Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.136

c7.136

Briefly, the present position is this. On a number of Indus sites, superimposed vestiges of later cultures have been observed. At Harappā itself remains of jerry-built houses of re-used brick have been found built into the débris overlying the Indus city, and the intruders buried their dead in alien fashions and in or with good but largely alien pottery, in a cemetery known to archaeology as 'Cemetery H'. This Cemetery H culture has at present been identified on only two other sites (in Bahāwalpur), and little is known of it save that it would appear to have post-dated the Indus Civilization by an appreciable interval. Again at Chanhu-daro, some eighty miles south of Mohenjo-daro, a shoddy late Indus phase was succeeded by a squatter culture of lower grade, named the ‘Jhukar’ culture from another site in Sind. The Jhukar squatters made coarser pottery than their Indus predecessors, and used round button-seals, commonly bearing radiate or compartmental patterns reminiscent of 2nd millennium types in northern Iran and the Caucasus. There would appear to have been an approximation of age between the end of the Indus Civilization here and the arrival of the squatters, though actual continuity is not implied. After an interval, more squatters (the ‘Jhangar’ people) replaced the Jhukars. The whole succession is undated and leaves us little wiser, but is sufficient to show a continuing cultural deterioration in this region after the end of the Civilization, and to suggest recurrent links with Iran and the Caucasus. This suggestion may be sustained into the latter part of the 2nd millennium by burial-cairns at Moghul Ghundai in the Zhob valley of northern Baluchistan, from which a tripod jar, horse-bells, rings and bangles have been thought to recall similar objects from ‘Cemetery B’ at Sialk in central Iran, dated to 1000 B.C. or thereabouts. On the other hand, there is some evidence that these cairns may in fact be appreciably later.59