Mature Harappan
According to Giosan et al. (2012), the slow southward migration of the monsoons across Asia initially allowed the Indus Valley villages to develop by taming the floods of the Indus and its tributaries. Flood-supported farming led to large agricultural surpluses, which in turn supported the development of cities.
The IVC residents did not develop irrigation capabilities, relying mainly on the seasonal monsoons leading to summer floods. Brooke further observes that the development of advanced cities comes with a decline in rainfall that may have spurred a reorganisation into larger urban centers.
According to J.G. Shaffer and D.A. Lichtenstein, the Mature Harappan civilization was ‘a synthesis of the Bagor, Hakra, and Kot Diji traditions or ‘ethnic groups’ in the Ghaggar-Hakra valley on the borders of India and Pakistan.
According to a more recent summary by Maisels (2003), ‘The Harappan oecumene formed from a Kot Dijian/Amri-Nal synthesis.’ He further states that in the development of complexity, ‘the site of Mohenjo-daro has priority, along with the Hakra-Ghaggar cluster of sites, where Hakra wares actually precede the Kot Diji related material.’ He looks at these regions as ‘catalytic in producing the fusion from Hakra, Kot Dijian, and Amri-Nal cultural elements that resulted in the gestalt we recognize as Early Harappan (Early Indus).’
By 2600 BCE, the Early Harappan communities turned into large urban centres. Such urban centres include Harappa, Ganeriwala, Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan, and Dholavira, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, Rupar, and Lothal in modern-day India. In total, more than 1,000 settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra Rivers and their tributaries.
Cities
A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture is visible in the Indus Valley Civilisation, making them the first urban centre in the region. The quality of municipal town planning suggests the knowledge of urban planning and efficient municipal governments which placed a high priority on hygiene, or, alternatively, accessibility to the means of religious ritual.
As seen in Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and the recently partially excavated Rakhigarhi, this urban plan included the world’s first known urban sanitation systems. Within the city, individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. From a room that seems to have been set aside for bathing, waste water was channeled into covered drains which lined the main streets. Houses opened only on inner courtyards and small lanes. The housebuilding in some villages in the region still resembles in some respects the housebuilding of the Harappans.
The ancient Indus systems of sewerage and drainage that were developed and used in cities throughout the Indus region were far more advanced than any found in contemporary urban sites in the Middle East and even more efficient than those in many areas of Pakistan and India today. The advanced architecture of the Harappans is shown by their dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms, and protective walls. The massive walls of Indus cities most likely protected the Harappans from floods and may have dissuaded military conflicts.
The purpose of the citadel remains debated. In sharp contrast to this civilisation’s contemporaries, Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, no large monumental structures were built. There is no conclusive evidence of palaces or temples. Some structures are thought to have been granaries. Found at one city is an enormous well-built bath (the ‘Great Bath’), which may have been a public bath. Although the citadels were walled, it is far from clear that these structures were defensive.
Most city dwellers seem to have been traders or artisans, living with others doing the same in well-defined neighbourhoods. The cities made use of materials coming from other places to build their seals, beads, and so on. Artefacts recovered include beautiful glazed faïence beads. Steatite seals feature images of animals, people (perhaps gods), and other types of inscriptions, including the yet un-deciphered writing system of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Some of the seals were used to stamp clay on trade goods.
While houses varied in size, the Indus cities are remarkable for their apparent egalitarianism, though relative. All houses were connected to water and drainage. The impression created is of a relatively low wealth concentration society.
Authority and governance
Archaeological records provide no immediate answers for a centre of power or for depictions of people in power in Harappan society. But, there are indications of complex decisions being taken and implemented. For example, most of the cities were built in a highly uniform and well-planned grid pattern, indicating that they were planned by a central authority; extraordinary uniformity of Harappan artefacts as visible in pottery, seals, weights, and bricks; existence of public facilities and monumental architecture; heterogeneity in the mortuary symbolism and in grave goods (items included in burials).
