Aryan
indigenist writers like David Frawley use the terms "Sarasvati
culture", the "Sarasvati Civilisation", the "Indus-Sarasvati
Civilisation" or the "Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation",
because they consider the Ghaggar-Hakra river to be the same as
the Sarasvati, a river mentioned several times in the Rig Ved,
a collection of ancient Sanskrit hymns composed in the second
millennium BCE. Recent geophysical research suggests that
unlike the Sarasvati, whose descriptions in the Rig Veda are those
of a snow-fed river, the Ghaggar-Hakra was a system of perennial
monsoon-fed rivers, which became seasonal around the time that
the civilisation diminished, approximately 4,000 years ago. In
addition, proponents of the Sarasvati nomenclature see a connection
between the decline of the Indus civilisation and the rise of
the Vedic civilisation on the Gangetic plain; however, historians
of the decline of the mature Indus civilisation consider the two
to be substantially disconnected.
Extent :

Major
sites and extent of the Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus civilization was roughly contemporary with the other
riverine civilisations of the ancient world: Egypt along the Nile,
Mesopotamia in the lands watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris,
and China in the drainage basin of the Yellow River and the Yangtze.
By the time of its mature phase, the civilisation had spread over
an area larger than the others, which included a core of 1,500
kilometres (900 mi) up the alluvial plain of the Indus and its
tributaries. In addition, there was a region with disparate flora,
fauna, and habitats, up to ten times as large, which had been
shaped culturally and economically by the Indus.
Around
6500 BCE, agriculture emerged in Balochistan,
on the margins of the Indus alluvium. In the following millennia,
settled life made inroads into the Indus plains, setting the stage
for the growth of rural and urban human settlements. The more
organized sedentary life in turn led to a net increase in the
birth rate. The large urban centres of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa
very likely grew to containing between 30,000 and 60,000 individuals,
and during the civilization's florescence, the population of the
subcontinent grew to between 4–6 million people. During
this period the death rate increased as well, for close living
conditions of humans and domesticated animals led to an increase
in contagious diseases. According to one estimate, the population
of the Indus civilization at its peak may have been between one
and five million.
The
Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) extended from Pakistan's Balochistan
in the west to India's western Uttar Pradesh in the east, from
northeastern Afghanistan in the north to India's Gujarat state
in the south. The largest number of sites are in Gujarat,
Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir states
in India, and Sindh, Punjab, and Balochistan provinces in Pakistan.
Coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor in Western Baluchistan
to Lothal in Gujarat. An Indus Valley site has been found on the
Oxus River at Shortugai in northern Afghanistan, in the Gomal
River valley in northwestern Pakistan, at Manda, Jammu on the
Beas River
near Jammu, India, and at Alamgirpur on the Hindon River, only
28 km (17 mi) from Delhi. The southern most site of the Indus
valley civilisation is Daimabad in Maharashtra. Indus Valley sites
have been found most often on rivers, but also on the ancient
seacoast, for example, Balakot, and on islands, for example, Dholavira.
Discovery and history
of excavation :

Alexander
Cunningham, the first director general of the Archaeological Survey
of India (ASI), interpreted a Harappan stamp seal in 1875.

R.
D. Banerji, an officer of the ASI, visited Mohenjo-daro in 1919–1920,
and again in 1922–1923, postulating the site's far-off antiquity.

