Indus-Saraswati civilization

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Indus-Saraswati civilization
IVC major sites
Geographical range South Asia
Period Bronze Age
Dates c. 3300 – c. 1700 BCE[1]
File:Mohenjodaro Sindh.jpeg
Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, Sindh province, Pakistan, showing the Great Bath in the foreground. Mohenjo-daro, on the right bank of the Indus River, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first site in South Asia to be so declared.
Outline of South Asian history

The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilisation (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1600 BCE) mainly in the northwestern regions of South Asia, extending from what today is northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and northwest India.[2] Along with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia it was one of three early civilisations of the Old World, and of the three, the most widespread.[3][note 1] It flourished in the basins of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial, mostly monsoon-fed, rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the seasonal Ghaggar-Hakra river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.[4][5][6][note 2] Aridification of this region during the 3rd millennium BCE may have been the initial spur for the urbanisation associated with the civilisation, but eventually also reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation's demise, and to scatter its population eastward.[7][8][6][9][note 3]

At its peak, the Indus Civilisation may have had a population of over five million.[10] Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed new techniques in handicraft (carnelian products, seal carving) and metallurgy (copper, bronze, lead, and tin). The Indus cities are noted for their urban planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage systems, water supply systems, and clusters of large non-residential buildings.[11]

The Indus Valley Civilisation is also known as the Harappan Civilisation, after Harappa, the first of its sites to be excavated in the 1920s, in what was then the Punjab province of British India, and now is Pakistan.[12] The discovery of Harappa, and soon afterwards, Mohenjo-Daro, was the culmination of work beginning in 1861 with the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India in the British Raj.[13] Excavation of Harappan sites has been ongoing since 1920, with important breakthroughs occurring as recently as 1999.[14] This Harappan civilisation is sometimes called the Mature Harappan culture to distinguish it from the cultures immediately preceding and following it. Of these, the earlier is often called the Early Harappan culture, while the later one may be referred to as the Late Harappan, both of which existed in the same area as the Mature Harappan Civilisation. The early Harappan cultures were preceded by local Neolithic agricultural villages, from where the river plains were populated.[15][16] As of 1999, over 1,056 cities and settlements had been found, of which 96 have been excavated,[17] mainly in the general region of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra Rivers and their tributaries. Among the settlements were the major urban centres of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro (UNESCO World Heritage Site), Dholavira, Ganeriwala in Cholistan and Rakhigarhi.[18]

The Harappan language is not directly attested and its affiliation is uncertain since the Indus script is still undeciphered. A relationship with the Dravidian or Elamo-Dravidian language family is favoured by a section of scholars.[19][20]

Geography[edit]

File:Carte Indus.jpg
Locations of IVC-sites
File:Indus Valley Diorama - Indian Science and Technology Heritage Gallery - National Science Centre - New Delhi 2014-05-06 0806.JPG
File:Indus Valley Diorama - Indian Science and Technology Heritage Gallery - National Science Centre - New Delhi 2014-05-06 0805.JPG
Diorama reconstruction of everyday life in Indus Valley Civilisation.

The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) encompassed much of Pakistan, western India, and northeastern Afghanistan; extending from Pakistani Balochistan in the west to Uttar Pradesh in the east, northeastern Afghanistan to the north and Maharashtra to the south.[21] The geography of the Indus Valley put the civilisations that arose there in a highly similar situation to those in Egypt and Peru, with rich agricultural lands being surrounded by highlands, desert, and ocean. Recently, Indus sites have been discovered in Pakistan's northwestern Frontier Province as well. Other IVC colonies can be found in Afghanistan while smaller isolated colonies can be found as far away as Turkmenistan and in Maharashtra. The largest number of colonies are in the Punjab,Sindh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Gujrat belt Coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor[22] in Western Baluchistan to Lothal[23] in Gujarat. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus River at Shortughai in northern Afghanistan,[24] in the Gomal River valley in northwestern Pakistan,[25] at Manda, Jammu on the Beas River near Jammu,[26] India, and at Alamgirpur on the Hindon River, only 28 km from Delhi.[27] Indus Valley sites have been found most often on rivers, but also on the ancient seacoast,[28] for example, Balakot,[29] and on islands, for example, Dholavira.[30]

It flourished in the basins of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial, mostly monsoon-fed, rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the seasonal Ghaggar-Hakra river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.[4][5][6][note 2] There is evidence of dry river beds overlapping with the Hakra channel in Pakistan and the seasonal Ghaggar River in India. Many Indus Valley sites have been discovered along the Ghaggar-Hakra beds.[31] Among them are: Rupar, Rakhigarhi, Sothi, Kalibangan, and Ganwariwala.[32]

According to some Archaeologists, more than 500 Harappan sites have been discovered along the dried up river beds of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries,[33] in contrast to only about 100 along the Indus and its tributaries;[34] consequently, in their opinion, the appellation Indus Ghaggar-Hakra civilisation or Indus-Saraswati civilisation is justified. However, these arguments are disputed by other archaeologists who state that the Ghaggar-Hakra desert area has been left untouched by settlements and agriculture since the end of the Indus period and hence shows more sites than those found in the alluvium of the Indus valley; second, that the number of Harappan sites along the Ghaggar-Hakra river beds has been exaggerated .[35] "Harappan Civilisation" remains the correct one, according to the common archaeological usage of naming a civilisation after its first findspot.[citation needed]

Discovery and history of excavation[edit]

File:Jar, Indus Valley Tradition, Harappan Phase, Quetta, Southern Baluchistan, Pakistan, c. 2500-1900 BC - Royal Ontario Museum - DSC09717.JPG
Indus Valley pottery, 2500–1900 BCE
File:W8nafs aic000005ap.jpg
Indus valley seals with Bull, Elephant, and Rhinoceros, 2500–1900 BCE

The ruins of Harappa were first described in 1842 by Charles Masson in his Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab, where locals talked of an ancient city extending "thirteen cosses" (about 25 miles), but no archaeological interest would attach to this for nearly a century.[note 4]

In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham, later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa where the British engineers John and William Brunton were laying the East Indian Railway Company line connecting the cities of Karachi and Lahore. John wrote: "I was much exercised in my mind how we were to get ballast for the line of the railway". They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines, called Brahminabad. Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt bricks, and, "convinced that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I wanted", the city of Brahminabad was reduced to ballast.[37] A few months later, further north, John's brother William Brunton's "section of the line ran near another ruined city, bricks from which had already been used by villagers in the nearby village of Harappa at the same site. These bricks now provided ballast along 93 miles (150 km) of the railroad track running from Karachi to Lahore".[37]

In 1872–75, Alexander Cunningham published the first Harappan seal (with an erroneous identification as Brahmi letters).[38] It was half a century later, in 1912, that more Harappan seals were discovered by J. Fleet, prompting an excavation campaign under Sir John Hubert Marshall in 1921–22 and resulting in the discovery of the civilisation at Harappa by Marshall, Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni and Madho Sarup Vats, and at Mohenjo-daro by Rakhal Das Banerjee, E. J. H. MacKay, and Marshall. By 1931, much of Mohenjo-Daro had been excavated, but excavations continued, such as that led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944. Among other archaeologists who worked on IVC sites before the independence in 1947 were Ahmad Hasan Dani, Brij Basi Lal, Nani Gopal Majumdar, and Sir Marc Aurel Stein.[citation needed]

Following independence, the bulk of the archaeological finds were inherited by Pakistan where most of the IVC was based, and excavations from this time include those led by Wheeler in 1949, archaeological adviser to the Government of Pakistan. Outposts of the Indus Valley civilisation were excavated as far west as Sutkagan Dor in Pakistani Balochistan, as far north as at Shortugai on the Amu Darya (the river's ancient name was Oxus) in current Afghanistan, as far east as at Alamgirpur, Uttar Pradesh, India and as far south as at Malwan, in modern-day Surat, Gujarat, India.[39]

In 2010, heavy floods hit Haryana in India and damaged the archaeological site of Jognakhera, where ancient copper smelting furnaces were found dating back almost 5,000 years. The Indus Valley Civilisation site was hit by almost 10 feet of water as the Sutlej Yamuna link canal overflowed.[40]

Chronology[edit]

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The cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation had "social hierarchies, their writing system, their large planned cities and their long-distance trade [which] mark them to archaeologists as a full-fledged 'civilisation.'"[41] The mature phase of the Harappan civilisation lasted from c. 2600 to 1900 BCE. With the inclusion of the predecessor and successor cultures — Early Harappan and Late Harappan, respectively — the entire Indus Valley Civilisation may be taken to have lasted from the 33rd to the 14th centuries BCE. It is part of the Indus Valley Tradition, which also includes the pre-Harappan occupation of Mehrgarh, the earliest farming site of the Indus Valley.[16][42]

