showing, the N.B.P. Ware may be ascribed to the 5th-2nd centuries B.C. The occasional survival of this high-grade fabric into later levels is to be expected; thus at Shishupalgarh in Orissa three N.B.P. shreds occurred above Rouletted Ware, which is not likely to be earlier than the beginning of the 1st century A.D. But much more evidence is required as to the initial date of the ware in the Ganges Basin, and the Taxila dating may not in this respect be representative. On recent observation I am indeed inclined to suspect that in the far North-west, at Chārsada near Peshāwar (where a dozen stratified sherds of this fabric were found in 1958), at Udegram in Swat (where Professor G. Tucci's expedition has found a sherd in a mileu attributed to the 3rd century B.C.), and even at Taxila itself, its arrival should mostly be equated with the spread of the Mauryan dominion from the Ganges to these parts after 323 B.C. In other words, I would provisionally ascribe the N.B.P. Ware of the north-westerly regions of the subcontinent to the period 320-150 B.C., without prejudice to the possibility of an appreciably earlier beginning in the Ganges Basin itself.
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It is relevant to add that in the careful trial-trenches dug at Hastināpura in the Ganges valley over a hundred sherds of N.B.P. Ware were found in Period III, represented by 8 vertical feet of occupation-material. In the succeeding Period IV, which produced Mathurā coins ascribed to the 2nd century B.C., the ware was absent.
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3. Rouletted Ware. This ware was first recognized in 1945 at Arikamedu, near Pondicherry in South India, where it was found in association with Arretine ware imported from Italy in the early decades of the 1st century A.D. In a more general sense this dating is confirmed at Fig. 3 Distribution of painted grey and northern black polished wares
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CHARSADA OTAXILA O R. Jhelum R. Ravi R. Sutlej RUPAR KOTLANIHANG PANIPAT BARNAWA BAGHPAT HASTINAPURA (DELHI) INDRAPAT TILPAT AHICHCHHATRA BAIRAT OMATHURA KAMPIL R. Chambal R. Jumna R. Ganges AYODHYA VAISALI PATNA BANGARH OKAUSAMBI RAJGHAT RAJGIR OCALCUTTA TAMLUK O OKARACHI R. Luni R. Narbada R. Tapti OBAHAL ONASIK R. Godavari OUJJAIN MAHESWAR SANCHI TRIPURI ONAGPUR SISUPALGARH R. Mahanadi BAY OF BENGAL ARABIAN SEA HYDERABAD OAMARAVATI R. Kistna Miles 0 100 200 300 • PAINTED GREY WARE ONORTHERN BLACK POLISHED WARE ⊗ SITE WITH BOTH TYPES □ MODERN CITY
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Chandravalli in northern Mysore, where a denarius of Tiberius, dated A.D. 26-37, was found with closely derivative pottery and near actual rouletted sherds. The characteristic shape is a dish, sometimes more than 12 inches in diameter, with an incurved and beaked rim and two or three concentric rings of rouletted pattern on the flat interior base. This pattern is not an Indian feature and is certainly derived, like the associated Arretine, from the Mediterranean. The fabric is grey or black, has often a remarkably smooth surface, is usually thin, brittle and well-burnt, with almost a metallic ring. The better examples are doubtless imported;
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cruder varieties seem to be local imitations. The ware is particularly characteristic of the South Indian areas reached by Roman trade in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. with an appropriate extension in the north-east to Tamluk, the ancient Tamralipti or Ptolemy's Tamalites, in Bengal,⁹ and a stray sherd in the far north-west at Jhukar in Sind.¹⁰
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This abundant and distinctive ware lies itself outside the range of the present book, but as the first clear datum in the protohistoric chronology of South India it serves as a terminus for some of the dating in our later chapters.
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CHAPTER III
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Stones
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INDIAN STONE AGE TOOLS have been provisionally classified in three broad categories, chronological as well as typological: Series I and II representing the Lower and Upper Palaeolithic, and Series III marked by microlithic industries. In spite of its crude simplicity, this basic classification is useful in the present stage of research. Series II still lacks definition, but I and III, however interpreted, are readily recognizable brackets. This chapter is concerned mainly with Series I.
