The Indus Valley Civilisation, also known as the Indus Civilisation, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. With ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of the three early civilizations of North Africa, Southwest Asia, and South Asia.
Of the three, its sites were the most spread out, including large areas of what in modern times are Pakistan, northwestern India, and northeast Afghanistan. The civilization thrived both in the alluvial plain of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial monsoon-fed rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the Ghaggar-Hakra, a seasonal river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.
The term Harappan is sometimes applied to the Indus Civilisation after its type site Harappa, the first to be excavated early in the 20th century in what was then the Punjab province of British India and is now Punjab, Pakistan. The discovery of Harappa and soon afterwards Mohenjo-daro was the culmination of work that had begun after the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India in the British Raj in 1861.
There were earlier and later cultures called Early Harappan and Late Harappan in the same area. The early Harappan cultures were populated from Neolithic cultures, the earliest and best-known of which is named after Mehrgarh, in Balochistan, Pakistan. Harappan civilisation is also referred to as Mature Harappan to make a distinction from the earlier cultures.
The cities of the Indus civilisation were remarkable for their urban planning, baked brick houses, sophisticated drainage systems, water supply systems, clusters of large non-residential buildings, and techniques of handicraft and metallurgy. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa probably grew to contain between 30,000 and 60,000 individuals, and the civilisation may have contained between one and five million individuals during its fluorescence.
Probably a gradual desiccation of the region during the 3rd millennium BCE was the first incentive to its urbanisation, but it also reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation’s downfall and disperse its population to the east.
Although more than a thousand Mature Harappan sites have been reported and nearly a hundred excavated, there are five major urban centres: Mohenjo-daro in the lower Indus Valley (declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 as ‘Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro’), Harappa in the western Punjab region, Ganeriwala in the Cholistan Desert, Dholavira in western Gujarat (declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 as ‘Dholavira: A Harappan City’), and Rakhigarhi in Haryana. The Harappan language is not directly attested, and its affiliations are uncertain, as the Indus script has remained undeciphered. A section of scholars favors a relationship with the Dravidian or Elamo-Dravidian language family.
Etymology
The Indus civilisation is named after the Indus river system in whose alluvial plains the early sites of the civilisation were identified and excavated.
Following a tradition in archaeology, the civilisation is sometimes referred to as the Harappan, after its type site, Harappa, the first site to be excavated in the 1920s; this is notably true of usage employed by the Archaeological Survey of India after India’s independence in 1947.
The term ‘Ghaggar-Hakra’ features prominently in modern labels used to apply to the Indus civilization, because a large number of sites had been discovered along the Ghaggar-Hakra River both in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.
The terms ‘Indus-Sarasvati Civilisation’ and ‘Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation’ have also been used in the literature by advocates of Indigenous Aryanism, following a supposed identification of the Ghaggar-Hakra with the river Sarasvati described in the early chapters of the Rigveda, a collection of hymns in archaic Sanskrit composed in the second-millennium BCE, which are unrelated to the mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Recent geophysical research suggests that unlike the Sarasvati, described in the Rigveda as a snow-fed river, the Ghaggar-Hakra was a system of perennial monsoon-fed rivers, which became seasonal around the time that the civilisation diminished, approximately 4,000 years ago.
Extent
The Indus Valley Civilisation was roughly contemporary with the other riverine civilizations of the old world: Ancient Egypt along the Nile, Mesopotamia in the lands watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and China in the drainage basin of the Yellow River and the Yangtze.
At its mature stage, the civilization covered a larger area than the other, with a core of 1,500 kilometres (900 mi) up the alluvial plain of the Indus and its tributaries. It had, on the other hand, an area of diverse flora, fauna, and habitats tenfold in size that was molded culturally and economically by the Indus.
Agriculture emerged around 6500 BCE in Balochistan, on the margins of the Indus alluvium. In the following millennia, settled life made inroads into the Indus plains, setting the stage for the growth of rural and urban settlements. The more organized sedentary life, in turn, led to a net increase in the birth rate.
The major urban centers of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa probably expanded to harbour between 30,000 and 60,000 people, and the population of the subcontinent swelled during this time from around 4-6 million people. In this period, the death rate rose, as humans and domesticated animals kept close together increased the incidence of communicable diseases. According to one estimate, the population of the Indus civilization at its peak may have been between one and five million.