John
Marshall, the director-general of the ASI from 1902–1928,
who oversaw the excavations in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, shown
in a 1906 photograph.
"Three other scholars whose names I cannot pass over in silence,
are the late Mr. R. D. Banerji, to whom belongs the credit of
having discovered, if not Mohenjo-daro itself, at any rate its
high antiquity, and his immediate successors in the task of excavation,
Messrs. M.S. Vats and K.N. Dikshit. ... no one probably except
myself can fully appreciate the difficulties and hardships which
they had to face in the three first seasons at Mohenjo-daro"
— From, John Marshall (ed), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization,
London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931.
Outline of South Asian history :
_without_national_boundaries.svg.png)
• South
Asia (orthographic projection)
• Palaeolithic
(2,500,000–250,000 BC)
• Neolithic
(10,800–3300 BC)
• Chalcolithic
(3500–1500 BC)
• Bronze
Age (3300–1300 BC)
• Iron
Age (1500–200 BC)
• Middle
Kingdoms (230 BC – AD 1206)
• Late
medieval period (1206–1526)
• Early
modern period (1526–1858)
• Colonial
states (1510–1961)
• Periods
of Sri Lanka
• National
histories
• Regional
histories
• Specialised
histories
The first modern accounts of the ruins of the Indus civilisation
are those of Charles Masson, a deserter from the East India Company's
army. In 1829, Masson traveled through the princely state of Punjab,
gathering useful intelligence for the Company in return for a
promise of clemency. An aspect of this arrangement was the additional
requirement to hand over to the Company any historical artifacts
acquired during his travels. Masson, who had versed himself in
the classics, especially in the military campaigns of Alexander
the Great, chose for his wanderings some of the same towns that
had featured in Alexander's campaigns, and whose archaeological
sites had been noted by the campaign's chroniclers. Masson's major
archaeological discovery in the Punjab was Harappa, a metropolis
of the Indus civilization in the valley of Indus's tributary,
the Ravi river. Masson made copious notes and illustrations of
Harappa's rich historical artifacts, many lying half-buried. In
1842, Masson included his observations of Harappa in the book
Narrative of Various Journeys in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and
the Punjab. He dated the Harappa ruins to a period of recorded
history, erroneously mistaking it to have been described earlier
during Alexander's campaign. Masson was impressed by the site's
extraordinary size and by several large mounds formed from long-existing
erosion.
Two years later, the Company contracted
Alexander Burnes to sail up the Indus to assess the feasibility
of water travel for its army. Burnes, who also stopped in Harappa,
noted the baked bricks employed in the site's ancient masonry,
but noted also the haphazard plundering of these bricks by the
local population.
Despite
these reports, Harappa was raided even more perilously for its
bricks after the British annexation of the Punjab in 1848–49.
A considerable number were carted away as track ballast for the
railway lines being laid in the Punjab. Nearly 160 km (100
mi) of railway track between Multan and Lahore, laid in the mid
1850s, was supported by Harappan bricks.
In
1861, three years after the dissolution of the East India Company
and the establishment of Crown rule in India, archaeology on the
subcontinent became more formally organised with the founding
of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Alexander Cunningham,
the Survey's first director-general, who had visited Harappa in
1853 and had noted the imposing brick walls, visited again to
carry out a survey, but this time of a site whose entire upper
layer had been stripped in the interim. Although his original
goal of demonstrating Harappa to be a lost Buddhist city mentioned
in the seventh century CE travels of the Chinese visitor, Xuanzang,
proved elusive, Cunningham did publish his findings in 1875. For
the first time, he interpreted a Harappan stamp seal, with its