These are some major theories:
- There was a single state, given the similarity in artefacts, the evidence for planned settlements, the standardised ratio of brick size, and the establishment of settlements near sources of raw material.
- There was no single ruler but several cities like Mohenjo-daro had a separate ruler, Harappa another, and so forth.
Metallurgy
Harappans evolved some new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin.
A touchstone bearing gold streaks was found in Banawali, which was probably used for testing the purity of gold (such a technique is still used in some parts of India).
Metrology
The people of the Indus civilization reached a great precision in measuring length, mass, and time. They were some of the earliest ones to design a system of uniform weights and measures. Comparison of available objects reveals large-scale variation across the Indus territories.
Their smallest division, marked on an ivory scale found in Lothal in Gujarat, was approximately 1.704 mm, the smallest division ever recorded on a scale of the Bronze Age. Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their hexahedron weights.
These chert weights were in a ratio of 5:2:1 with weights of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 units, each unit weighted about 28 grams, corresponding to the English Imperial ounce or Greek uncia, and smaller objects corresponded in similar ratios but used units of 0.871. But in this case, as in others, real weights were not standard across the region. The weights and measures later used in Kautilya’s Arthashastra (4th century BCE) are the same as those used in Lothal.
Arts and crafts
Many Indus Valley seals and items in pottery and terracotta have been found, along with a very few stone sculptures and some gold jewelry and bronze vessels. Some anatomically detailed figurines in terracotta, bronze, and steatite have been found at excavation sites, the former probably mostly toys. The Harappans also made various toys and games, among them cubical dice (with one to six holes on the faces), which were found in sites like Mohenjo-daro.
The terracotta figurines included cows, bears, monkeys, and dogs. One animal has been identified on a majority of the seals at the mature sites, but the definition is hardly certain. Part bull, part zebra, with an impressive horn, it has provoked much speculation. As yet, there is insufficient evidence to support claims that the image had religious or cultic significance, but the prevalence of the image raises the question of whether or not the animals in images of the IVC are religious symbols.
Many crafts including, ‘shell working, ceramics, and agate and glazed steatite bead making’ were practised and the pieces were used in the making of necklaces, bangles, and other ornaments from all phases of Harappan culture. Some of these crafts are still practised in the subcontinent today.
Some make-up and toiletry items (a special kind of combs (kakai), the use of collyrium and a special three-in-one toiletry gadget) that were found in Harappan contexts still have similar counterparts in modern India. Terracotta female figurines were found (c. 2800–2600 BCE) which had red colour applied to the ‘manga’ (line of partition of the hair).
Archeological remains from 2000 to 3000 BC have been found from the city of Lothal of pieces on a board that resemble chess.
The finds from Mohenjo-daro were initially deposited in the Lahore Museum, but later moved to the ASI headquarters at New Delhi, where a new ‘Central Imperial Museum’ was being planned for the new capital of the British Raj, in which at least a selection would be displayed. It became apparent that Indian independence was approaching, but the Partition of India was not anticipated until late in the process.
The new Pakistani authorities requested that the Mohenjo-daro pieces excavated on their territory be returned; the Indian authorities refused. After some time an agreement was reached whereby the finds, numbering around 12,000 objects, were split fifty-fifty between the two countries; in a few cases, this was literally taken to extremes, with beads from necklaces and girdles separated into two piles. In the case of the ‘two most celebrated sculpted figures’, Pakistan asked for and received the so-called Priest-King figure, while India retained the much smaller Dancing Girl.
Though composed much later, the arts treatise Natya Shastra (c. 200 BCE – 200 CE) divides musical instruments into four categories based on their methods of acoustical production—strings, membranes, solid materials and air—and it is likely that such instruments were in existence from the IVC. Archaeological evidence for simple rattles and vessel flutes exists, but iconographic evidence suggests early harps and drums were used too. An ideogram within the IVC holds the oldest known representation of an arched harp dating back to a time before 1800 BCE.