At its peak, the civilisation stretched from Balochistan in the west to western Uttar Pradesh in the east, from northeastern Afghanistan in the north to Gujarat state in the south. Most of the sites are located in the states of Punjab, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan.
Coastal settlements range from Sutkagan Dor in Western Baluchistan to Lothal in Gujarat. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus River at Shortugai in Afghanistan, the northernmost site of the Indus Valley Civilisation, in the Gomal River valley in northwestern Pakistan, at Manda, Jammu on the Beas River near Jammu, and at Alamgirpur on the Hindon River, only 28 km (17 mi) from Delhi.
The southernmost site of the Indus Valley Civilisation is Daimabad in Maharashtra. Indus Valley sites have most frequently been discovered along rivers but also along the ancient seacoast, such as Balakot (Kot Bala), and on islands, for example, Dholavira.
Discovery and history of excavation
The first modern accounts of the ruins of the Indus civilisation are those of Charles Masson, a deserter from the East India Company’s army. In 1829, Masson traveled through the princely state of Punjab, gathering useful intelligence for the Company in return for a promise of clemency. An aspect of this arrangement was the additional requirement to hand over to the Company any historical artifacts acquired during his travels.
Masson, who knew the classics, especially the military campaigns of Alexander the Great, selected a few towns that had appeared during Alexander’s campaigns and whose archaeological sites the campaign’s chroniclers had noted. Masson’s most famous archaeological discovery in the Punjab was Harappa, a metropolis of the Indus civilization in the valley of Indus’s tributary, the Ravi river.
Masson recorded many observations and drawings of Harappa’s well-endowed ancient relics, mostly half-buried. In 1842, Masson included his observation of Harappa in the book Narrative of Various Journeys in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab.
He dated the ruins of Harappa to an age of documented history, confusing it as an ancient place mentioned to have been during Alexander’s invasion. Masson was impressed by the site’s extraordinary size and by several large mounds formed from long-existing erosion.
Two years later, the Company engaged Alexander Burnes to sail up the Indus to assess the feasibility of water travel for its army. Burnes, who also stopped in Harappa, noted the baked bricks employed in the site’s ancient masonry, but noted also the haphazard plundering of these bricks by the local population.
Despite these accounts, Harappa was plundered even more dangerously for its bricks after the British annexation of the Punjab in 1848–49. A significant number were taken away as ballast for the railway lines that were being laid in the Punjab. Almost 160 km (100 mi) of railway track between Multan and Lahore, laid in the mid-1850s, rested on Harappan bricks.
In 1861, three years after the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of Crown rule in India, archaeology on the subcontinent became more formally organized with the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Alexander Cunningham, the first director-general of the Survey, who had visited Harappa in 1853 and had noted the imposing brick walls, visited again to carry out a survey, but this time of a site whose entire upper layer had been stripped in the interim.
Though his original goal of proving Harappa to be a lost Buddhist city mentioned in the seventh century CE travels of the Chinese visitor, Xuanzang, proved elusive, Cunningham did publish his findings in 1875. For the first time, he interpreted a Harappan stamp seal, with its unknown script, which he concluded to be of an origin foreign to India.
Archaeological work at Harappa subsequently lagged until a new viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, rammed through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act 1904, and appointed John Marshall to head the ASI. Some years later Hiranand Sastri, whom Marshall had set to survey Harappa, described it as being of non-Buddhist origin, and thereby more ancient by implication. Expropriating Harappa for the ASI under the Act, Marshall ordered ASI archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni to dig up the two mounds of the site.
Further south, along the main stem of the Indus in Sind province, the almost intact site of Mohenjo-daro had attracted attention. Marshall sent a series of ASI officers to make surveys of the site. These were D. R. Bhandarkar (1911), R. D. Banerji (1919, 1922–1923), and M. S. Vats (1924). In 1923, on his second visit to Mohenjo-daro, Baneriji wrote to Marshall about the site, postulating an origin in ‘remote antiquity’, and noting a congruence of some of its artifacts with those of Harappa.
