Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.30

c8.30

In no instance has a hoard or distinctive hoard-type been found in a stratified deposit, and even the precise find-spot of most of the hoards is forgotten. At Rājpur Parsu, in the Bijnor district beside the upper Ganges, a hoard came from the periphery of a mound 'which is 5-7 feet high and covers an area of nearly 4 square furlongs'. Another hoard, from Bisauli in the Badaun district a little farther south, was ploughed up in a field that is 'almost flat without any signs of a mound'. At both these sites Mr. B. B. Lal dug exploratory trenches; at neither did he find further implements, but both sites yielded scraps of ill-fired thick ochre-washed ware, mixed at Bisauli with sherds of well-fired red-slipped ware with black designs. All the Bisauli pottery was near the surface—as indeed the hoard had been—but the groups of sherds were distinguished by the freshness of the red ware and the worn aspect of the ochre ware. Yet another hoard-site, at Bahādarabād eight miles west of Hardwār on the upper Ganges, has also produced ochre sherds. A comparable ochre fabric has been found by Mr. A. Ghosh farther west, in the Drishadvati valley of Bikaner, and has there been called, a little ambitiously perhaps, the 'Sothi Culture', from a place near the sub-divisional town of Nohar. More significantly, it characterized the lowest (earliest) occupation of the Ganges site at Hastināpura, to which we shall come in a moment. Little is at present known of this Ochre Ware; even the shapes of the pots have not been determined; and its association with the copper hoards is not proved. But a considerably more advanced exploration of the succeeding Painted Grey Ware levels in the Ganges-Jumna basin has failed to reveal in them any of the more distinctive hoard-types, and the impression for the moment is that these precede the Grey Ware and the full development of urban life in the region. In a chronology which is at present largely guesswork, I should say that that implies a date for the hoards before the 8th century B.C.; my Indian colleagues might prefer a somewhat earlier terminus.