Human statuettes
A handful of realistic statuettes have been found at IVC sites, of which much the most famous is the lost-wax casting bronze statuette of a slender-limbed Dancing Girl adorned with bangles, found in Mohenjo-daro. Two other realistic incomplete statuettes have been found in Harappa in proper stratified excavations, which display near-Classical treatment of the human shape: the statuette of a dancer who seems to be male, and the Harappa Torso, a red jasper male torso, both now in the Delhi National Museum. Sir John Marshall reacted with surprise when he saw these two statuettes from Harappa.
When I first saw them I found it difficult to believe that they were prehistoric; they seemed to completely upset all established ideas about early art, and culture. Modelling such as this was unknown in the ancient world up to the Hellenistic age of Greece, and I thought, therefore, that some mistake must surely have been made; that these figures had found their way into levels some 3000 years older than those to which they properly belonged … Now, in these statuettes, it is just this anatomical truth which is so startling; that makes us wonder whether, in this all-important matter, Greek artistry could possibly have been anticipated by the sculptors of a far-off age on the banks of the Indus.
These statuettes are controversial because of their advanced style in representing the human body. About the red jasper torso, the discoverer, Vats, claims a Harappan date, but Marshall considered this statuette is probably historical, dating to the Gupta period, comparing it to the much later Lohanipur torso.
Another relatively similar grey stone torso of a dancing male was discovered around 150 meters from this in a secure Mature Harappan stratum. More broadly, the overall assessment anthropologist Gregory Possehl often comes to with respect to these statuettes is that they represent probably the acme of Indus art for the Mature Harappan phase.
Seals
Thousands of steatite seals have been recovered, and their physical character is fairly consistent. In size they range from squares of side 2 to 4 cm (3⁄4 to 1+1⁄2 in). In most cases they have a pierced boss at the back to accommodate a cord for handling or for use as personal adornment. Besides this, a vast number of sealings have also survived, but only a few of them can be matched to the seals. Most examples of the Indus script are short groups of signs on seals.
Seals have been discovered at Mohenjo-daro showing a figure standing on its head, and another, on the Pashupati seal, sitting cross-legged in what some describe as a yoga-like pose (see image, the so-called Pashupati, below). This figure has been variously identified. Sir John Marshall identified a resemblance to the Hindu god, Shiva.
A human deity with the horns, hooves and tail of a bull also appears in the seals, in particular in a fighting scene with a horned tiger-like beast. This deity has been compared to the Mesopotamian bull-man Enkidu. Several seals also show a man fighting two lions or tigers, a ‘Master of Animals’ motif common to civilisations in Western and South Asia.
Trade and transportation
The Indus Valley civilisation may have had bullock carts identical to those seen throughout South Asia today, as well as boats. Most of these boats were probably small, flat-bottomed craft, perhaps driven by sail, similar to those one can see on the Indus River today;. An extensive canal network, used for irrigation, has however also been discovered by H.-P. Francfort.
During 4300–3200 BCE of the chalcolithic period (copper age), the Indus Valley Civilisation area shows ceramic similarities with southern Turkmenistan and northern Iran that suggest considerable mobility and trade. During the Early Harappan period (about 3200–2600 BCE), similarities in pottery, seals, figurines, ornaments, etc. document intensive caravan trade with Central Asia and the Iranian plateau.
Judging from the dispersal of Indus civilisation artefacts, the trade networks economically integrated a huge area, including portions of Afghanistan, the coastal regions of Persia connected by the Gulf of Oman from the Arabian Sea, northern and western India, and Mesopotamia, leading to the development of Indus-Mesopotamia relations.
Studies of tooth enamel from individuals buried at Harappa suggest that some residents had migrated to the city from beyond the Indus Valley. Ancient DNA studies of graves at Bronze Age sites at Gonur Depe, Turkmenistan, and Shahr-e Sukhteh, Iran, have identified 11 individuals of South Asian descent, who are presumed to be of mature Indus Valley origin.