Later in 1923, Vats, also in correspondence with Marshall, noted the same more specifically about the seals and the script found at both sites. On the weight of these opinions, Marshall ordered crucial data from the two sites to be brought to one location and invited Banerji and Sahni to a joint discussion. By 1924, Marshall had become convinced of the significance of the finds, and on 24 September 1924, made a tentative but conspicuous public intimation in the Illustrated London News:
“Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilisation. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.”
In the next issue, a week later, the British Assyriologist Archibald Sayce was able to point to very similar seals found in Bronze Age levels in Mesopotamia and Iran, giving the first strong indication of their date; confirmations from other archaeologists followed. Systematic excavations began in Mohenjo-daro in 1924–25 with that of K. N. Dikshit, continuing with those of H. Hargreaves (1925–1926), and Ernest J. H. Mackay (1927–1931). Most of Mohenjo-daro was excavated by 1931, but periodic excavations went on, as with Mortimer Wheeler, newly appointed director-general of the ASI in 1944, and Ahmad Hasan Dani.
After the partition of India in 1947, when most excavated sites of the Indus Valley Civilisation lay in territory awarded to Pakistan, the Archaeological Survey of India, its area of authority reduced, carried out large numbers of surveys and excavations along the Ghaggar-Hakra system in India. Some speculated that the Ghaggar-Hakra system might yield more sites than the Indus river basin.
According to archaeologist Ratnagar, many Ghaggar-Hakra sites in India and Indus Valley sites in Pakistan are actually those of local cultures; some sites display contact with Harappan civilisation, but only a few are fully developed Harappan ones. As of 1977, approximately 90% of the Indus script seals and inscribed objects discovered were found at sites in Pakistan along the Indus river, whereas other sites account for only the remaining 10%.
By 2002, more than 1,000 Mature Harappan cities and settlements had been reported, out of which approximately ninety had been excavated in the general area of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra rivers along with their tributaries; only five are recognized as major urban sites: Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Dholavira, Ganeriwala, and Rakhigarhi. By 2008, close to 616 sites have reportedly been found in India, compared to 406 in Pakistan.
Unlike India, which after 1947 had the ASI try to ‘Indianise’ archaeological work in keeping with new nation’s goals of national unity and historical continuity, in Pakistan the national imperative was the promotion of Islamic heritage, and consequently archaeological work on early sites was left to foreign archaeologists.
Following the partition, Mortimer Wheeler, the Director of ASI from 1944, managed to create archaeological institutes in Pakistan and subsequently joined a UNESCO initiative charged with the task of preserving the site at Mohenjo-daro.
International contributions to Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have been from the German Aachen Research Project Mohenjo-daro, the Italian Mission to Mohenjo-daro, and the US Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) established by George F. Dales.
Mehrgarh excavations were first conducted by the French archaeologist Jean-François Jarrige and his team in the early 1970s immediately after a chance flash flood revealed a part of an archaeological site at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan.
Chronology
Social hierarchies characterize the cities of the ancient Indus, the writing system they had, large planned cities they built, and long-distance trade that marked the cities to the archaeologists as a full-fledged ‘civilisation.’ Mature phase of Harappan civilization lasted from about 2600–1900 BCE.
With the inclusion of the predecessor and successor cultures-early Harappan and Late Harappan, respectively-it can be assumed that the whole Indus Valley Civilisation has run from the 33rd to the 14th centuries BCE. It belongs to the Indus Valley Tradition that also contains the pre-Harappan occupation of Mehrgarh-the earliest farming site of the Indus Valley.
