The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.5

v1.c33.5

As the stone age passed gradually away in Northern India, it appears to have given place, not to an age of bronze, as it did in most parts of Europe, but to one of copper. Finds of seven bronze implements, it is true, have been recorded from various parts of the Empire, but it has rightly been pointed out by Dr Vincent Smith that out of these seven one only can claim to be of real bronze, deliberately and knowingly manufactured as such, and the evidence of a single specimen, which may well have been imported from abroad, is wholly insufficient to justify the assumption of a bronze age. Copper implements, on the contrary, occur in relatively large quantities and over a wide range throughout Northern India, from Hooghly in the east to Baluchistān in the west. Among them are bare and shouldered celts, harpoons, spear-heads both plain and barbed, axe-heads, swords, and an object suggestive of the human shape (Pl. X, 11–20). The last mentioned, as well as some of the swords, which are remarkable for their excessive weight and the form of their handles (Pl. X, 18–20), may have been used for cult purposes. One hoard of these implements, which came from Gungeria in the Central Provinces—the most important, be it said, yet recorded in the Old World—contained as many as 424 specimens of almost pure metal, weighing in all 829 pounds, besides 102 ornamental laminae of silver. Such a collection, comprising as it did a variety of implements intended for manifold domestic and other purposes, affords evidence enough, as Dr Smith has remarked, that their manufacture was being conducted in India on an extensive scale; while the distinctive types that had been evolved and are represented both in this and in other finds, connote a development that must already have extended over a long period, though at the same time the barbed spear-heads and harpoons and flat celts, manifestly copied from neolithic prototypes, bespeak a relatively high antiquity. The presence of silver ornaments in the Gungeria hoard has suggested doubts as to its remote date, but there seems little reason for assuming that a race familiar with the difficult metallurgical processes by which copper is extracted from its ores, were incapable of smelting silver from the rich argentiferous galenas which occur in various localities.