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In India it is more than ordinarily difficult to set Man of the Old Stone Age, Palaeolithic Man, squarely upon his feet. That he abounded for a great many thousands of years is sufficiently evident from the unnumbered lumps of stone which he split and shaped and left for us in a variety of geological environments. But of the bones and branches which he may also have hewn in the fulfilment of his daily needs, practical or spiritual, of the skins and matting which may have adorned his person and his precinct, nothing has survived. Of his physical aspect we know nothing. His solitary memorial is an infinitude of stones.
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His setting lies within the Pleistocene epoch of geology—the last prior to the Recent or Holocene in which we live—as defined by the presence of a distinctive fauna: Elephas, Equus and Bos. More particularly, the stone implements encountered in this chapter may be equated with the Middle Pleistocene and a schematic time-bracket of 400,000 to 100,000 years ago, though the terminal date for some of the industries may well be later. Broadly, they fall into three main categories.
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1. *Pebble-implements*. These are more or less crudely sharpened pebbles, characteristically of quartzite, and frequently retaining a part of the cortex or crust of the pebble. Sometimes flakes are struck upwards from the edges of the flat platform of a pebble which has been cloven transversely by man or nature; the steep cutting-edge thus formed would enable the implement to be used as a chopper or scraper. Alternatively, a rounded or oval pebble may be shaped by the removal of flakes, normally on one side only to produce a scalloped cutting-edge or even a point. In the latter case, the sharpened pebble sometimes vaguely resembles a handaxe, and a genetic connection between pebble-handaxes and true handaxes in India has been postulated. Equally, the resemblance may be fortuitous or at most the result of interaction. Pebble industries in India are often referred to as 'Soan' (or 'Sohan') industries, from the Punjab river where they were first recorded.
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2. *Flake-implements*. Two main series (with many varieties) have been recognized. The first is comparable with the Clactonian of Essex, in that the flake is struck off an unprepared block by means of a hammer or by striking a fixed anvil ('block-on-block' technique); the striking-platform of the flake shows no preparatory working and is set at a wide angle (110-125 degrees) from the ventral side of the flake, and there is a large semi-cone of percussion where the formative blow was struck. The second series approaches the French Levallois technique whereby a domical or 'tortoise' core is first trimmed by the removal of a series of small flakes from the stone block; then a large flake is detached sometimes by a blow on a small flat surface prepared at right-angles to the surface of the core. The detached flake shows converging flaking or fluting on the upper side and a flat primary surface on the under side, and is generally usable as a knife or scraper or spearhead without further trimming, though it may on occasion be submitted to some secondary working.
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3. *Handaxes*. These are pear-shaped or oval implements, sometimes of considerable size, a foot or more in length, worked to an edge on both sides of a core or occasionally a flake. The more primitive examples appear to have been made in a fashion similar to that of the Clactonian flakes; their French category is 'Abbevillian' (formerly 'Chellian'), but in India the term is liable to imply a greater measure of precision than the coarse material used there justifies. On the other hand the best Indian handaxes, showing, it seems, controlled flaking produced by the use of a bone or wooden mallet, may justifiably borrow the name 'Acheulian' from the more evolved French category. With the Acheulian handaxes are associated cleavers, oblong or rhomboidal in outline and with a wide chisel-edge, made by the same techniques. Levallois flakes partially overlapped the Acheulian handaxes but also outlasted them. Indian handaxes, with or without cleavers, are commonly known collectively as the 'Madras industry', from the region where they were first recognized, but the name bears no relation to the distribution of the type.
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In 1863, R. Bruce Foote, of the Geological Survey of India, picked up a palaeolithic implement in a gravel-pit at Pallavaram, near Madras. From this early start began the intermittent study of the Old Stone Age of India, though it is a fair comment to add that that study is still in a rudimentary stage. Foote's own work was of fundamental value, but only in the last quarter-century has the subject received any further sustained attention from trained enquirers.¹¹ Here no complete survey or even summary can be attempted, but a few of the more notable palaeolithic sites in northern, central and southern India are selected to illustrate the current state of enquiry. If the result displays a somewhat sombre monotony, it is at least a sympathetic reflection of millennia of mental and social stagnation modified by reluctant technical variation and occasional slight advancement. In India, not less than in other parts of the world, the human race got off to a slow start.
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Fig. 4 Early Soar implements: 1-4, pebble tools; 5-9, discoidal cores; 10-14, 'Clactonian' flakes. 1/2