The long-distance sea trade that existed between the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilisations became active as early as the middle Harappan Phase, although most of this was handled by ‘middlemen merchants from Dilmun’ – modern Bahrain, Eastern Arabia, and Failaka located in the Persian Gulf. Such long-distance sea trade was possible once plank-built watercraft were developed and equipped with a single central mast supporting a sail of woven rushes or cloth.
However, the evidence of sea-borne trade involving the Harappan civilisation is not firm. In their book Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan, archaeologists Bridget Allchin and Raymond Allchin write:
. the settlement at Lothal. along the east side was a brick basin. Its excavator claims it to have been a dockyard, connected by channels to a neighbouring estuary. On its edge the excavator found several heavily-pierced stones, comparable to modern anchor stones used by traditional seafaring communities of Western India.
This interpretation, however, has been challenged, and indeed the published levels of the basin and its entrance relative to the modern sea level seem to argue against it. Leshnik has cogently suggested that it was a tank for the reception of sweet water, channelled from higher ground inland to an area where the local water supplies were anciently, as still today, saline.
We look upon either construction as still in the realm of hypothesis, and prefer the second. A discussion of trade leads the emphasis to modes of transport. On seals and graffito’s at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, etc there are several examples of ships.
A terracotta model of a ship, including a stick-pressed socket for the mast, and holes through which to peg rigging in place comes from Lothal. We saw above that this great brick tank Rao considered interpreted as a dock at Lothal cannot yet certainly be identified. The evidence about sea trade and contact during the Harappan period is in large part circumstantial, or else derived from inference through the Mesopotamian texts, as cited above.
Daniel T. Potts writes:
It is generally assumed that most trade between the Indus Valley (ancient Meluhha?) and western neighbors proceeded up the Persian Gulf rather than overland. Although there is no incontrovertible proof that this was indeed the case, the distribution of Indus-type artifacts on the Oman peninsula, on Bahrain and in southern Mesopotamia makes it plausible that a series of maritime stages linked the Indus Valley and the Gulf region.
If this is accepted, then the presence of etched carnelian beads, a Harappan-style cubical stone weight, and a Harappan-style cylinder seal at Susa (Amiet 1986a, Figs. 92-94) may be evidence of maritime trade between Susa and the Indus Valley in the late 3rd millennium BCE.
On the other hand, given that similar finds, particularly etched carnelian beads, are attested at landlocked sites including Tepe Hissar (Tappe Heṣār), Shah Tepe (Šāh-Tappe), Kalleh Nisar (Kalla Nisār), Jalalabad (Jalālābād), Marlik (Mārlik) and Tepe Yahya (Tappe Yaḥyā) (Possehl 1996, pp. 153-54), other mechanisms, including overland traffic by peddlers or caravans, may account for their presence at Susa.
In the 1980s, important archaeological discoveries were made at Ras al-Jinz (Oman), demonstrating maritime Indus Valley connections with the Arabian Peninsula.
Dennys Frenez recently regards that:
Indus-type and Indus-related artifacts were found over a large and differentiated ecumene, encompassing Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau, Mesopotamia and the northern Levant, the Persian Gulf, and the Oman Peninsula.
The discovery of Indus trade tools (seals, weights, and containers) across the entire Middle Asia, complemented by information from Mesopotamian cuneiform texts, shows that entrepreneurs from the Indus Valley regularly ventured into these regions to transact with the local socioeconomic and political entities.
However, Indus artifacts were also exchanged beyond this core region, eventually reaching as far [as] the Nile River valley, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. On the contrary, only a handful of exotic trade tools and commodities have been found at sites in the Greater Indus Valley. The success of Indus trade in Central and Western Asia did not only rely on the dynamic entrepreneurialism of Indus merchants and the exotic commodities they offered.
Specific products were proactively designed and manufactured in the Indus Valley to fulfill the particular needs of foreign markets, and Indus craftspeople moved beyond their native cultural sphere adapting their distinctive productions to the taste of foreign elites or reworking indigenous models. The adoption of specific seals and iconographies to regulate external trade activities suggests a conscious attempt at implementing a coordinated supraregional marketing strategy
Agriculture
According to Gangal et al., there is strong archaeological and geographical evidence that Neolithic farming spread from the Near East into north-west India, but there is also good evidence for the local domestication of barley and the zebu cattle at Mehrgarh.