unknown script, which he concluded to be of an origin foreign
to India.
Archaeological work in Harappa
thereafter flagged until a new viceroy of India, Lord Curzon,
pushed through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act 1904, and
appointed John Marshall to lead the ASI. Several years later,
Hiranand Sastri, who had been assigned by Marshall to survey Harappa,
reported it to be of non-Buddhist origin, and by implication more
ancient. Expropriating Harappa for the ASI under the Act, Marshall
directed ASI archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni to excavate the site's
two mounds.
Farther south, along the main
stem of the Indus in Sind province, the largely undisturbed site
of Mohenjo-daro had attracted notice. Marshall deputed a succession
of ASI officers to survey the site. These included D. R. Bhandarkar
(1911), R. D. Banerji (1919, 1922–1923), and M.S. Vats (1924).
In 1923, on his second visit to Mohenjo-daro, Baneriji wrote to
Marshall about the site, postulating an origin in "remote
antiquity," and noting a congruence of some of its artifacts
with those of Harappa. Later in 1923, Vats, also in correspondence
with Marshall, noted the same more specifically about the seals
and the script found at both sites. On the weight of these opinions,
Marshall ordered crucial data from the two sites to be brought
to one location and invited Banerji and Sahni to a joint discussion.
By 1924, Marshall had become convinced of the significance of
the finds, and on 24 September 1924, made a tentative but conspicuous
public intimation in the Illustrated London News:
"Not often has it been given
to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and
Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon
the remains of a long forgotten civilization. It looks, however,
at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery
in the plains of the Indus."
Systematic excavations began in
Mohenjo-daro in 1924–25 with that of K. N. Dikshit, continuing
with those of H. Hargreaves (1925–1926), and Ernest J. H.
Mackay (1927–1931). By 1931, much of Mohenjo-daro had been
excavated, but occasional excavations continued, such as the one
led by Mortimer Wheeler, a new director-general of the ASI appointed
in 1944.
After the partition of India in
1947, when most excavated sites of the Indus Valley civilisation
lay in territory awarded to Pakistan, the Archaeological Survey
of India, its area of authority reduced, carried out large numbers
of surveys and excavations along the Ghaggar-Hakra system in India.
Some speculated that the Ghaggar-Hakra system might yield more
sites than the Indus river basin. By 2002, over 1,000 Mature Harappan
cities and settlements had been reported, of which just under
a hundred had been excavated, mainly in the general region of
the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra rivers and their tributaries; however,
there are only five major urban sites: Harappa, Mohenjo-daro,
Dholavira, Ganeriwala and Rakhigarhi. According to a historian
approximately 616 sites have been reported in India, whereas 406
sites have been reported in Pakistan. However, according to an
archaeologist, many Ghaggar-Hakra sites in India are those of
local cultures; some sites display contact with Harappan civilization,
but only a few are fully developed Harappan ones.
Unlike India, in which after 1947,
the ASI attempted to "Indianise" archaeological work
in keeping with the new nation's goals of national unity and historical
continuity, in Pakistan the national imperative was the promotion
of Islamic heritage, and consequently archaeological work on early
sites was left to foreign archaeologists. After the partition,
Mortimer Wheeler, the Director of ASI from 1944, oversaw the establishment
of archaeological institutions in Pakistan, later joining a UNESCO
effort tasked to conserve the site at Mohenjo-daro. Other international
efforts at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have included the German Aachen
Research Project Mohenjo-daro, the Italian Mission to Mohenjo-daro,
and the US Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) founded
by George F. Dales. Following a chance flash flood which exposed