Several periodisations are employed for the periodisation of the IVC.[16][42] The most commonly used classifies the Indus Valley Civilisation into Early, Mature and Late Harappan Phase.[43] An alternative approach by Shaffer divides the broader Indus Valley Tradition into four eras, the pre-Harappan "Early Food Producing Era," and the Regionalisation, Integration, and Localisation eras, which correspond roughly with the Early Harappan, Mature Harappan, and Late Harappan phases.[15][44]

Dates Phase Era
7000–5500 BCE Pre-Harappan Mehrgarh I (aceramic Neolithic) Early Food Producing Era
5500–3300 BCE Mehrgarh II-VI (ceramic Neolithic) Regionalisation Era
c.4000-2500/2300 BCE (Shaffer)[45]
c.5000-3200 BCE (Coningham & Young)[46]
3300–2800 BCE Early Harappan Harappan 1 (Ravi Phase; Hakra Ware)
2800–2600 BCE Harappan 2 (Kot Diji Phase, Nausharo I, Mehrgarh VII)
2600–2450 BCE Mature Harappan (Indus Valley Civilisation) Harappan 3A (Nausharo II) Integration Era
2450–2200 BCE Harappan 3B
2200–1900 BCE Harappan 3C
1900–1700 BCE Late Harappan (Cemetery H);
Ochre Coloured Pottery 		Harappan 4 Localisation Era
1700–1300 BCE Harappan 5
1300–300 BCE Post-Harappan Painted Grey Ware
Northern Black Polished Ware (Iron Age)
Iron Age India 		Vedic period
Second urbanisation

Pre-Harappan - Mehrgarh[edit]

File:Distribution Haplogroup L Y-DNA.svg
Haplogroup L-M20 has a high frequency in the Indus Valley. McElreavy & Quintana-Murci (2005) note that "both the frequency distribution and estimated expansion time (~7,000 YBP) of this lineage suggest that its spread in the Indus Valley may be associated with the expansion of local farming groups during the Neolithic period."[47][note 5]

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Mehrgarh is a Neolithic (7000 BCE to c. 2500 BCE) site to the west of the Indus River valley, near the capital of the Kachi District in Pakistan, on the Kacchi Plain of Balochistan, near the Bolan Pass.[48] According to Ahmad Hasan Dani, professor emeritus at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, the discovery of Mehrgarh "changed the entire concept of the Indus civilisation […] There we have the whole sequence, right from the beginning of settled village life."[41] Mehrgarh is one of the earliest sites with evidence of farming and herding in South Asia.[49][50][note 6] According to Parpola, the culture migrated into the Indus Valley and became the Indus Valley Civilisation.[59]

Mehrgarh was influenced by the Near Eastern Neolithic,[60] with similarities between "domesticated wheat varieties, early phases of farming, pottery, other archaeological artefacts, some domesticated plants and herd animals."[61] Gallego Romero et al. (2011) notice that "[t]he earliest evidence of cattle herding in south Asia comes from the Indus River Valley site of Mehrgarh and is dated to 7,000 YBP."[62][note 7]

Lukacs and Hemphill suggest an initial local development of Mehrgarh, with a continuity in cultural development but a change in population. According to Lukacs and Hemphill, while there is a strong continuity between the neolithic and chalcolithic (Copper Age) cultures of Mehrgarh, dental evidence shows that the chalcolithic population did not descend from the neolithic population of Mehrgarh,[64] which "suggests moderate levels of gene flow."[64][note 8] Masacernhas et al. (2015) note that "new, possibly West Asian, body types are reported from the graves of Mehrgarh beginning in the Togau phase (3800 BCE)."[65]

Early Harappan[edit]

File:Indus Valley Civilization, Early Phase (3300-2600 BCE).png
Early Harappan Period, c. 3300–2600 BCE

The Early Harappan Ravi Phase, named after the nearby Ravi River, lasted from c. 3300 BCE until 2800 BCE. It is related to the Hakra Phase, identified in the Ghaggar-Hakra River Valley to the west, and predates the Kot Diji Phase (2800–2600 BCE, Harappan 2), named after a site in northern Sindh, Pakistan, near Mohenjo Daro. The earliest examples of the Indus script date to the 3rd millennium BCE.[66][67]

The mature phase of earlier village cultures is represented by Rehman Dheri and Amri in Pakistan.[68] Kot Diji represents the phase leading up to Mature Harappan, with the 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.[69]

Trade networks linked this culture with related regional cultures and distant sources of raw materials, including lapis lazuli and other materials for bead-making. By this time, villagers had domesticated numerous crops, including peas, sesame seeds, dates, and cotton, as well as animals, including the water buffalo. Early Harappan communities turned to large urban centres by 2600 BCE, from where the mature Harappan phase started. The latest research shows that Indus Valley people migrated from villages to cities.[70][71]

Mature Harappan[edit]

File:Indus Valley Civilization, Mature Phase (2600-1900 BCE).png
Mature Harappan Period, c. 2600–1900 BCE
File:Moenjodaro(a) by Usman Ghani.jpg
Mohenjo-Daro
File:Another view of Granary and Great Hall on Mound F.JPG
View of Granary and Great Hall on Mound F in Harappa

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.[6] Brooke further notes that the development of advanced cities coincides with a reduction in rainfall, which may have triggered a reorganisation into larger urban centers.[9][note 3]

According to J. G. Shaffer and D. A. Lichtenstein,[72] the Mature Harappan Civilisation was "a fusion of the Bagor, Hakra, and Kot Diji traditions or 'ethnic groups' in the Ghaggar-Hakra valley on the borders of India and Pakistan".[31]

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.[73] In total, more than 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus Rivers and their tributaries.[citation needed]

Cities[edit]

File:Sokhta Koh.jpg
Computer-aided reconstruction of coastal Harappan settlement at Sokhta Koh near Pasni, Pakistan

A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture is evident in the Indus Valley Civilisation making them the first urban centres 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.[citation needed]

As seen in Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro and the recently partially excavated Rakhigarhi, this urban plan included the world's first known urban sanitation systems: see hydraulic engineering of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Within the city, individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. From a room that appears to have been set aside for bathing, waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined the major streets. Houses opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. The house-building in some villages in the region still resembles in some respects the house-building of the Harappans.[74]

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 impressive 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.[75]

File:Mohenjo-daro Priesterkönig.jpeg
So-called "Priest King" statue, Mohenjo-Daro, late Mature Harappan period, National Museum, Karachi, Pakistan

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—or of kings, armies, or priests. 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. They may have been built to divert flood waters.[citation needed]

Most city dwellers appear to have been traders or artisans, who lived with others pursuing the same occupation in well-defined neighbourhoods. Materials from distant regions were used in the cities for constructing seals, beads and other objects. Among the artefacts discovered were beautiful glazed faïence beads. Steatite seals have 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 and most probably had other uses as well.[citation needed]

Although some houses were larger than others, Indus Civilisation cities were remarkable for their apparent, if relative, egalitarianism. All the houses had access to water and drainage facilities. This gives the impression of a society with relatively low wealth concentration, though clear social levelling is seen in personal adornments. [clarification needed] The prehistory of Indo-Iranian borderlands shows a steady increase over time in the number and density of settlements. The population increased in Indus plains because of hunting and gathering.[76]

File:Dholavira1.JPG
Dholavira Sophisticated Water Reservoir, evidence for hydraulic sewage systems in the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation.

Toilets that used water were used in the Indus Valley Civilization. The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro had a flush toilet in almost every house, attached to a sophisticated sewage system.[77]

Authority and governance[edit]

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 instance, the majority of the cities were constructed in a highly uniform and well-planned grid pattern, suggesting they were planned by a central authority; extraordinary uniformity of Harappan artefacts as evident in pottery, seals, weights and bricks; presence of public facilities and monumental architecture; heterogeneity in the mortuary symbolism and in grave goods (items included in burials).[citation needed]

These are the major theories:[citation needed]

  • 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: Mohenjo-daro had a separate ruler, Harappa another, and so forth.
  • Harappan society had no rulers, and everybody enjoyed equal status.