| Dates (BCE) | Main Phase | Mehrgarh Phases | Harappan Phases | Post-Harappan Phases | Era |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7000–5500 | Pre-Harappan | Mehrgarh I and Bhirrana (aceramic Neolithic) | Early Food Producing Era | ||
| 5500–3300 | Pre-Harappan/Early Harappan | Mehrgarh II–VI (ceramic Neolithic) | Regionalisation Era | ||
| c. 4000–2500/2300 | Harappan 1 (Ravi Phase; Hakra Ware) | ||||
| c. 5000–3200 | |||||
| 3300–2800 | Early Harappan | ||||
| c. 3300–2800 | Harappan 1 (Ravi Phase; Hakra Ware) | ||||
| 2800–2600 | Mehrgarh VII | Harappan 2 (Kot Diji Phase, Nausharo I) | |||
| 2600–2450 | Mature Harappan (Indus Valley Civilisation) | Harappan 3A (Nausharo II) | Integration Era | ||
| 2450–2200 | Harappan 3B | ||||
| 2200–1900 | Harappan 3C | ||||
| 1900–1700 | Late Harappan | Harappan 4 (Cemetery H, Ochre Coloured Pottery) | Localisation Era | ||
| 1700–1300 | Harappan 5 | ||||
| 1300–600 | Post-Harappan | Painted Grey Ware (1200–600) | Vedic period (c. 1500–500) | Regionalisation | |
| c. 1200–300 | |||||
| c. 1500–600 | |||||
| 600–300 | Northern Black Polished Ware (Iron Age) (700–200) | Second Urbanisation (c. 500–200) | Integration |
Pre-Harappan era: Mehrgarh
Mehrgarh is a Neolithic (7000 BCE to c. 2500 BCE) mountain site in the Balochistan province of Pakistan, which provided new perspectives on the origins of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Mehrgarh is one of the earliest sites showing farming and herding in South Asia. Mehrgarh was influenced by the Near Eastern Neolithic, with similarities between domesticated wheat varieties, early phases of farming, pottery, other archaeological artefacts, some domesticated plants, and herd animals.
Jean-Francois Jarrige argues for an independent origin of Mehrgarh. Jarrige notes the assumption that farming economy was introduced full-fledged from the Near-East to South Asia, and the similarities between Neolithic sites from eastern Mesopotamia and the western Indus valley, which are evidence of a ‘cultural continuum’ between those sites. But given the novelty of Mehrgarh, Jarrige concludes that Mehrgarh has an earlier local background, and is not a ‘backwater’ of the Neolithic culture of the Near East.
Lukacs and Hemphill indicate an early local development of Mehrgarh with a continuation of cultural development but with change in population. As per Lukacs and Hemphill, there is strong continuity between the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (Copper Age) cultures of Mehrgarh, yet the dental evidence suggests that the Chalcolithic population was not descended from the Neolithic population of Mehrgarh, thus suggesting moderate levels of gene flow. Mascarenhas et al. (2015) report new, possibly West Asian, body types from the graves of Mehrgarh starting from the Togau phase (3800 BCE).
Gallego Romero et al. (2011) report that their study on lactose tolerance in India revealed that ‘the west Eurasian genetic contribution identified by Reich et al. (2009) principally reflects gene flow from Iran and the Middle East’. They also observe that ‘the earliest evidence of cattle herding in South Asia comes from the Indus River Valley site of Mehrgarh and is dated to 7,000 YBP.”.
Early Harappan
The Early Harappan Ravi Phase was named after the nearby river and lasted from about 3300 BCE to 2800 BCE. It began when farmers from the mountains gradually spent time between their mountain homes and the lowland river valleys and is associated with the Hakra Phase, found in the Ghaggar-Hakra River Valley to the west and predates the Kot Diji Phase (2800–2600 BCE, Harappan 2), a name based on a site in northern Sindh, Pakistan, a short distance northwest of Mohenjo-daro. The earliest examples of the Indus script date to the 3rd millennium BCE.
Rehman Dheri and Amri in Pakistan are the mature phase of earlier village cultures. Kot Diji is the phase preceding Mature Harappan, which has a citadel representing centralised authority and an increasingly urban quality of life. Another town of this stage was found at Kalibangan in India on the Hakra River.
Trade networks connected this culture to other regional related cultures and even far-flung sources of raw materials, like lapis lazuli and others used in making beads. It was by now that the farmers had domesticated several crops including peas, sesame seeds, dates, and cotton besides animals, like the water buffalo.
These Early Harappan communities now looked towards major urban centers from 2600 BCE, and it was at these centers where the mature phase of Harappa started. New studies suggest that the Indus Valley people migrated from villages to cities.
The final stages of the Early Harappan period are marked by the construction of large walled settlements, expansion of trade networks, and growing integration of regional communities into a ‘relatively uniform’ material culture in terms of pottery styles, ornaments, and stamp seals with Indus script, which marks the transition to the Mature Harappan phase.
Continue in the next part.
