An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c9.s17.27

v1.c9.s17.27

Whence came the urge of erecting megaliths in India? Scholars by and large look towards w. Asia for the answer although hardly any one appears to have hit the point. Thus, Childe, 1947-8, and Wheeler, 1947-8, vaguely point out some general kind of architectural similarities, particularly the presence of port-holes, between the Indian and n. Iranian, Caucasian and Palestinian megalithic graves; Fürer-Haimendorf, 1945, and Ruben, 1939, have located the origin of the Indian megaliths, particularly those of s. India, which the latter feels started on the Malabar coast, in the port-holed cists and dolmens of the e. Mediterranean coast. Gordon, 1958, Gupta, 1972, and Ramachandran, 1969-70, quote the parallels in cairns, cists and rock-cut underground caves in the s. Arab countries; Gupta even favours the Gulf of Oman area as the immediate source or spring-board for the Indian megaliths. Heine-Geldern, 1965, and Leshnik, 1969, stake the claims of the C. Asian nomads as the authors of Indian megaliths, while Asthana, 1974, includes the cairn circles and cists of the Gandhāra graves amongst the earliest forms of megaliths on the Indian borderlands. Banerjee, 1965, pleads the case of the Baluchistan cairns for locating the original source for the Indian megaliths, and Allchin, 1968, and Soundara Rajan, 1969, take the Indian megaliths ‘as a developing complex with several streams of influence combining in them.’ Obviously the evidence is extremely slender and theories are generally based on some formal similarities in architectural features and rarely on pottery and tools and weapons. In fact the most difficult aspect of the problem is the chronological and spatial gap between the w. Asian and Indian examples: while most of the typical megaliths of India belong to the Iron Age of post-1000 B.C. date, most of the typical w. Asian megaliths end around 1500 B.C., i.e., during the last phase of the Bronze Age. It is as yet not certain when and how the iron technology developed in India, the theory of its Greek origin around 500 B.C. proposed by Gordon, 1958, and Wheeler, 1969, having long been rejected since at sites like HALLUR and ATRANJIKHERA iron is dated to 1000 B.C. But whether it has an indigenous origin [cf. 4.16] or had a two-way entry into India, one overland and the other maritime, from w. Asia is as yet to be established on independent grounds. Similarly typical megalithic types are practically absent between the Gulf of Oman and Sind—in fact between Palestine and Caucasia and the s.-w. coast of Indian peninsula. Some, like Allchin, who try to fill up the gaps take recourse to just a few atypical monuments and objects, such as three-legged pots, and therefore cannot be fully relied upon. The same observation applies to a black-and-red ware found by Lal in the cairn burials of Tumas in Nubia, Egypt (Lal, 1961-2, 1963), since as against the plain and painted black-and-red ware of India the Egyptian wares are often highly decorated with incised geometrical designs and human figures, and these are dated to the pre-Iron Age of pre-1000 B.C.; moreover whereas the Nubian burials are single complete interments the Indian megaliths are generally collective and post-exposure.