Technology[edit]

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File:Indus civilisation seal unicorn at Indian Museum, Kolkata.jpg
Unicorn seal of Indus Valley, Indian Museum
File:Elephant seal of Indus Valley, Indian Museum, Kolkata.jpg
Elephant seal of Indus Valley, Indian Museum
File:IndusValleySeals.JPG
Indus Valley seals, British Museum

The people of the Indus Civilisation achieved great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time. They were among the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures. A comparison of available objects indicates large scale variation across the Indus territories. Their smallest division, which is 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.[78]

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, with each unit weighing approximately 28 grams, similar to the English Imperial ounce or Greek uncia, and smaller objects were weighed in similar ratios with the units of 0.871. However, as in other cultures, actual weights were not uniform throughout the area. The weights and measures later used in Kautilya's Arthashastra (4th century BCE) are the same as those used in Lothal.[79]

Harappans evolved some new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin. The engineering skill of the Harappans was remarkable, especially in building docks.[80]

In 2001, archaeologists studying the remains of two men from Mehrgarh, Pakistan, discovered that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation, from the early Harappan periods, had knowledge of proto-dentistry. Later, in April 2006, it was announced in the scientific journal Nature that the oldest (and first early Neolithic) evidence for the drilling of human teeth in vivo (i.e., in a living person) was found in Mehrgarh. Eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults were discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Mehrgarh that dates from 7,500–9,000 years ago. According to the authors, their discoveries point to a tradition of proto-dentistry in the early farming cultures of that region.[81]

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).[82]

Arts and crafts[edit]

File:Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro.jpg
The "dancing girl of Mohenjo Daro" (replica)
File:Red pottery, IVC.jpg
Chanhudaro. Fragment of Large Deep Vessel, circa 2500 BCE. Red pottery with red and black slip-painted decoration, 415/16×6⅛ in. (12.5×15.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum

Various sculptures, seals, bronze vessels pottery, gold jewellery, and anatomically detailed figurines in terracotta, bronze, and steatite have been found at excavation sites.[83]

A number of gold, terracotta and stone figurines of girls in dancing poses reveal the presence of some dance form. These terracotta figurines included cows, bears, monkeys, and dogs. The animal depicted on a majority of seals at sites of the mature period has not been clearly identified. Part bull, part zebra, with a majestic horn, it has been a source of speculation. As yet, there is insufficient evidence to substantiate 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.[84]

Sir John Marshall reacted with surprise when he saw the famous Indus bronze statuette of a slender-limbed dancing girl in Mohenjo-Daro:

"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. Modeling 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".[85]

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.[86] 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.[87] Terracotta female figurines were found (ca. 2800–2600 BCE) which had red colour applied to the "manga" (line of partition of the hair).[87]

Seals have been found at Mohenjo-Daro depicting a figure standing on its head, and another sitting cross-legged in what some call a yoga-like pose (see image, the so-called Pashupati, below).[citation needed] This figure, sometimes known as a Pashupati, has been variously identified. Sir John Marshall identified a resemblance to the Hindu god, Shiva.[88] If this can be validated, it would be evidence that some aspects of Hinduism predate the earliest texts, the Veda.[citation needed]

A harp-like instrument depicted on an Indus seal and two shell objects found at Lothal indicate the use of stringed musical instruments. 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.[89]

Trade and transportation[edit]

File:Lothal dock.jpg
The docks of ancient Lothal as they are today (2006)

Lua error in Module:Hatnote_list at line 44: attempt to call field 'formatPages' (a nil value). The Indus civilisation's economy appears to have depended significantly on trade, which was facilitated by major advances in transport technology. The IVC may have been the first civilisation to use wheeled transport.[90] These advances may have included bullock carts that are 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; however, there is secondary evidence of sea-going craft. Archaeologists have discovered a massive, dredged canal and what they regard as a docking facility at the coastal city of Lothal in western India (Gujarat state). An extensive canal network, used for irrigation, has however also been discovered by H.-P. Francfort.[91]

During 4300–3200 BCE of the chalcolithic period (copper age), the Indus Valley Civilisation area shows ceramic similarities with southern Turkmenistan and northern Iran which 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.[92]

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, northern and western India, and Mesopotamia. Studies of tooth enamel from individuals buried at Harappa suggest that some residents had migrated to the city from beyond the Indus valley.[93] There is some evidence that trade contacts extended to Crete and possibly to Egypt.[94]

There was an extensive maritime trade network operating between the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilisations as early as the middle Harappan Phase, with much commerce being handled by "middlemen merchants from Dilmun" (modern Bahrain and Failaka located in the Persian Gulf).[95] Such long-distance sea trade became feasible with the development of plank-built watercraft, equipped with a single central mast supporting a sail of woven rushes or cloth.[citation needed]

Several coastal settlements like Sotkagen-dor (astride Dasht River, north of Jiwani), Sokhta Koh (astride Shadi River, north of Pasni), and Balakot (near Sonmiani) in Pakistan along with Lothal in western India, testify to their role as Harappan trading outposts. Shallow harbours located at the estuaries of rivers opening into the sea allowed brisk maritime trade with Mesopotamian cities.[citation needed]

Subsistence[edit]

Some post-1980 studies indicate that food production was largely indigenous to the Indus Valley. It is known that the people of Mehrgarh used domesticated wheats and barley,[96] and the major cultivated cereal crop was naked six-row barley, a crop derived from two-row barley (see Shaffer and Liechtenstein 1995, 1999). Archaeologist Jim G. Shaffer (1999: 245) 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".

Language[edit]

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It has often been suggested that the bearers of the IVC corresponded to proto-Dravidians linguistically, the break-up of proto-Dravidian corresponding to the break-up of the Late Harappan culture.[97] Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola concludes that the 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.[98] Today, the Dravidian language family is concentrated mostly 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.

According to Heggarty and Renfrew, Dravidian languages may have spread into the Indian subcontinent with the spread of farming.[99] According to David McAlpin, the Dravidian languages were brought to India by immigration into India from Elam.[note 9] In earlier publications, Renfrew also stated that proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent,[100][101][102][note 10] but more recently Heggarty and Renfrew note that "a great deal remains to be done in elucidating the prehistory of Dravidian." They also note that "McAlpin's analysis of the language data, and thus his claims, remain far from orthodoxy."[99][note 12]

Possible writing system[edit]

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Between 400 and as many as 600 distinct Indus symbols[107] have been found on 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.

File:The 'Ten Indus Scripts' discovered near the northern gateway of the Dholavira citadel.jpg
Ten Indus Signs, dubbed the Dholavira Signboard

Typical Indus inscriptions are no more than four or five characters in length, most of which (aside from the Dholavira "signboard") are tiny; the longest on a single surface, which is less than 1 inch (2.54 cm) square, is 17 signs long; the longest on any object (found on three different faces of a mass-produced object) has a length of 26 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)[108] 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 on occasion 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.[109]

In a 2009 study by P. N. Rao et al. published in Science, computer scientists, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and non-linguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language, found that the Indus script's pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language.[110][111]

Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel have disputed this finding, pointing out that Rao et al. did not actually compare the Indus signs with "real-world non-linguistic systems" but rather with "two wholly artificial systems invented by the authors, one consisting of 200,000 randomly ordered signs and another of 200,000 fully ordered signs, that they spuriously claim represent the structures of all real-world non-linguistic sign systems".[112] Farmer et al. have also demonstrated that a comparison of a non-linguistic system like medieval heraldic signs with natural languages yields results similar to those that Rao et al. obtained with Indus signs. They conclude that the method used by Rao et al. cannot distinguish linguistic systems from non-linguistic ones.[113]

The messages on the seals have proved to be too short to be decoded by a computer. Each seal has a distinctive combination of symbols and there are too few examples of each sequence to provide a sufficient context. The symbols that accompany the images vary from seal to seal, making it impossible to derive a meaning for the symbols from the images. There have, nonetheless, been a number of interpretations offered for the meaning of the seals. These interpretations have been marked by ambiguity and subjectivity.[113]:69

Photos of many of the thousands of extant inscriptions are published in the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (1987, 1991, 2010), edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues. The final, third, volume, republished photos taken in the 1920s and 1930s of hundreds of lost or stolen inscriptions, along with many discovered in the last few decades. Formerly, researchers had to supplement the materials in the Corpus by study of the tiny photos in the excavation reports of Marshall (1931), MacKay (1938, 1943), Wheeler (1947), or reproductions in more recent scattered sources.

Edakkal caves in Wayanad district of Kerala contain drawings that range over periods from as early as 5000 BC to 1000 BC. The youngest group of paintings have been in the news for a possible connection to the Indus Valley Civilization.

Religion[edit]

File:Female figure, possibly a fertility goddess, Indus Valley Tradition, Harappan Phase, c. 2500-1900 BC - Royal Ontario Museum - DSC09701.JPG
Female figure, possibly a fertility goddess, Harappan Phase, 2500-1900 BCE
The Pashupati seal, showing a seated and possibly tricephalic figure, surrounded by animals.