According to Jean-Francois Jarrige, farming had an independent local origin at Mehrgarh, which he argues is not merely a ‘backwater’ of the Neolithic culture of the Near East, despite similarities between Neolithic sites from eastern Mesopotamia and the western Indus valley which are evidence of a ‘cultural continuum’ between those sites.
Archaeologist Jim G. Shaffer writes that the Mehrgarh site demonstrates that food production was an indigenous South Asian phenomenon and that the data support interpretation of ‘the prehistoric urbanisation and complex social organisation in South Asia as based on indigenous, but not isolated, cultural developments’.
Jarrige notes that the people of Mehrgarh used domesticated wheats and barley, while Shaffer and Liechtenstein note that the major cultivated cereal crop was naked six-row barley, a crop derived from two-row barley. Gangal agrees that Neolithic domesticated crops in Mehrgarh include more than 90% barley, noting that there is good evidence for the local domestication of barley.
Yet, Gangal also notes that the crop also included a small amount of wheat, which are suggested to be of Near-Eastern origin, as the modern distribution of wild varieties of wheat is limited to Northern Levant and Southern Turkey.
The cattle that are often portrayed on Indus seals are humped Indian aurochs (Bos primigenius namadicus), which are similar to Zebu cattle. Zebu cattle are still common in India, and in Africa. They are different from European cattle (Bos primigenius taurus) and are believed to have been independently domesticated on the Indian subcontinent, probably in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan.
Research confirms that Indus populations were the earliest people to use complex multi-cropping strategies across both seasons, growing foods during summer (rice, millets and beans) and winter (wheat, barley and pulses), which required different watering regimes.
The research also found evidence for an entirely separate domestication process of rice in ancient South Asia, based around the wild species Oryza nivara. This led to the local development of a mix of ‘wetland’ and ‘dryland’ agriculture of local Oryza sativa indica rice agriculture, before the truly ‘wetland’ rice Oryza sativa japonica arrived around 2000 BCE.
Food
The diet of the Indus Valley civilisation was dominated by meats of animals such as cattle, buffalo, goat, pig, and chicken, according to archaeological finds. Remnants of dairy products were also discovered. Available evidence indicates culinary practices to be common over the region; food constituents were dairy products (in low proportion), ruminant carcass meat, and either non-ruminant adipose fats, plants, or mixtures of these products. The dietary pattern remained the same throughout the decline.
Seven food-balls (‘laddus’) were recovered in intact form, along with two figurines of bulls and a hand-held copper adze, during excavations in 2017 from western Rajasthan. Dated to about 2600 BCE, they were likely composed of legumes, primarily mung, and cereals. The authors speculated the food-balls to be of a ritualistic significance, given the finds of bull figurines, adze, and a seal in the immediate vicinity.
Language
It has often been suggested that the bearers of the Indus Valley Civilisation corresponded to proto-Dravidians linguistically, the break-up of proto-Dravidian corresponding to the break-up of the Late Harappan culture. Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola concludes that uniformity of the Indus inscriptions precludes any possibility of widely different languages being used and that an early form of Dravidian language must have been the language of the Indus people.
Today, the Dravidian language family is concentrated mainly in southern India and northern and eastern Sri Lanka, but pockets of it still remain throughout the rest of India and Pakistan (the Brahui language), which lends credence to the theory.
Dravidian languages may have spread into the Indian subcontinent with the spread of farming, as Heggarty and Renfrew suggest. According to David McAlpin, the Dravidian languages were introduced to India through immigration from Elam.
In earlier articles, Renfrew also commented that proto-Dravidian was introduced into India by the farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent but more recently Heggarty and Renfrew remark that ‘a great deal remains to be done in elucidating the prehistory of Dravidian.’
They also comment that ‘McAlpin’s analysis of the language data, and thus his claims, remain far from orthodoxy.’ Heggarty and Renfrew end by concluding that several scenarios are compatible with the data, and that ‘the linguistic jury is still very much out.’
A 2021 study by Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay put forward a linguistic analysis to advance the argument that there was a Proto-Dravidian presence in the ancient Indus region, using the Dravidian root words for tooth, toothbrush, and elephant in several contemporary ancient civilizations.
Possible writing system
Between 400 and as many as 600 distinct Indus symbols have been found on stamp seals, small tablets, ceramic pots, and more than a dozen other materials, including a “signboard” that apparently once hung over the gate of the inner citadel of the Indus city of Dholavira. Typical Indus inscriptions are around five characters in length, most of which (aside from the Dholavira “signboard”) are tiny; the longest on any single object (inscribed on a copper plate) has a length of 34 symbols.
While the Indus Valley Civilisation is generally characterised as a literate society on the evidence of these inscriptions, this description has been challenged by Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel (2004), who argue that the Indus system did not encode language, but was instead similar to a variety of non-linguistic sign systems used extensively in the Near East and other societies, to symbolise families, clans, gods, and religious concepts.
Others have claimed that the symbols were exclusively used for economic transactions, but this claim leaves unexplained the appearance of Indus symbols on many ritual objects, many of which were mass-produced in moulds. No parallels to these mass-produced inscriptions are known in any other early ancient civilisations.
In a 2009 study by P.N. Rao et al., published in Science, computer scientists analyzed the pattern of symbols from the Indus script and compared it to various linguistic scripts as well as non-linguistic systems like DNA sequencing and computer programming languages.
Their findings suggested that the pattern of the Indus symbols most closely resembled that of spoken words. This supported the hypothesis that the Indus script may encode an unknown language, offering evidence in favor of the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization had a form of written communication, though the exact language remains unidentified.
Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel have criticized the findings of P.N. Rao et al.’s 2009 study, pointing out methodological flaws in their comparison. They argue that Rao et al. did not compare the Indus symbols with “real-world non-linguistic systems,” but instead with artificial systems created by the authors themselves—one consisting of 200,000 randomly ordered signs and another with 200,000 fully ordered signs. Farmer et al. claim that Rao et al.’s approach misrepresents how real-world non-linguistic systems operate.
Furthermore, Farmer and colleagues demonstrated that similar results could be obtained by comparing medieval heraldic signs—an example of a non-linguistic system—with natural languages, suggesting that Rao et al.’s method cannot effectively differentiate between linguistic and non-linguistic sign systems. Based on this, they concluded that the method used by Rao et al. fails to establish that the Indus script encodes a language.
The challenge in deciphering the messages on Indus Valley seals is that the inscriptions are short and inconsistent. Each seal has a unique combination of symbols, and the limited number of occurrences of any particular symbol sequence makes it hard to establish a meaningful context. Moreover, the symbols accompanying the images vary from seal to seal, which makes it even harder to derive consistent meanings from them.
Consequently, many interpretations have been forwarded for the meanings of the seals, but these interpretations are usually very vague and subjective. Without more concrete evidence or a key to deciphering the script, scholars have not been able to agree on a definitive interpretation of the symbols, leaving the true function and significance of the seals open to debate.
The Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (1987, 1991, 2010) edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues, is a comprehensive collection of the thousands of extant inscriptions from the Indus Valley Civilization. This publication has played a crucial role in making available a wide range of photos of the seals and inscriptions, many of which had previously been lost or stolen, as well as new findings from recent excavations.
Of special interest is the 2010 volume, which publishes previously photographed inscriptions from the 1920s and 1930s. These images shed much-needed light on artifacts previously considered out of reach.
Researchers had previously depended on restricted and often very small images published in excavation reports by Sir John Marshall (1931), Daya Ram Sahni (1938, 1943), and Mortimer Wheeler (1947) or reproductions in more sporadically located sources.
These photos and studies are a valuable resource in understanding the Indus script, although, as discussed earlier, the short length and variability of the inscriptions make full decoding difficult. However, these works form the core of ongoing research into the Indus Valley Civilization and its mysterious writing system.
Religion
The religion and belief system of the Indus Valley people have received considerable attention, especially from the view of identifying precursors to deities and religious practices of Indian religions that later developed in the area. However, due to the sparsity of evidence, which is open to varying interpretations, and the fact that the Indus script remains undeciphered, the conclusions are partly speculative and largely based on a retrospective view from a much later Hindu perspective.
One of the earliest and most influential studies that set the trend for all subsequent Hindu interpretations of archaeological evidence from the Harappan sites is the work done by John Marshall in 1931, who identified as the most important characteristics of Indus religion: a Great Male God and a Mother Goddess; deification or veneration of animals and plants; a symbolic representation of the phallus (linga) and vulva (yoni); and, use of baths and water in religious practice. Marshall’s explanations have been extensively debated and often disputed in the following decades.
One Indus Valley seal contains a seated figure whose headdress contains horns, who can be tricephalic and can be ithyphallic as well, surrounded by animals. Marshall has identified the figure as an early form of Hindu god Shiva, or Rudra as he is called. Shiva is associated with asceticism and yoga and linga. He is considered a lord of animals and is often depicted with three eyes. Henceforth, it came to be called the Pashupati Seal, named after Pashupati, the lord of all animals-an epithet of Shiva.
Marshall’s work, though winning some support, attracted several objections even from its well-wishers. Doris Srinivasan had criticized the figure saying that it has not got three faces and is not in yogic posture; besides, Rudra in Vedic literature did not look like a guardian angel for wild animals. Herbert Sullivan and Alf Hiltebeitel rejected Marshall’s conclusions. The former said that the figure was female, while the latter associated the figure with Mahisha, the Buffalo God and the surrounding animals with vahanas (vehicles) of deities for the four cardinal directions.
Writing in 2002, Gregory L. Possehl concluded that although it would be proper to understand the figure to be a god, its identification with the water buffalo, and its posture of ritual discipline, to view it as a proto-Shiva would be a step too far. Even though Marshall criticized it for linking the seal to a proto-Shiva icon, this has been viewed as Tirthankara Rishabhanatha by several Jain scholars including Vilas Sangave. Heinz and Thomas McEvilley also support the notion of a relation of first Jain Tirthankara Rishabhanatha to Indus Valley Civilization.
Marshall hypothesised the existence of a cult of Mother Goddess worship based upon excavation of several female figurines and thought that this was a precursor of the Hindu sect of Shaktism. The female figurines were, however ‘not terribly informative’ about how they functioned in the Indus Valley peoples’ life and Possehl does not hold the evidence regarding Marshall’s hypothesis to be very robust.
Part of the baetyls considered by Marshall as sacred phallic symbols now appear to be pestles and even game counters; the ring stones construed as yoni symbols were confirmed to be part of architectural provision for standing up pillars, and though their use as religious symbolism cannot be altogether ruled out.
Many Indus Valley seals portray animals, some carrying them in procession, and others chimera-creations. On a seal from Mohenjo-daro, a half human and a half-buffalo monster attacks a tiger, which may be connected to the Sumerian myth, where such monster was created by the goddess Aruru for the fight with Gilgamesh.
In contrast to contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations, Indus Valley lacks any monumental palaces, even though excavated cities indicate that the society possessed the requisite engineering knowledge. This may suggest that religious ceremonies if any, may have been largely confined to individual homes, small temples, or the open air.
Several sites have been proposed by Marshall and later scholars as possibly devoted to religious purposes, but at present only the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is widely thought to have been so used, as a place for ritual purification.
The funerary practices of the Harappan civilisation are characterized by fractional burial-a process by which the body, exposed to the forces of nature, is reduced to skeletal remains before being finally buried-and even cremation.