a portion of an archaeological site at the foot of the Bolan Pass
in Balochistan, excavations were carried out in Mehrgarh by French
archaeologist Jean-François Jarrige and his team.
Chronology
:
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.'"
The mature phase of the Harappan civilisation lasted from c. 2600–1900
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.
Several
periodisations are employed for the periodisation of the IVC.
The most commonly used classifies the Indus Valley Civilisation
into Early, Mature and Late Harappan Phase. 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.
Dates |
Main
Phase |
Mehrgarh
phases |
Harappan
phases |
Post-Harappan
phases |
Era |
7000
- 5500 BCE |
Pre-Harappan |
Mehrgarh
I
(aceramic Neolithic) |
|
|
Early
Food Producing Era |
5500
- 3300 BCE |
Pre-Harappan
/Early Harappan |
Mehrgarh
II - VI
(ceramic Neolithic) |
|
|
Regionalisation
Era
c. 4000 -
2500/
2300 BCE (Shaffer)
c. 5000 - 3200 BCE (Coningham & Young) |
3300
- 2800 BCE |
Early
Harappan
c. 3300 - 2800 BCE (Mughal)
c. 5000 -
2800 BCE (Kenoyer) |
|
|
|
2800
- 2600 BCE |
Mehrgarh
VII |
Harappan
2
(Kot Diji Phase,
Nausharo I) |
|
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 |
|
Harappan
4 |
Cemetery
H
Ochre
Coloured
Pottery |
Localisation
Era |
1700
- 1300 BCE |
|
Harappan
5 |
1300
- 600 BCE |
Post
Harappan
Iron Age
India |
|
|
Painted
Grey Ware (1200 - 600 BCE)
Vedic period
(c. 1500 - 500 BCE) |
Regionalisation
c. 1200 -
300 BCE (Kenoyer)
c. 1500 - 600 BCE (Coningham
& Young) |
600
- 300 BCE |
|
|
Northern
Black Polished Ware (Iron Age) (700 - 200 BCE)
Second urbanisation (c. 500 - 200 BCE) |
Integration |
Pre-Harappan era: Mehrgarh
:
Mehrgarh
is a Neolithic (7000 BCE to c. 2500 BCE) site in the Balochistan
province of Pakistan, which gave new insights on the emergence
of the Indus Valley Civilization. Mehrgarh is one of the earliest
sites with evidence of farming and herding in South Asia. Mehrgarh
was influenced by the Near Eastern Neolithic, with similarities
between "domesticated wheat varieties, early phases of farming,
pottery, other archaeological artefacts, some domesticated plants
and herd animals."
Jean-Francois Jarrige argues for
an independent origin of Mehrgarh. Jarrige notes "the assumption
that farming economy was introduced full-fledged from Near-East
to South Asia," and the similarities between Neolithic sites
from eastern Mesopotamia and the western Indus valley, which are
evidence of a "cultural continuum" between those sites.
But given the originality of Mehrgarh, Jarrige concludes that
Mehrgarh has an earlier local background," and is not a "'backwater'
of the Neolithic culture of the Near East."
Lukacs and Hemphill 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, which "suggests moderate
levels of gene flow." Mascarenhas 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)."
Gallego Romero et al. (2011) state
that their research on lactose tolerance in India suggests that
"the west Eurasian genetic contribution identified by Reich
et al. (2009) principally reflects gene flow from Iran and the
Middle East." They further note that " the earliest
evidence of cattle herding in south Asia comes from the Indus
River Valley site of Mehrgarh and is dated to 7,000 YBP."
Early
Harappan :
Early
Harappan Period, c. 3300–2600 BCE
_02.jpg)
Terracotta
boat in the shape of a bull, and female figurines. Kot Diji period
(c. 2800-2600 BC)
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.
The mature phase of earlier village
cultures is represented by Rehman Dheri and Amri in Pakistan.
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.
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.
The final stages of the Early
Harappan period are characterised by the building of large walled
settlements, the expansion of trade networks, and the increasing
integration of regional communities into a "relatively uniform"
material culture in terms of pottery styles, ornaments, and stamp
seals with Indus script, leading into the transition to the Mature
Harappan phase.
Mature
Harappan :
Mature
Harappan Period, c. 2600–1900 BCE