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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.[114][115] An early and influential work in the area that set the trend for Hindu interpretations of archaeological evidence from the Harapan sites[116] was that of John Marshall, who in 1931 identified the following as prominent features of the Indus religion: a Great Male God and a Mother Goddess; deification or veneration of animals and plants; symbolic representation of the phallus (linga) and vulva (yoni); and, use of baths and water in religious practice. Marshall's interpretations have been much debated, and sometimes disputed over the following decades.[117][118]

File:IndusValleySeals swastikas.JPG
Swastika seals of Indus Valley Civilisation in British Museum

One Indus valley seal shows a seated figure with a horned headdress, possibly tricephalic and possibly ithyphallic, surrounded by animals. Marshall identified the figure as an early form of the Hindu god Shiva (or Rudra), who is associated with asceticism, yoga, and linga; regarded as a lord of animals; and often depicted as having three eyes. The seal has hence come to be known as the Pashupati Seal, after Pashupati (lord of all animals), an epithet of Shiva.[117][119] While Marshall's work has earned some support, many critics and even supporters have raised several objections. Doris Srinivasan has argued that the figure does not have three faces, or yogic posture, and that in Vedic literature Rudra was not a protector of wild animals.[120][121] Herbert Sullivan and Alf Hiltebeitel also rejected Marshall's conclusions, with the former claiming 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.[122][123] Writing in 2002, Gregory L. Possehl concluded that while it would be appropriate to recognise the figure as a deity, its association with the water buffalo, and its posture as one of ritual discipline, regarding it as a proto-Shiva would be going too far.[119] Despite the criticisms of Marshall's association of the seal with a proto-Shiva icon, it has been interpreted as the Tirthankara Rishabhanatha by Jains and Vilas Sangave[124] or an early Buddha by Buddhists.[116] Historians such as Heinrich Zimmer and Thomas McEvilley believe that there is a connection between first Jain Tirthankara Rishabhanatha and the Indus Valley civilisation.[125][126]

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. However the function of the female figurines in the life of Indus Valley people remains unclear, and Possehl does not regard the evidence for Marshall's hypothesis to be "terribly robust".[127] Some of the baetyls interpreted by Marshall to be sacred phallic representations are now thought to have been used as pestles or game counters instead, while the ring stones that were thought to symbolise yoni were determined to be architectural features used to stand pillars, although the possibility of their religious symbolism cannot be eliminated.[128] Many Indus Valley seals show animals, with some depicting them being carried in processions, while others show chimeric creations. One seal from Mohen-jodaro shows a half-human, half-buffalo monster attacking a tiger, which may be a reference to the Sumerian myth of such a monster created by goddess Aruru to fight Gilgamesh.[129]

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.[130][131] 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 purpose, but at present only the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is widely thought to have been so used, as a place for ritual purification.[127][132] The funerary practices of the Harappan civilisation are marked by their diversity, with evidence of supine burial, fractional burial (in which the body is reduced to skeletal remains by exposure to the elements before final interment), and even cremation.[133][134]

Late Harappan[edit]

File:Indus Valley Civilization, Late Phase (1900-1300 BCE).png
Late Harappan Period, c. 1900–1300 BCE
File:Coach driver Indus 01.jpg
Late Harappa figures from a hoard at Daimabad, 2000 BCE

Around 1800 BCE signs of a gradual decline began to emerge, and by around 1700 BCE most of the cities had been abandoned. Recent examination of human skeletons from the site of Harappa has demonstrated that the end of the Indus civilisation saw an increase in inter-personal violence and in infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis.[135][136]

"Aryan invasion"[edit]

In 1953 Sir Mortimer Wheeler proposed that the invasion of an Indo-European tribe from Central Asia, the "Aryans", caused the decline of the Indus Civilisation. As evidence, he cited a group of 37 skeletons found in various parts of Mohenjo-Daro, and passages in the Vedas referring to battles and forts. However, scholars soon started to reject Wheeler's theory, since the skeletons belonged to a period after the city's abandonment and none were found near the citadel. Subsequent examinations of the skeletons by Kenneth Kennedy in 1994 showed that the marks on the skulls were caused by erosion, and not by violence.[137]

Climate change and drought[edit]

Suggested contributory causes for the localisation of the IVC include changes in the course of the river,[138] and climate change that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle East.[139] As of 2016 many scholars believe that drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse of the Indus Civilisation.[140]

The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed,[6][note 2][141][note 13][142][note 14] and water-supply depended on the monsoons. The Indus valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BCE, linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time.[6] The Indian monsoon declined and aridity increased, with the Ghaggar-Hakra retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya,[6][143][144] leading to erratic and less extensive floods that made inundation agriculture less sustainable.

Aridification reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation's demise, and to scatter its population eastward.[7][8][9][note 3] According to Giosan et al. (2012), the IVC residents did not develop irrigation capabilities, relying mainly on the seasonal monsoons leading to summer floods. As the monsoons kept shifting south, the floods grew too erratic for sustainable agricultural activities. The residents then migrated towards the Ganges basin in the east, where they established smaller villages and isolated farms. The small surplus produced in these small communities did not allow development of trade, and the cities died out.[145]

Continuity[edit]

Archaeological excavations indicate that the decline of Harappa drove people eastward.[146] After 1900 BCE the number of sites in India increased from 218 to 853. Excavations in the Gangetic plain show that urban settlement began around 1200 BCE, only a few centuries after the decline of Harappa and much earlier than previously expected.[140] Archaeologists have emphasised that, just as in most areas of the world, there was a continuous series of cultural developments. These link "the so-called two major phases of urbanisation in South Asia".[147]

There is also a Harappan site called Rojdi in Rajkot district of Saurashtra. Its excavation started under an archaeological team from Gujarat State Department of Archaeology and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in 1982–83.[148]

Post-Harappan[edit]

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Previously, scholars believed that the decline of the Harappan civilisation led to an interruption of urban life in the Indian subcontinent. However, the Indus Valley Civilisation did not disappear suddenly, and many elements of the Indus Civilisation appear in later cultures. The Cemetery H culture may be the manifestation of the Late Harappan over a large area in the south, and the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture its successor. David Gordon White cites three other mainstream scholars who "have emphatically demonstrated" that Vedic religion derives partially from the Indus Valley Civilisations.[149]

As of 2016, archaeological data suggests that the material culture classified as Late Harappan may have persisted until at least c. 1000–900 BCE and was partially contemporaneous with the Painted Grey Ware culture.[147] Harvard archaeologist Richard Meadow points to the late Harappan settlement of Pirak, which thrived continuously from 1800 BCE to the time of the invasion of Alexander the Great in 325 BCE.[140]

In the aftermath of the Indus Civilisation's localisation, regional cultures emerged, to varying degrees showing the influence of the Indus Civilisation. In the formerly great city of Harappa, burials have been found that correspond to a regional culture called the Cemetery H culture. At the same time, the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture expanded from Rajasthan into the Gangetic Plain. The Cemetery H culture has the earliest evidence for cremation; a practice dominant in Hinduism today.

Historical context[edit]

Near East[edit]

The mature (Harappan) phase of the IVC is contemporary to the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East, in particular the Old Elamite period, Early Dynastic to Ur III Mesopotamia, Prepalatial Minoan Crete and Old Kingdom to First Intermediate Period Egypt.

The IVC has been compared in particular with the civilisations of Elam (also in the context of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis) and with Minoan Crete (because of isolated cultural parallels such as the ubiquitous goddess worship and depictions of bull-leaping).[150] The IVC has been tentatively identified with the toponym Meluhha known from Sumerian records; the Sumerians called them Meluhhaites.[151]

Shahr-i-Sokhta, located in southeastern Iran shows trade route with Mesopotamia.[152][153] A number of seals with Indus script have been also found in Mesopotamian sites.[153][154][155]

Dasyu[edit]

After the discovery of the IVC in the 1920s, it was immediately associated with the indigenous Dasyu inimical to the Rigvedic tribes in numerous hymns of the Rigveda. Mortimer Wheeler interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-Daro as the victims of a warlike conquest, and famously stated that "Indra stands accused" of the destruction of the IVC. The association of the IVC with the city-dwelling Dasyus remains alluring because the assumed timeframe of the first Indo-Aryan migration into India corresponds neatly with the period of decline of the IVC seen in the archaeological record. The discovery of the advanced, urban IVC however changed the 19th-century view of early Indo-Aryan migration as an "invasion" of an advanced culture at the expense of a "primitive" aboriginal population to a gradual acculturation of nomadic "barbarians" on an advanced urban civilisation, comparable to the Germanic migrations after the Fall of Rome, or the Kassite invasion of Babylonia. This move away from simplistic "invasionist" scenarios parallels similar developments in thinking about language transfer and population movement in general, such as in the case of the migration of the proto-Greek speakers into Greece, or the Indo-Europeanization of Western Europe.

