Indus valley civilization

               

                     Indus valley                        civilisation

In the nineteenth century, British engineers searching for ballast for a railway line in what was then northwestern India and is now Pakistan stumbled upon the remains of an ancient city known only to locals. The engineers were only interested in the well-fired bricks from the ruins, and they proceeded to quarry the city for that resource. It was not until the early twentieth century, as other similar sites were uncovered, that archaeologists appreciated the full significance of this unwitting discovery. They determined that the ancient city, now reduced to railroad ballast, was part of a vast network of villages and towns constituting an entire civilization long forgotten by the rest of humanity. The discovery of this ancient culture, one of the most remarkable archaeological finds of modern times, compelled scholars to revise their understanding of the earliest history of India and has in recent years sparked a heated debate about the original inhabitants of the Indian Subcontinent.

The Indus Valley Civilization, so named because many of its settlements were situated along the Indus River, turned out to be one of the great cultures of the ancient world.1 What has come to light since the first excavations suggests that the Indus Valley Civilization was as impressive as ancient Egypt and Sumeria. While many Hindus today do not regard the Indus Valley Civilization as part of their sacred history, the evidence suggests that this culture contributed significantly to the grand complex known to many as Hinduism.

What is known about the Indus Valley culture comes exclusively from archaeological evidence, because its cryptic script has never been completely deciphered. We do not even know what the citizens of this civilization called themselves. The archaeological data indicate that the Indus Valley culture was established around 3300 b.c.e. and flourished between 2600 and 1900 b.c.e. Around 1900 b.c.e., it entered a period of decline and ultimately disappeared around 1400 b.c.e. At its height, the Indus Valley Civilization covered most of present-day Pakistan, the westernmost part of present-day India, and parts of Afghanistan, in an area estimated to include over five hundred thousand square miles.Over fifteen hundred Indus Valley sites throughout this region have been unearthed so far, and most have yet to be fully excavated. Several hundred of these sites are large enough to be classi fied as villages or towns. The largest and most important are cities known as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. These names are post–Indus Civilization designations that refer to towns built much later on the ruins of the ancient urban centers. In their heyday, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa may have each hosted a population as large as forty to fifty thousand, which was immense by ancient standards. Harappa appears to have been the capital, and accordingly the culture is sometimes referred to as the Harappan Civilization.

All of the Indus Valley municipalities were highly organized and carefully planned, displaying remarkably similar features. The uniformity of these cities suggests a centralized authority and code enforcement, since many of the settlements were over fifty miles apart. The remains of buildings and the layout of the towns indicate that their inhabitants prized order and organization. But aside from the urban consistency that indicates central administration, we know very little about the way Indus dwellers governed themselves or structured their society. We also know little about their economy except that village life focused on agriculture and cattle herding and life in the larger cities centered on the production of arts and crafts. The discovery of Indus Valley artifacts as far away as Mesopotamia and Central Asia suggests that trade played a significant role in the Harappan economy.

Although the archaeological data do not tell the complete story of this society, they do reveal enough for scholars to make informed judgments about its worldview and religious practices. Yet, since literary sources are unavailable for corroboration, and because the artifacts are often ambiguous, these judgments remain conjectures and are frequently debated by experts. We will consider the archaeological discoveries that appear to have religious import and attempt to comprehend what they tell us about the Indus culture and its possible impact on the development of the Hindu Traditions.

Purity and pollution

One of the most obvious and intriguing features of the Indus cities is the evidence that points to an intense concern with cleanliness. Private homes were furnished with sophisticated indoor bathing and toilet facilities that were plumbed and lined with ceramic tiles in a relatively modern way. The plumbing and sewer systems were superior to those found in other cultures of the time and are in fact superior to facilities found in many Indian and Pakistani homes today. Not only did individual homes feature advanced lavatories, but municipalities did as well. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa each had a large central bath with public access.

These public baths predate similar facilities in ancient Rome by many centuries. The ubiquity of the baths, their central locations, and the care with which they were constructed all point to a deep preoccupation with purity and cleanness.

Almost certainly, this concern was more than a matter of bodily hygiene. Like many premodern cultures, and like Hindus today, the Indus dwellers were probably anxious about ritual purity. Ritual purity, as compared to hygiene, involves more than removing the sweat and grime that accumulate on the body and avoiding germs that cause disease. In its most basic sense, ritual purity is the state of cleanness that is required for approaching what is sacred, or holy. It often concerns what and how one eats, the kinds of clothes and ornamentation one wears, the flow of one’s bodily fluids, and the great mysteries of life: birth, sex, and death. What counts as pure and impure varies greatly from culture to culture and time to time. Observant Jews and Muslims regard pork as unclean, but others consider it a great delicacy. Traditional Christianity once considered childbirth to be an occasion requiring ritual purification, but most contemporary Christians no longer regard it as such. In some societies, including Hindu India, one may become ritually contaminated simply by coming into contact with someone who is impure.

Observant Jews and Muslims regard pork as unclean, but others consider it a great delicacy. Traditional Christianity once considered childbirth to be an occasion requiring ritual purification, but most contemporary Christians no longer regard it as such. In some societies, including Hindu India, one may become ritually contaminated simply by coming into contact with someone who is impure.

We do not know what specific things the Indus dwellers regarded as ritually impure. Whatever the cause of impurity, the baths most likely served to remove contaminants and reinstate the order of things, just as public and private baths do in contemporary Hindu traditions. In modern India, the first religious act of the day for most Hindus is bathing, a ritual that brings the individual into the appropriate bodily and mental states for relating to the gods and other persons. Today, many Hindu temples have tanks or reservoirs that function as ritual baths. Many natural bodies of water, such as the river Ganges, serve this purpose as well There, devout Hindus restore the pristine order that might have been disrupted by inappropriate behavior or thoughts, or by contact with a person who is deemed unclean. What we find in the sophisticated baths and lavatories of the Harappan Civilization is probably the earliest expression of religious practices that run throughout Hindu history.

Artifacts

In addition to architectural ruins, the excavation of the Indus Valley cities has revealed a host of intriguing artifacts. Some of the most interesting of these relics are the hundreds of tiny soapstone seals that were used to stamp designs into soft clay. These seals were probably used to mark property in the merchant trade, as one might use a signet ring. Similar seals have been found as far away as Mesopotamia, suggesting a commercial connection between these two civilizations. While the practical use of the Harappan seals is not so mysterious, the significance of the images on the seals is still a matter of speculation and debate.

The great majority of the seals portray male animals with horns and massive flanks and legs. Indeed, throughout the artifacts found in the Indus Valley ruins, the male sex is almost exclusively represented by animals; artistic representations of the human male are rare. Many of the animals are easily recognizable: buffaloes, elephants, rhinoceroses, bulls, tigers, and antelopes. But other seals display strange creatures that appear to be products of the imagination, such as a three-headed antelope and a bull with a single horn protruding from its forehead, like a unicorn’s. This “unihorned” bull is one of the most common images on the seals. The bull often appears along with what seems to be a brazier or censer, either of which may have been used for ritual purposes. Braziers can be used for cooking sacrificial meat, and censers are receptacles for burning incense.

The soapstone images raise many questions. Why do they depict only male animals? Why is the male sex represented almost exclusively in animal rather than human form? Why do the images accentuate the animals’ horns and flanks? Do the animals have religious importance, as suggested by what appear to be ritual objects on some of the seals? If the seals have religious meaning, why would they have been used for commercial purposes, such as marking property for trade? Why are some of the animals realistic and others imaginary? Efforts to answer these questions will be speculative, of course, but not necessarily uninformed. What we know of other ancient cultures and later Hindu beliefs and practices can help guide our hypotheses. But because answers cannot be certain without confirmation from literary or other sources, they must be held tentatively and kept always open to revision.

With this caveat in mind, let us try to elucidate the meaning of these unusual images. To begin, we may reasonably conclude that the images express an intense fascination with, and perhaps anxiety about, sexuality and reproductive functions. That the seals portray only male animals, with their genitals on obvious display, supports this supposition, as does the strong emphasis on the animals’ horns and flanks. Still, we must wonder why animals rather than humans are taken as symbols of male sexuality. Perhaps these depictions are associated with the human appropriation of animal powers. Throughout the world, human beings have often sought to incorporate certain qualities they admired in animals. In some cultures, for example, eating the heart of a powerful animal was believed to allow a human to incorporate the animal’s courage and strength, which were thought to reside in the heart. The animal images of the Indus Valley seals may represent a symbolic attempt to obtain such powers. By creating and using visual representations of sexually potent animals, the dwellers of the Indus Valley may have intended to acquire that potency for themselves. Furthermore, it is possible that the animals themselves were regarded as sacred because of their sexual prowess. If so, they may have been worshiped and made the objects of cultic practice. Its frequent appearance in these designs might indicate that the bull was the principal object of veneration.

Further underscoring the Indus Valley culture’s captivation with sexuality is the discovery of numerous terra-cotta figurines depicting women with exaggerated hips, full thighs, bare breasts, and elaborate hairstyles. While men seemed somehow insufficient to symbolize male sexuality in this society, the same was not true of women.

Whether these images signify human women or goddesses (or different manifestations of a single goddess) cannot be ascertained by examining the figurines alone. But two factors support the argument that the images are goddesses. First, the Hindu traditions assumed to have roots in the religion of the Indus Valley do not always make sharp distinctions between the divine and the human domains. The gods and goddesses, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, can assume human forms, and individual human beings can come to be regarded as divine.2 Because of the permeability between these two realms, the fact that the figurines appear unremarkably human does not rule out the possibility that they symbolize the divine. Second, similar representations of females from the same time period have been unearthed in many parts of the world.These comparable figurines are almost certainly symbols of divine females.

The widespread discovery of such images has led some scholars to theorize the existence of a vast mother goddess religion that long antedated the worship of male gods.4 That hypothesis has been controversial and does not enjoy universal acceptance among scholars. But whether or not such a wide-reaching cult ever existed, it is quite likely that the dwellers of the Harappan Civilization venerated a mother goddess. The worship of a divine mother figure has a long, deep-rooted tradition in Hindu history, and thus it is at least plausible that the Indus Valley images are the vestiges of what may be the earliest form of that tradition. Even if the figurines are not goddesses per se, it seems evident that in the Indus Valley culture, the reproductive powers of women were revered and celebrated, and women themselves were perhaps regarded as sacred.

Sexuality and the Sacred

The intimate connection between sexuality and the sacred may strike some modern persons, particularly those living in the West, as odd. For many today, religion seems more involved in suppressing sexuality rather than encouraging and celebrating it. To understand the correlation of sex and divinity in the ancient world, we must appreciate several things about the way early humans viewed the world and their role in it. First, we must bear in mind that the reproductive process was the object of awe. How new human beings were produced by the sexual union of males and females was a fundamental mystery. The idea that new life was created by the merger of sperm and egg did not arise until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, little more than two centuries ago. That reproduction was controlled by powers beyond the reach of human beings was for millennia a reasonable assumption. Second, although the ancients thought reproduction was governed by forces greater than themselves, they often believed it was necessary to cooperate with and assist these forces in certain ways. One of the functions of sacrifice, for example, was to provide the gods with the nourishment and raw materials (in the form of meat and blood) they required to produce (or reproduce) life. In this sense, the divine and human realms were dependent on each other.

Third, most ancient peoples believed in the power of what we would call magic. Magic, in this sense, is the process of achieving a desired effect through the use of rituals, words, thoughts, and other technical means. For example, many societies believed ceremonial dancing could induce rain. Because reproduction, both human and animal, was so vital to human survival, it was often made the object of magical practices. The mythologies of some cultures told how the world and its inhabitants were produced by the sexual union of a god and goddess. In such cultures, men and women might perform ritualized sex acts to ensure the fecundity of the land and its people. A magical performance imitating the primordial act of the gods was thought to provoke them to re-create or to harness the same creative and procreative powers in the service of human reproduction. In the Harappan culture, the creation and usage of the soapstone seals and terra-cotta figurines depicting aspects of sexuality may have been a way of magically petitioning and assisting the divine forces in the crucial matter of continuing life.

Location

The region in which the Indus civilization developed lies at the intersection of two major zones: the dry Iranian plateau and the largely tropical South Asian peninsula, watered by the monsoons. These belonged originally to two different landmasses separated by a vast stretch of ocean. In the geologically recent past, the peninsula broke away from the southern continent of Gondwanaland and around thirty-five million years ago crashed into Asia (Laurasia), being driven against it, slipping beneath it, and causing the edges of both plates to buckle and rise, forming the Himalayas. A trough was created at the junction of the plates and gradually filled with eroded material, forming the IndoGangetic plain. The collision zone is still active, with the result that periodically earth tremors are experienced in and beyond the mountains, altering the landscape and often causing massive destruction. Areas rise or sink, and rivers change their courses. The annual flooding and alluviation also promote changes in the course of the major rivers and have impacted the coastline.

The Indus River rises in the Himalayas, as do the other rivers that form the Punjab. These come together at the Panjnad to form the massive lower course of the Indus, flowing through Sindh, a region that is largely desert beyond the alluvial stretches along the river. Other tributaries join the Indus from the mountains of Baluchistan, which separate the Indus plains from the Iranian plateau, and the mighty river fans out into a delta in the Arabian Sea. To the east of the Punjab other rivers rise from the Himalayas and the Siwalik Hills: These include the Ganges, flowing east to a huge delta in the Bay of Bengal, and the Yamuna, now the companion of the Ganges but in antiquity probably contributing to a major river that flowed southwest. Identified as the Saraswati River eulogized in early Indian literature, this is now reduced to a series of small seasonal rivers periodically flowing into the largely dry Ghaggar-Hakra riverbed. The ancient Saraswati may have spent its waters in an inland delta in the Great Indian (Thar) Desert that borders the Indus region to the south, or it may have continued to the sea, joining the Indus delta or flowing into the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat. Gujarat was the southern province of the Indus civilization: Today Kutch is separated from the Indian mainland by the marshy Ranns, but in Indus times the latter were probably open water. Rabi (winter) cultivation is the main practice in most of the greater Indus region, as it is in the lands farther west, with wheat and barley as the principal crops. In many areas where cultivation is not possible, grasslands offer pastures for feeding substantial numbers of domestic animals; forests in upland areas and various minerals, such as metal ores and gemstones, are also exploited.Beyond the desert to the south and into the lands of the Ganges to the east, the environment of the subcontinent changes. The most dramatic difference is a substantial increase in rainfall, particularly during the southwest monsoon from June to September; there is also far less seasonal variation in temperature, and in the Ganges Valley there was originally dense forest that presented a major barrier to agricultural settlement. Here kharif (summer) cultivation is the norm and the staple crops are rice and a variety of millets: Most of these grains, however, did not come under cultivation until the late third millennium or later. At the time of the Indus civilization, the peninsula and eastern South Asia were sparsely occupied by groups living by hunting, gathering, and fishing or by farming often dominated by animal husbandry. Economically the people of the Indus were linked with regions to their west, in Baluchistan and the Iranian plateau, with whom there were longstanding communications and trade; but in the Indus period links were also established and developed with the cultures of the Gulf, initially with those of Oman but also with the emerging empires of southern Mesopotamia and with the lands between the two civilizations. Seaborne trade continued to be of great importance to the subcontinent from the first millennium BCE onward.