View
of Granary and Great Hall on Mound F in Harappa

Archaeological
remains of washroom drainage system at Lothal
.jpg)
Dholavira
in Gujarat, India, is one of the largest cities of Indus Valley
Civilisation, with stepwell steps to reach the water level in
artificially constructed reservoirs.
.jpg)
Skull
of a Harappan, Indian Museum
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 notes that the development of advanced cities coincides
with a reduction in rainfall, which may have triggered a reorganisation
into larger urban centers.
According to J.G. Shaffer and
D.A. Lichtenstein, 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".
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 cities and 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
evident 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
Authority and governance
:

So-called
"Priest King" statue, Mohenjo-daro, late Mature Harappan
period, National Museum, Karachi, Pakistan
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 cities like Mohenjo-daro had a
separate ruler, Harappa another, and so forth.
• Harappan
society had no rulers, and everybody enjoyed equal status.[better
source needed]
Technology :
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. [dubious –
discuss] 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. [citation needed] Harappan engineers
followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical
purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their
hexahedron weights.[citation needed]
_Balance_&_Weights.jpg)
Harappan weights found in the Indus Valley
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.
Harappans evolved some new techniques
in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin.[citation
needed]
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).
Arts
and crafts :

Fragment of a large deep vessel; circa 2500 BC; red pottery with
red and black slip-painted decoration; 12.5 × 15.5 cm (4
15/16 × 6 1/8 in.); Brooklyn Museum (New York City).
Various sculptures, seals, bronze vessels pottery, gold jewellery,
and anatomically detailed figurines in terracotta, bronze, and
steatite have been found at excavation sites. 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.
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.
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).
Human
statuettes :
The
Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro; 2300-1750 BCE; bronze; height: 10.8
cm (4 1/4 in.)
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 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 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. 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.
These statuettes remain controversial,
due to their advanced techniques. Regarding 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. A second rather
similar grey stone statuette of a dancing male was also found
about 150 meters away in a secure Mature Harappan stratum. Overall,
anthropologist Gregory Possehl tends to consider that these statuettes
probably form the pinnacle of Indus art during the Mature Harappan
period.
Seals
:

Stamp
seals, some of them with Indus script; probably made of steatite;
British Museum (London)
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.
Seals have been found at Mohenjo-daro
depicting a figure standing on its head, and another, on the Pashupati
seal, sitting cross-legged in what some [who?] call 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, Shiv.
A harp-like instrument depicted
on an Indus seal and two shell objects found at Lothal indicate
the use of stringed musical instruments.
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 civilizations in Western and
South Asia.
Trade
and transportation :
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. 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.
.jpg)
Harappan
burnished and painted clay ovoid Vase, with round carnelian beads.
(3rd Millennium-2nd Millennium BCE)
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.

Archaeological discoveries suggest that trade routes between Mesopotamia
and the Indus were active during the 3rd millennium BCE, leading
to the development of Indus-Mesopotamia relations.

Boat
with direction finding birds to find land. Model of Mohenjo-daro
seal, 2500-1750 BCE
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, 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. There is some evidence that trade
contacts extended to Crete and possibly to Egypt.
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). 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.
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.
In the 1980s, important archaeological
discoveries were made at Ras al-Jinz (Oman), demonstrating maritime
Indus Valley connections with the Arabian Peninsula.
Agriculture :
According to Gangal et al. (2014), there is strong archeological
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 origin at Mehrgarh, despite the similarities
which he notes between Neolithic sites from eastern Mesopotamia
and the western Indus valley, which are evidence of a "cultural
continuum" between those sites. Nevertheless, Jarrige concludes
that Mehrgarh has an earlier local background," and is not
a "'backwater' of the Neolithic culture of the Near East."
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, which are similar to Zebu cattle. Zebu cattle is still
common in India, and in Africa. It is different from the European
cattle, and had been originally domesticated on the Indian subcontinent,
probably in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan.
Research by J. Bates et al. (2016)
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.
Bates et al. (2016) 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.
Language :
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.
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. 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. According
to David McAlpin, the Dravidian languages were brought to India
by immigration into India from Elam. In earlier publications,
Renfrew also stated that proto-Dravidian was brought to India
by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent, 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." Heggarty
and Renfrew conclude that several scenarios are compatible with
the data, and that "the linguistic jury is still very much
out."
Possible writing system
:

Ten
Indus characters from the northern gate of Dholavira, dubbed the
Dholavira Signboard, one of the longest known sequences of Indus
characters
Between 400 and as many as 600 distinct Indus symbols 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. 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 2.5 cm (1 in) 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) 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.
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.
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". 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.
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.
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 most recent 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 BCE to 1000 BCE. The youngest group of paintings have
been in the news for a possible connection to the Indus Valley
Civilisation.
Religion
:

The
Pashupati seal, showing a seated figure, surrounded by animals
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.
An early and influential work
in the area that set the trend for Hindu interpretations of archaeological
evidence from the Harappan sites 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.