Munda[edit]

Proto-Munda (or Para-Munda) and a "lost phylum" (perhaps related or ancestral to the Nihali language)[156] have been proposed as other candidates for the language of the IVC. Michael Witzel suggests an underlying, prefixing language that is similar to Austroasiatic, notably Khasi; he argues that the Rigveda shows signs of this hypothetical Harappan influence in the earliest historic level, and Dravidian only in later levels, suggesting that speakers of Austroasiatic were the original inhabitants of Punjab and that the Indo-Aryans encountered speakers of Dravidian only in later times.[157]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

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  1. ↑ Wright: "The Indus civilisation is one of three in the 'Ancient East' that, along with Mesopotamia and Pharaonic Egypt, was a cradle of early civilisation in the Old World (Childe 1950). Mesopotamia and Egypt were longer lived, but coexisted with Indus civilisation during its florescence between 2600 and 1900 B.C. Of the three, the Indus was the most expansive, extending from today's northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and India."[3]
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Giosan: "Numerous speculations have advanced the idea that the Ghaggar-Hakra fluvial system, at times identified with the lost mythical river of Sarasvati (e.g., 4, 5, 7, 19), was a large glacier fed Himalayan river. Potential sources for this river include the Yamuna River, the Sutlej River, or both rivers. However, the lack of large-scale incision on the interfluve demonstrates that large, glacier-fed rivers did not flow across the Ghaggar-Hakra region during the Holocene [...] The present Ghaggar-Hakra valley and its tributary rivers are currently dry or have seasonal flows. Yet rivers were undoubtedly active in this region during the Urban Harappan Phase. We recovered sandy fluvial deposits approximately 5;400 y old at Fort Abbas in Pakistan (SI Text), and recent work (33) on the upper Ghaggar-Hakra interfluve in India also documented Holocene channel sands that are approximately 4;300 y old. On the upper interfluve, fine-grained floodplain deposition continued until the end of the Late Harappan Phase, as recent as 2,900 y ago (33) (Fig. 2B). This widespread fluvial redistribution of sediment suggests that reliable monsoon rains were able to sustain perennial rivers earlier during the Holocene and explains why Harappan settlements flourished along the entire Ghaggar-Hakra system without access to a glacier-fed river."[6]
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Broke:[9] "The story in Harappan India was somewhat different (see Figure 111.3). The Bronze Age village and urban societies of the Indus Valley are some-thing of an anomaly, in that archaeologists have found little indication of local defense and regional warfare. It would seem that the bountiful monsoon rainfall of the Early to Mid-Holocene had forged a condition of plenty for all, and that competitive energies were channeled into commerce rather than conflict. Scholars have long argued that these rains shaped the origins of the urban Harappan societies, which emerged from Neolithic villages around 2600 BC. It now appears that this rainfall began to slowly taper off in the third millennium, at just the point that the Harappan cities began to develop. Thus it seems that this "first urbanisation" in South Asia was the initial response of the Indus Valley peoples to the beginning of Late Holocene aridification. These cities were maintained for 300 to 400 years and then gradually abandoned as the Harappan peoples resettled in scattered villages in the eastern range of their territories, into the Punjab and the Ganges Valley....'
    17 (footnote):
    a)Liviu Giosan et al., "Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization," [archive] PNAS, 102 (2012), E1688—E1694;
    (b) Camilo Ponton, "Holocene Aridification of India," [archive] GRL 39 (2012), L03704;
    (c) Harunur Rashid et al., "Late Glacial to Holocene Indian Summer Monsoon Variability Based upon Sediment Records Taken from the Bay of Bengal," [archive] Terrestrial, Atmospheric, and Oceanic Sciences 22 (2011), 215-28;
    (d) Marco Madella and Dorian Q. Fuller, "Paleoecology and the Harappan Civilization of South Asia: A Reconsideration," [archive] Quaternary Science Reviews 25 (2006), 1283-301. Compare with the very different interpretations in Gregory L. PossehlPossehl, Gregory L. (2002), The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective [archive], Rowman Altamira, pp. 237–245, ISBN 978-0-7591-0172-2<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>, and Michael Staubwasser et al., "Climate Change at the 4.2 ka BP Termination of the Indus Valley Civilization and Holocene South Asian Monsoon Variability," GRL 30 (2003), 1425. Bar-Matthews and Avner Ayalon, "Mid-Holocene Climate Variations."
  4. ↑ Masson: "A long march preceded our arrival at Haripah, through jangal of the closest description.... When I joined the camp I found it in front of the village and ruinous brick castle. Behind us was a large circular mound, or eminence, and to the west was an irregular rocky height, crowned with the remains of buildings, in fragments of walls, with niches, after the eastern manner.... Tradition affirms the existence here of a city, so considerable that it extended to Chicha Watni, thirteen cosses distant, and that it was destroyed by a particular visitation of Providence, brought down by the lust and crimes of the sovereign."[36] Note that the coss, a measure of distance used from Vedic period to Mughal times, is approximately 2 miles (3.2 km).
  5. ↑ See also:* This map [archive] from Sahoo et al. (2006), A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios [archive]
    * Sengupta et al. (2006), Polarity and Temporality of High-Resolution Y-Chromosome Distributions in India Identify Both Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists [archive]
  6. ↑ Excavations at Bhirrana, Haryana, in India between 2006 and 2009, by archaeologist K. N. Dikshit, provided six artefacts, including "relatively advanced pottery," socalled Hakra ware, which were dated at a time bracket between 7380 and 6201 BCE.[1][51][52][53] These dates compete with Mehrgarh for being the oldest site for cultural remains in the area.[54]

    Yet, Dikshit and Mani clarify that this time-bracket concerns only charcoal samples, which were radio-carbon dated at respectively respectively 7570-7180 BCE (sample 2481) and 6689-6201 BCE (sample 2333).[55][56] Dikshit further writes that the earliest phase concerns 14 shallow dwelling-pits which "could accommodate about 3-4 people."[57] According to Dikshit, in the lowest level of these pits wheel-made Hakra Ware was found which was "not well finished,"[57] together with other wares.[58]
  7. ↑ Gallego romero et al. (2011) refer to (Meadow 1993):[62] Meadow RH. 1993. Animal domestication in the Middle East: a revised view from the eastern margin. In: Possehl G, editor. Harappan civilization. New Delhi (India): Oxford University Press and India Book House. p 295–320.[63]
  8. ↑ They further noted that "the direct lineal descendents of the Neolithic inhabitants of Mehrgarh are to be found to the south and the east of Mehrgarh, in northwestern India and the western edge of the Deccan plateau," with neolithic Mehrgarh showing greater affinity with chalocolithic Inamgaon, south of Mehrgarh, than with chalcolithic Mehrgarh.[64]
  9. ↑ See:
    • David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974);
    • David McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1 (1975);
    • David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979);
    • David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)
  10. ↑ See also:
    • Mukherjee (2001): "More recently, about 15,000-10,000 years before present (ybp), when agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent region that extends from Israel through northern Syria to western Iran, there was another eastward wave of human migration (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Renfrew 1987), a part of which also appears to have entered India. This wave has been postulated to have brought the Dravidian languages into India (Renfrew 1987). Subsequently, the Indo-European (Aryan) language family was introduced into India about 4,000 ybp."[101]
    • Derenko: "The spread of these new technologies has been associated with the dispersal of Dravidian and Indo-European languages in southern Asia. It is hypothesized that the proto-Elamo-Dravidian language, most likely originated in the Elam province in southwestern Iran, spread eastwards with the movement of farmers to the Indus Valley and the Indian sub-continent."[102]

      Derenko refers to:
      * Renfrew (1987), Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
      * Renfrew (1996), Language families and the spread of farming. In: Harris DR, editor, The origins and spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, pp. 70–92
      * Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, Piazza (1994), The History and Geography of Human Genes.
  11. ↑ Kumar: "The analysis of two Y chromosome variants, Hgr9 and Hgr3 provides interesting data (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). Microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages from south-west Iran (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001)."[105]
  12. ↑ Nevertheless, Kivisild et al. (1999) note that "a small fraction of the West Eurasian mtDNA lineages found in Indian populations can be ascribed to a relatively recent admixture."[103] at ca. 9,300 ± 3,000 years before present,[104] which coincides with "the arrival to India of cereals domesticated in the Fertile Crescent" and "lends credence to the suggested linguistic connection between the Elamite and Dravidic populations."[104] According to Kumar (2004), referring to Quintan-Murci et al. (2001), "microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages from south-west Iran."[105][105][note 11] According to Palanichamy et al. (2015), "The presence of mtDNA haplogroups (HV14 and U1a) and Y-chromosome haplogroup (L1) in Dravidian populations indicates the spread of the Dravidian language into India from west Asia."[106]
  13. ↑ Geological research by a group led by Peter Clift investigated how the courses of rivers have changed in this region since 8000 years ago, to test whether climate or river reorganisations caused the decline of the Harappan. Using U-Pb dating of zircon sand grains they found that sediments typical of the Beas, Sutlej and Yamuna rivers (Himalayan tributaries of the Indus) are actually present in former Ghaggar-Hakra channels. However, sediment contributions from these glacial-fed rivers stopped at least by 10,000 years ago, well before the development of the Indus civilisation.[141]
  14. ↑ Tripathi et al. (2004) found that the isotopes of sediments carried by the Ghaggar-Hakra system over the last 20 thousand years do not come from the glaciated Higher Himalaya but have a sub-Himalayan source, and concluded that the river system was rain-fed. They also concluded that this contradicted the idea of a Harappan-time mighty "Sarasvati" river.[142]

References[edit]

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Archeologists confirm Indian civilization is 2000 years older than previously believed, Jason Overdorf, Globalpost, 28 November 2012" [archive].<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  2. ↑ Wright 2009, p. 1.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wright 2010.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Wright 2010, p. 1.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Maemoku, Hideaki; Shitaoka, Yorinao; Nagatomo, Tsuneto; Yagi, Hiroshi (2013), "Geomorphological Constraints on the Ghaggar River Regime During the Mature Harappan Period", in Giosan,Liviu; Fuller, Dorian Q.; Nicoll, Kathleen (eds.), Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations [archive], American Geophysical Union Monograph Series 198, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-1-118-70443-1<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Giosan, L.; et al. (2012). "Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan Civilization" [archive]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 109 (26): E1688–E1694. doi:10.1073/pnas.1112743109 [archive].<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Madella, Marco; Fuller, Dorian (2006). "Palaeoecology and the Harappan Civilisation of South Asia: a reconsideration". Quaternary Science Reviews. 25 (11–12): 1283–1301. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2005.10.012 [archive].<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 MacDonald, Glen (2011). "Potential influence of the Pacific Ocean on the Indian summer monsoon and Harappan decline". Quaternary International. 229: 140–148. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2009.11.012 [archive].<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Brooke, John L. (2014), Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey [archive], Cambridge University Press, p. 296, ISBN 978-0-521-87164-8<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  10. ↑ McIntosh, Jane (2008), The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives, ABC-CLIO, p. 387, ISBN 978-1-57607-907-2<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  11. ↑ Wright 2010, pp. 115–125.
  12. ↑ Beck, Roger B.; Linda Black; Larry S. Krieger; Phillip C. Naylor; Dahia Ibo Shabaka (1999). World History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell. ISBN 0-395-87274-X.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  13. ↑ Wright 2010, p. 2.
  14. ↑ "'Earliest writing' found" [archive]. BBC News. 4 May 1999. Retrieved 5 January 2010.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Shaffer 1992, I:441–464, II:425–446.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Kenoyer 1991.
  17. ↑ Morrison, Kathleen D.; Junker, Laura L., eds. (2002). Forager-traders in South and Southeast Asia : long term histories [archive] ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-521-01636-0.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  18. ↑ Wright 2010, p. 107: Quote: "Five major Indus cities are discussed in this chapter. During the Urban period, the early town of Harappa expanded in size and population and became a major center in the Upper Indus. Other cities emerging during the Urban period include Mohenjo-daro in the Lower Indus, Dholavira to the south on the western edge of peninsular India in Kutch, Ganweriwala in Cholistan, and a fifth city, Rakhigarhi, on the Ghaggar-Hakra. Rakhigarhi will be discussed briefly in view of the limited published material."
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  • Kenoyer, J.M. 1998 Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford University Press and American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Karachi.
  • Kenoyer, J. M. 1991a The Indus Valley Tradition of Pakistan and Western India. In Journal of World Prehistory 5(4): 331-385.
  • Kenoyer, J. M. 1995a Interaction Systems, Specialized Crafts and Culture Change: The Indus Valley Tradition and the Indo-Gangetic Tradition in South Asia. In The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, edited by G. Erdosy, pp. 213-257. Berlin, W. DeGruyter.
  • Shaffer, J. G. 1992 The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic Through Bronze Age. In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology (3rd Edition), edited by R. Ehrich, pp. 441-464. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Fussman, G. in Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X. (2005), p. 220; H.-P. Francfort, Fouilles de Shortugai</ref> H.-P. Francfort in Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X. (2005), p. 268</ref> Sarianidi 1993. "Margiana in the Ancient Orient." International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia Information Bulletin. 19:5-28; Bryant 2001: 220</ref> Other scholars[1] have argued that the Andronovo culture cannot be associated with the Indo-Aryans of India or with the Mitannis because the Andronovo culture took shape too late and because no actual traces of their culture (e.g. warrior burials or timber-frame materials of the Andronovo culture) have been found in India or Mesopotamia[2]. The archaeologist J. P. Mallory (1998) found it "extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India" and remarked that the proposed migration routes "only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" [3].

References[edit]

  • Edwin Bryant (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516947-6.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Nicolo Di Cosmo, "The Northern Frontier in Pre-Imperial China", Cambridge History of Ancient China (pp. 885-966) ch. 13.
  • Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X.: Aryas, Aryens et Iraniens en Asie Centrale. (2005), Institut Civilisation Indienne ISBN 2-86803-072-6
  • Jones-Bley, K.; Zdanovich, D. G. (eds.), Complex Societies of Central Eurasia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium BC, 2 vols, JIES Monograph Series Nos. 45, 46, Washington D.C. (2002), ISBN 0-941694-83-6, ISBN 0-941694-86-0.
  • J. P. Mallory, "Andronovo Culture", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.

Notes:[edit]

  1. ↑ like Brentjes (1981), Klejn (1974), Francfort (1989), Lyonnet (1993), Hiebert (1998), Bosch-Gimpera (1973) and Sarianidi (1993); see Bryant 2001, chapter 10
  2. ↑ see Edwin Bryant 2001, chapter 10
  3. ↑ Mallory 1998; cited from Edwin Bryant 2001: 216

Sarianidi, V. I. 1976. "Issledovanija pamjatnikov Dashlyiskogo Oazisa," in Drevnii Baktria, vol. 1. Moscow: Akademia Nauk. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. 2002. "Archaeology and Language: The Indo-Iranians," in Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 1, Feb. year University of Chicago

Further reading[edit]

  • Edwin Bryant (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516947-6.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • CNRS, L'archéologie de la Bactriane ancienne. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985
  • Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X.: Aryas, Aryens et Iraniens en Asie Centrale. (2005) Institut Civilisation Indienne ISBN 2-86803-072-6
  • J. P. Mallory, "BMAC", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997 EIEC.
  • Lubotsky, A., "Indo-Iranian substratum [archive]" in Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European, ed. Carpelan et al., Helsinki (2001).
  • Sarianidi, V. I., Preface, in F.T. Hiebert, Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization of Central Asia, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1994 ISBN 0-87365-545-1
  • Sarianidi, V. I., "Soviet Excavations in Bactria: The Bronze Age," in G. Ligabue and S. Salvatori, editors, Bactria: An ancient oasis civilization from the sands of Afghanistan, Venice, 1990

References[edit]

  • Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513777-9.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Parpola, Asko: Margiana and the Aryan Problem. 1993. International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia Information Bulletin 19:41-62.
  • Tulsa, Sebastiano: 1977. The Swat Valley in the 2nd and 1st Millennia BC: A Question of Marginality. South Asian Archaeology 6:675-695.
[1]
  • Gupta, S.P. (ed.). 1995. The lost Sarasvati and the Indus Civilization. Kusumanjali Prakashan, Jodhpur.

. [2] [3] The Early Harappan, Harappan and Late Harappan periods are described as "Regionalisation", "Integration" and "Localisation" Eras, respectively, the Regionalization Era taken to reach down to the Neolithic Mehrgarh II period:


[4]

The Indus Valley Civilization extended from Balochistan to Gujarat, with an upward reach to Punjab from east of the river Jhelum to Rupar on the upper Sutlej. Coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor in Western Baluchistan to Lothal in Gujarat. Besides the western states of India, the Indus Valley Civilization encompassed most of Pakistan. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus river at Shortughai in northern Afghanistan [5], at Sutkagen dor (Western Baluchistan, Pakistan),[6] at Mandu on the Beas River near Jammu[7], and at Alamgirpur on the Hindon River, only 28 km from Delhi [8]. Indus Valley sites have been found most often on rivers, but also on lakes, the ancient sea-coast and on islands.[9]

There is a sure evidence of another large river, now dried up, running parallel to the Indus River to the east. Dry river beds overlap with the Hakra channel in Pakistan and the seasonal Ghaggar River in India. Over 500 ancient sites belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization have been discovered along the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries (S.P. Gupta 1995: 183). By contrast, only about 100 of the known Indus Valley sites have been discovered on the Indus and its tributaries. [10] Certain scholars propose that this was a major river during the third and fourth millennia BCE, and suggest that it may have been the Sarasvati River of the Rigveda. Some advocate designating the Indus Valley culture the "Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization," Sindhu being the Sanskrit name of the Indus River. Saraswati river's identification is accepted by most archaeologists, for instance Kenoyer, Raymond and Bridget Allchin, G. L. Possehl or D. P. Agrawal.




  • Lal, B.B. (2002) The Sarasvati flows on.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Basham, A.L., The Wonder That Was India, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1967, p 11-14.
  • Chakrabarti, D.K. (2004). Indus Civilization Sites in India: New Discoveries. Mumbai: Marg Publications. ISBN 81-85026-63-7.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Dani, Ahmad Hassan, Short History of Pakistan, Book 1, 1984, University of Karachi.
  • Gupta, S.P. (1996). The Indus-Saraswati Civilization : Origins, Problems and Issues. ISBN 81-85268-46-0.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Gupta, S.P. (ed.). 1995. The lost Sarasvati and the Indus Civilisation. Kusumanjali Prakashan, Jodhpur.
  • Kathiroli et al. 2004. "Recent Marine Archaeological Finds in Khambhat, Gujarat". Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology No 1, p. 141-149.
  • Kenoyer, J. Mark. 1998. Ancient cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-577940-1.
  • Kenoyer, J. Mark (1991). "The Indus Valley tradition of Pakistan and Western India". Journal of World Prehistory. 5: 1–64.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Lahiri, Nayanjot (editor) (2000). The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilisation. ISBN 81-7530-034-5.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Lal, B.B. (1998). India 1947-1997 : New Light on the Indus Civilization. ISBN 81-7305-129-1.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Lal, B.B. (1997). The Earliest Civilisation of South Asia (Rise, Maturity and Decline).<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Mcintosh, Jane. 2002. A Peaceful realm. Boulder: Westview Press.
  • Parpola, Asko (2005) "Study of the Indus Script" [archive], 50th ICES Tokyo Session, Tokyo, May 19, 2005
  • Possehl, Gregory. 2002. The Indus Civilisation. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press.
  • Rao, S.R. (1991). Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilisation. ISBN 81-85179-74-3.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Shaffer, Jim G. (1995). Cultural tradition and Palaeoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology. In: Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia. Ed. George Erdosy. ISBN 0948-1923 Template:Please check ISBN.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Shaffer, Jim G. (1999). Migration, Philology and South Asian Archaeology. In: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia. Ed. Bronkhorst and Deshpande. ISBN 1-888789-04-2.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Jim G. Shaffer. 1992. "The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic Through Bronze Age." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. Second Edition. R.W. Ehrich, (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I:441-464, II:425-446.
  • Witzel, M., The Languages of Harappa, EJVS Feb. 2000 [3] [archive].

External links[edit]


  • Jarrige, Jean-François: 1985, Continuity and change in the North Kachi Plain at the beginning of the 2nd millenium BC, in J Schotsmans and M. Taddei (eds.) South Asian Archaeology, Naples 1983. Instituto Universatirio Orientale.


Remains of the Equus namadicus have been found from Pleistocene levels in India.[11] The Equus namadicus is closely related to the Equus sivalensis.[12] The Equus sivalensis lived in the Himalayan foothills in prehistoric times and it is assumed that it was extinct during the last Ice Age. Remains of horses have been found among other places in Mahagara near Allahabad (dated to c. 2265 BC to 1480 BC, described as Equus caballus Linn), Hallur in Karnataka (c.1500 - 1300 BC, described as Equus caballus), Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa ("small horse"), Lothal[13] (e.g., a terracotta figurine and a molar horse tooth, dated to 2200 BC), Kalibangan, and Kuntasi (dated to 2300 – 1900 BC). Horse remains from the Harappan site Surkotada (dated to c. 2400-1700 BC) have been identified by A.K. Sharma as being of the Equus caballus species. The horse specialist Sandor Bökönyi (1997) later confirmed these conclusions and stated that the excavated tooth specimens could "in all probability be considered remnants of true horses [i.e. Equus caballus Linn]". Bökönyi stated that "The occurrence of true horse (Equus Caballus L.) was evidenced by the enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form of incisors and phalanges (toe bones)." [14]. However, others like Meadow (1997) still disagree, because remains of the Equus caballus Linn horse are difficult to distinguish even by specialists from other horse species like Equus asinus (donkeys) or Equus hemionus (onagers) [15]. An alleged clay model of a horse has been found in Mohenjo-Daro and an alleged horse figurine in Periano Ghundai in the Indus Valley.[16]

Trautmann (1982) thus remarked that the supply and import of horses has "always" been a preoccupation of the Indians and that "it is a structure of its history, then, that India has always been dependent upon western and central Asia for horses." [17]. The paucity of horse remains could also be explained by India's climatic factors which lead to a faster decay of horse bones. Horse bones may also be rare because horses were probably not eaten or used in burials by the Harappans.[18] It should however also be noted that other sites like the BMAC complex (which some consider nevertheless as Indo-Aryan) are at least as poor in horse remains as the Harappan sites.[19][20] Note also that the horse only appears in Mesopotamia from ca. 1800 BC when it acquires military significance with the invention of the chariot. Domestication of the horse before the 2nd millennium appears confined to its native habitat (the Great Steppe).

  • Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend (ISBN 0-500-51088-1) by Anna Dallapiccola
  • Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513777-9.
  • Falconer H. and Cautley, Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis, Being the Fossil Zoology of the Siwalik Highlands in the North of India, 1849, London.
  • Lal, B.B. New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books, Delhi 1998
  • Lal, B.B. 2005. The Homeland of the Aryans. Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna & Archaeology, New Delhi, Aryan Books International.
  • Kenneth A.R. Kennedy. 2000, God-Apes and Fossil Men: Palaeoanthropology of South Asia Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  • Trautmann, Thomas. The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8

Further reading[edit]

  • Sandor Bököni (1997). "Horse Remains from the Prehistoric Site of Surkotada, Kutch, Late 3rd Millennium BC". South Asian Archaeology. 13: 297–307.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  • Horse Riding in the Rgveda and Atharvaveda. Ananada Coomaraswamy. Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol 62, no 2. 1942.



[21]

Malik and other scholars have noted similarities between NPB and Harappan cultures, among them the ivory dice and combs and a similar system of weights. Other similarities include the utilization of mud, baked bricks and stone in architecture, the construction of large units of public architecture, the systematic development of hydraulic features and a similar craft industry. [22] There are however also important differences between these two cultures, e.g. in the NBP culture rice, millet and sorghum become more important.[22] The NBP culture may reflect the first state-level organization in South Asia. [22] In some sites, BRW pottery is associated with Late Harappan pottery, and according to some scholars like Tribhuan N. Roy, the BRW may have directly influenced the Painted Grey Ware and Northern Black Polished cultures. [23] BRW pottery is unknown west of the Indus Valley.[24]

It is reaches from the upper Gangetic plain in Uttar Pradesh to the eastern Vindhya range and West Bengal.

Researches and findings suggest that the Black-and-Red pottery flourished in Bengal around 1500 BC and continued to evolve, well past the Chalcolithic age, into the historical period around the 3rd century BC.

Use of Iron, although sparse at first, is relatively early, postdating the beginning of the Iron Age in Anatolia (Hittites) by only two or three centuries, and predating the European (Celts) Iron Age by another two to three hundred years. Recent findings in Northern India show Iron working since 1800 BC. According to Shaffer, the "nature and context of the iron objects involved [of the BRW culture] are very different from early iron objects found in Southwest Asia."[25]



  • Shaffer, Jim. Mathura: A protohistoric Perspective in D.M. Srinivasan (ed.), Mathura, the Cultural Heritage, 1989, pp. 171-180. Delhi.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]


The Cemetery H culture is part of the Punjab Phase, one of three cultural phases that developed in the Localization Era of the Indus Valley Tradition.[26][27]

The Cemetery H culture also "shows clear biological affinities" with the earlier population of Harappa. [28]

The chariot must not necessarily be regarded as a marker for Indo-European or Indo-Iranian presence.[29] According to Raulwing, it is an undeniable fact that only comparative Indo-European linguistics is able to furnish the methodological basics of the hypothesis of a "PIE chariot", in other words: "Ausserhalb der Sprachwissenschaft winkt keine Rettung![30]"[31][32]

The earliest evidence for chariots in southern Central Asia (on the Oxus) dates to the Achaemenid period (apart from chariots harnessed by oxen, as seen on petroglyphs).[33] No Andronovian chariot burial has been found south of the Oxus.[34]

References[edit]

  • Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513777-9.
  • Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X.: Aryas, Aryens et Iraniens en Asie Centrale. (2005) Institut Civilisation Indienne ISBN 2-86803-072-6
  • Kazanas, Nicholas. The AIT and Scholarship. Athens, 2001.
  • Peter Raulwing, Horses, Chariots and Indo-Europeans, Foundations and Methods of Chariotry Research from the Viewpoint of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Archaeolingua, Series Minor 13, Budapest 2000)


  • Lal, B.B. The Earliest Civilization of South Asia.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  • Agarwal, V. On Perceiving Aryan Migrations in Vedic Ritual Texts: Puratattva (Bulletin of the Indian Archaeolgical Society), New Delhi, No. 36, 2005-06, pp. 155-165 (.doc) [archive]
  • Agarwal, Vishal. "Is there Vedic Evidence for the Indo-Aryan Immigration to India?", Dialogue (Journal of Astha Bharati, New Delhi), vol. 8, No. 1, July-September 2006, pp. 122-145 [6] [archive]
  • Agarwal, Vishal. (2001) The Aryan Migration Theory Fabricating Literary Evidence [7] [archive]
  • Caland, Willem. 1903. “Eene Nieuwe Versie van de Urvasi-Mythe”. In Album-Kern, Opstellen Geschreven Ter Eere van Dr. H. Kern. E. J. Brill: Leiden, pp. 57-60
  • The Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra belonging to the Taittirīya saühitā, ed. W. Caland, Bibliotheca Indica 163, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1904–1924 (2nd ed. with new appendix containing many text improvements [prepared by Radhe Shyam Shastri], New Delhi).
  • Cardona, George. The Indo-Aryan languages, RoutledgeCurzon; 2002 ISBN 0-7007-1130-9
  • Elst, Koenraad; “The Vedic Corpus Provides No Evidence for the so-called Aryan Invasion of India”; 28 October 1998.
  • Elst, Koenraad. (1999) Update on the Aryan Invasion Theory ISBN 81-86471-77-4
  • Kashikar, Chintamani Ganesh. 2003. Baudhayana Srautasutra. 3 vols. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass/IGNCA. ISBN 81-208-1852-0 Review [archive]
  • Lal, B. B. (2005) The Homeland of the Aryans: Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna and Archaeology.
  • Triveda, D. S. 1938-39. “The Original Home of the Aryans”. In Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. XX, pp. 49-68
  • Tushifumi Goto. ‘Pururavas und Urvasi” aus dem neuntdecktem Vadhula-Anvakhyana (Ed. Y. Ikari)’. pp. 79-110 in Tichy, Eva and Hintze, Almut (eds.). Anusantatyai; J. H. Roll: Germany (2000)
  • Talageri, Shrikant. The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis. 2000. ISBN 81-7742-010-0 [8] [archive]
  • Michael Witzel, Rgvedic history: poets, chieftains and politics, in: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity. The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. G. Erdosy, Berlin/New York (de Gruyter) 1995, 307-352. --- On the Localisation of Vedic Texts and Schools; pp. 173-213 in “India and the Ancient World” ed. by Gilbert Pollet; Departement Orientalistiek; Keuven; 1987 --- Tracing the Vedic Dialects; in Dialectes dans les literatures indo-aryennes; Publications de l’Institute de Civilization Indienne, Serie in-8, Fascicule 55, ed. by C. Caillat; Diffusion de Boccard; Paris; 1989


Further reading[edit]

  • Coningham, Robin; Young, Ruth (2015), The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka, c.6500 BCE–200 CE, Cambridge University Press<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>

https://www.harappa.com/books2 [archive]

Sources[edit]

This article includes modified content derived from Wikipedia. See source [9] [archive]

External links[edit]

The Ancient Indus Valley and the British Raj in India and Pakistan [archive]
Indus Valley Civilization: The Demise of Utopia [archive]
Center and Periphery: Indus Valley Civilization [archive]
Early Developments of Art, Symbol and Technology in the Indus Valley Tradition Print Version [archive]
Indus Valley Civilization [archive]
Indus Valley Civilizations [archive]
The Ancient Indus Valley Printable Essay [archive]
Varanasi is as old as Indus valley civilization, finds IIT-KGP study: Times of India - Hinduism Now | Hinduism Now [archive]
http://www.sanskritimagazine.com/indian-religions/hinduism/varanasi-old-indus-valley-civilization-finds-iit-kgp-study/ [archive]
Varanasi is as Old as Indus Valley Civilization, Finds IIT Study [archive]
Indus Valley civilisation may pre-date Egypt's pharoahs | Daily Mail Online [archive]
Indus Valley texts deciphered - Kurt Schildmann opens up the way... [archive]
  1. ↑ Kenneth A.R. Kennedy. 2000, God-Apes and Fossil Men: Palaeoanthropology of South Asia Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 339
  2. ↑ Kenoyer, J. Mark (1991). "The Indus Valley tradition of Pakistan and Western India". Journal of World Prehistory. 5: 1–64.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  3. ↑ Jim G. Shaffer. 1992. "The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic Through Bronze Age." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. Second Edition. R.W. Ehrich, (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I:441-464, II:425-446.
  4. ↑ Shaffer, Jim. 1993:58, Reurbanisation: The eastern Punjab and beyond. In Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed. H. Spodek and D.M. Srinivasan.
  5. ↑ (Kenoyer 1998:96)
  6. ↑ S.P. Gupta. The dawn of civilization, in G.C. Pande (ed.)(History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed., D.P. Chattophadhyaya, vol I Part 1) (New Delhi:Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999)
  7. ↑ S.P. Gupta. The dawn of civilization, in G.C. Pande (ed.)(History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed., D.P. Chattophadhyaya, vol I Part 1) (New Delhi:Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999)
  8. ↑ (S.P. Gupta 1995:183)
  9. ↑ e.g., Dholavira at the Khadir islands in the Rann of Kacch) S.P. Gupta. The dawn of civilization, in G.C. Pande (ed.)(History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed., D.P. Chattophadhyaya, vol I Part 1) (New Delhi:Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999)
  10. ↑ e.g. V.N. Misra 1992, in Eastern Anthropologist vol 45, pp 1-19.
  11. ↑ Kennedy 2000
  12. ↑ Arun Sonakia and S. Biswas, Antiquity of the Narmada Homo erectus, the early man of India, 1998, Palaeontology Division, Geological Survey of India [12] [archive]; Biswas, S., Rec. GSI, 1988, 118, 53–62.
  13. ↑ Bryant 2001; S.R. Rao (1985) Lothal - A Harappan Port Town
  14. ↑ (quoted by Prof. B.B. Lal from Bökönyi's letter to the Director of the Archaeological Survey of India, 13-12-1993, in New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books, Delhi 1998, p.111)
  15. ↑ (see Edwin Bryant. 2001:169-175)
  16. ↑ Bryant 2001:171, with reference to Mackay 1938 and Piggott 1952
  17. ↑ (Bryant 2001)
  18. ↑ Bryant 2001:194; S.P. Gupta. The dawn of civilization, in G.C. Pande (ed.)(History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed., D.P. Chattophadhyaya, vol I Part 1) (New Delhi:Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999)
  19. ↑ (e.g. Bryant 2001; Bernard Sergent 1997:161 ff.)
  20. ↑ Hastinapura (8th century BCE) is likewise poor in horse remains, even though it is considered as Indo-Aryan. Thapar 1996:21. The theory of Aryan race and India. Social Scientist, Delhi.
  21. ↑ Himanshu Prabha Ray, Early Coastal Trade in the Bay of Bengal, In: Julian Reade (ed.) The Indian Ocean in Antiquity. London: Kegan Paul Intl. 1996
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Shaffer, Jim. 1993, Reurbanization: The eastern Punjab and beyond. In Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed. H. Spodek and D.M. Srinivasan.
  23. ↑ Shaffer, Jim. 1993, Reurbanization: The eastern Punjab and beyond. In Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed. H. Spodek and D.M. Srinivasan.
  24. ↑ Shaffer, Jim. Mathura: A protohistoric Perspective in D.M. Srinivasan (ed.), Mathura, the Cultural Heritage, 1989, pp. 171-180. Delhi. cited in Chakrabarti 1992
  25. ↑ Shaffer 1989, cited in Chakrabarti 1992:171
  26. ↑ Kenoyer, J. Mark (1991). "The Indus Valley tradition of Pakistan and Western India". Journal of World Prehistory. 5: 1–64.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  27. ↑ Jim G. Shaffer. 1992. "The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic Through Bronze Age." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. Second Edition. R.W. Ehrich, (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I:441-464, II:425-446.
  28. ↑ Kenneth A.R. Kennedy. 2000, God-Apes and Fossil Men: Palaeoanthropology of South Asia Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 312; also Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (JP Mallory with D. Q. Adams). Fitzroy-Dearborn, London and Chicago. 1997. p. 103 and 310
  29. ↑ Cf. Raulwing 2000
  30. ↑ Outside of linguistics there's no hope.
  31. ↑ Raulwing 2000:83
  32. ↑ Cf. Henri Paul Francfort in Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X. (2005), p. 272-276
  33. ↑ They were not used for warfare. H. P. Francfort, Fouilles de Shortugai, Recherches sur L'Asie Centrale Protohistorique Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1989, p. 452. Cf. Henri Paul Francfort in Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X. (2005), p.272
  34. ↑ H. P. Francfort in Fussman, G.; Kellens, J.; Francfort, H.-P.; Tremblay, X. (2005), p. 220, 272; H.-P. Francfort, Fouilles de Shortugai
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