Swastik 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
Shiv (or Rudra), who is associated with asceticism, yog, and ling;
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 Shiv. 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. 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 Mahish, the Buffalo
God and the surrounding animals with vahan's (vehicles) of deities
for the four cardinal directions. 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-Shiv would be going too far. Despite the criticisms of Marshall's
association of the seal with a proto-Shiv icon, it has been interpreted
as the Tirthankar Rishabhanath by Jains and Vilas Sangave. Historians
such as Heinrich Zimmer and Thomas McEvilley believe that there
is a connection between first Jain Tirthankar Rishabhanath and
the Indus Valley civilisation.
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". 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. Many Indus Valley seals show animals, with
some depicting them being carried in processions, while others
show chimeric creations. One seal from Mohenjo-daro 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.
(in India there is a story mentioned in Purans about a Asur called
Mahishasur who was half human and half buffalo and was killed
by Goddess Durga).
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 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. The funerary practices of
the Harappan civilisation are marked by fractional burial (in
which the body is reduced to skeletal remains by exposure to the
elements before final interment), and even cremation.
Late Harappan :
.png)
Late
Harappan Period, c. 1900–1300 BCE

Late
Harappan figures from a hoard at Daimabad, 2000 BCE
Around 1900 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.
According to historian Upinder
Singh, "the general picture presented by the late Harappan
phase is one of a breakdown of urban networks and an expansion
of rural ones."
During
the period of approximately 1900 to 1700 BCE, multiple regional
cultures emerged within the area of the Indus civilisation. The
Cemetery H culture was in Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh,
the Jhukar
culture was in Sindh, and the Rangpur culture (characterised
by Lustrous Red Ware pottery) was in Gujarat. Other sites associated
with the Late phase of the Harappan culture are Pirak in Balochistan,
Pakistan, and Daimabad in Maharashtra, India.
The largest Late Harappan sites
are Kudwala in Cholistan, Bet Dwarka in Gujarat, and Daimabad
in Maharashtra, which can be considered as urban, but they are
smaller and few in number compared with the Mature Harappan cities.
Bet Dwarka was fortified and continued to have contacts with the
Persian Gulf region, but there was a general decrease of long-distance
trade. On the other hand, the period also saw a diversification
of the agricultural base, with a diversity of crops and the advent
of double-cropping, as well as a shift of rural settlement towards
the east and the south.
The pottery of the Late Harappan
period is described as "showing some continuity with mature
Harappan pottery traditions," but also distinctive differences.
Many sites continued to be occupied for some centuries, although
their urban features declined and disappeared. Formerly typical
artifacts such as stone weights and female figurines became rare.
There are some circular stamp seals with geometric designs, but
lacking the Indus script which characterised the mature phase
of the civilisation. Script is rare and confined to potsherd inscriptions.
There was also a decline in long-distance trade, although the
local cultures show new innovations in faience and glass making,
and carving of stone beads. Urban amenities such as drains and
the public bath were no longer maintained, and newer buildings
were "poorly constructed". Stone sculptures were deliberately
vandalised, valuables were sometimes concealed in hoards, suggesting
unrest, and the corpses of animals and even humans were left unburied
in the streets and in abandoned buildings.
During the later half of the 2nd
millennium BCE, most of the post-urban Late Harappan settlements
were abandoned altogether. Subsequent material culture was typically
characterised by temporary occupation, "the campsites of
a population which was nomadic and mainly pastoralist" and
which used "crude handmade pottery." However, there
is greater continuity and overlap between Late Harappan and subsequent
cultural phases at sites in Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar
Pradesh, primarily small rural settlements.
Aryan
:

Painted
pottery urns from Harappa (Cemetery H culture, c. 1900-1300 BCE)
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.
In
the Cemetery H culture (the late Harappan phase in the Punjab
region), some of the designs painted on the funerary urns have
been interpreted through the lens of Vedic literature : for instance,
peacocks with hollow bodies and a small human form inside, which
has been interpreted as the souls of the dead, and a hound that
can be seen as the hound of Yam, the god of death. This may indicate
the introduction of new religious beliefs during this period,
but the archaeological evidence does not support the hypothesis
that the Cemetery H people were the destroyers of the Harappan
cities.
Climate change and drought
:
Suggested contributory causes for the localisation of the IVC
include changes in the course of the river, and climate change
that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle
East. As of 2016 many scholars believe that drought, and a decline
in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, caused the collapse of the
Indus Civilisation. The climate change which caused the collapse
of the Indus Valley Civilisation was possibly due to "an
abrupt and critical mega-drought and cooling 4,200 years ago,"
which marks the onset of the Meghalayan Age, the present stage
of the Holocene.
The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed,
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. The Indian
monsoon declined and aridity increased, with the Ghaggar-Hakra
retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya, 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. 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.
Earthquakes :
There are archaeological evidences of major earthquakes at Dholavira
in 2200 BCE as well as at Kalibangan in 2700 and 2900 BCE. Such
succession of earthquakes, along with drought, may have contributed
to decline of Ghaggar-Harka system. Sea level changes are also
found at two possible seaport sites along the Makran coast which
are now inland. Earthquakes may have contributed to decline of
several sites by direct shaking damage, by sea level change or
by change in water supply.
Continuity :
Archaeological excavations indicate that the decline of Harappa
drove people eastward. According to Possehl, after 1900 BCE the
number of sites in today's India increased from 218 to 853. According
to Andrew Lawler, "excavations along the Gangetic plain show
that cities began to arise there starting about 1200 BCE, just
a few centuries after Harappa was deserted and much earlier than
once suspected." According to Jim Shaffer there was a continuous
series of cultural developments, just as in most areas of the
world. These link "the so-called two major phases of urbanisation
in South Asia".
At sites such as Bhagwanpura (in
Haryana), archaeological excavations have discovered an overlap
between the final phase of Late Harappan pottery and the earliest
phase of Painted Grey Ware pottery, the latter being associated
with the Vedic Culture and dating from around 1200 BCE. This site
provides evidence of multiple social groups occupying the same
village but using different pottery and living in different types
of houses: "over time the Late Harappan pottery was gradually
replaced by Painted Grey ware pottery," and other cultural
changes indicated by archaeology include the introduction of the
horse, iron tools, and new religious practices.
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. In their report on archaeological
excavations at Rojdi, Gregory Possehl and M.H. Raval write that
although there are "obvious signs of cultural continuity"
between the Harappan Civilisation and later South Asian cultures,
many aspects of the Harappan "sociocultural system"
and "integrated civilization" were "lost forever,"
while the Second Urbanisation of India (beginning with the Northern
Black Polished Ware culture, c. 600 BCE) "lies well outside
this sociocultural environment".
Post-Harappan :
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 region of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar
Pradesh, 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.
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. 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.
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 :
Near East :

Impression of a cylinder seal of the Akkadian Empire, with
label: "The Divine Sharkalisharri Prince of Akkad, Ibni-Sharrum
the Scribe his servant". The long-horned buffalo is thought
to have come from the Indus Valley, and testifies to exchanges
with Meluhha, the Indus Valley civilization. Circa 2217-2193 BCE.
Louvre Museum.
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,
the Akkadian
Empire 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). The IVC has been tentatively identified with
the toponym Meluhha known from Sumerian records; the Sumerians
called them Meluhhaites.
Shahr-i-Sokhta,
located in southeastern Iran shows trade route with Mesopotamia.
A number of seals with Indus script have been also found in Mesopotamian
sites.
Dasyu :
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 Rigved. 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-Europeanisation
of Western Europe.
Munda
:
Proto-Munda (or Para-Munda) and a "lost phylum" (perhaps
related or ancestral to the Nihali language) 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.
Source
:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation