A civilisation nobody recognised until the 1920s
Inscribed seals had been turning up at Harappa, in the Punjab, since the late 1800s, but nobody knew what they belonged to. Only in the 1920s, when excavations began at Harappa and then at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, did archaeologists realise that the buried cities of the Indus plain were a civilisation of their own. It is also called the Harappan culture, after the first city to be identified.
It grew out of a long local past. Farmers were growing wheat and barley and herding cattle, sheep and goats at Mehrgarh, in Baluchistan, by around 6500 BCE, and for nearly four thousand years regional cultures, each with its own pottery and figurines, traded with one another. Around 2600 BCE these cultures were drawn into a single urban culture, with the same writing, weights and symbols across a huge area, and it held together for about 700 years. In Egypt, those were the centuries of the Great Pyramid.
Twice the size of Egypt
At its height the civilisation covered some 650,000 square kilometres, from the mountains of Baluchistan and Afghanistan to the coasts of Sindh and Gujarat: more than twice the size of the United Kingdom. Its heart was the plain of the Indus and of a second river to the east, the Ghaggar-Hakra, which has since dried up. Snowmelt and monsoon rains made that plain rich in fields, pasture, fish and timber, enough to feed large cities.
More than a thousand Harappan sites are known, most of them villages and small towns. The largest cities include Mohenjo-daro on the Indus, Harappa on the Ravi, Ganweriwala in Cholistan, Rakhigarhi in Haryana and Dholavira, on an island in the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. Dholavira was built largely of stone, depended on a chain of reservoirs for its water, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021.
Streets, drains and a bath in almost every house
Indus cities were planned. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa stand on massive platforms of mud brick that kept them above the seasonal floods. Their main streets run north-south and east-west, with smaller streets and alleys leading off into the neighbourhoods, and in the large cities the houses were built of fired brick, often two storeys high.
The most striking thing is the water. Almost every house had a bathing area with a watertight floor, supplied by a well in the house or the neighbourhood, and every house was connected to a city-wide drainage system of brick channels. Someone had to plan it, build it and keep it clear, and a system like that reflects a well-organised civic authority.
So who was in charge?
This is the great puzzle of the Indus. Egypt had pharaohs and pyramids, and Mesopotamia had kings, palaces and temple towers. At Mohenjo-daro and Harappa archaeologists have found no palace, no royal tomb and no temple they can identify with confidence. The dead were buried with simple ornaments of shell, copper or agate, while jewellery of gold and silver stayed with the living. And since the script cannot be read, there is no name of a ruler either.
The first excavators filled the gap with their own expectations. A small bearded figure in steatite was nicknamed the “Priest-King”, and the idea grew of a single priest-king ruling the whole civilisation from two capitals. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, one of the excavators of Harappa, lists it among the misconceptions left by the early digs.
What the evidence does show is control. Weights were cut in the same graded sizes everywhere, rising in a binary series from 0.856 grams to a common unit of about 13.7 grams, then in decimal steps, and they were probably used to control trade and perhaps to collect taxes. Seals were made only in a few restricted workshops. Large houses in every part of Mohenjo-daro could have belonged to merchants or landowners, and the centre of power seems to have shifted between neighbourhoods over time. Probably, then, each city was run by its own ruling groups, held together with the others by trade, writing and shared symbols. Whether anyone stood above them, we don’t know.
A script that still can’t be read
The Indus people wrote. Their signs appear on pottery and tablets and above all on small square seals of stone, carved with an animal and a line of symbols. The most common animal is a one-horned “unicorn”; others show a bull, an elephant or a rhinoceros. Unlike the cylinder seals rolled across clay in the art of Mesopotamia, these were stamped, and a sealing of clay could close a jar of goods.
Reading them is another matter. The inscriptions are short, about seven signs on average, and no bilingual text has been found to give a key, as the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Until longer texts or a bilingual inscription turn up, the script will probably stay undeciphered, and with it whatever it records: the names of people or gods, perhaps, or of goods.
Small works, made with skill
The best-known Indus sculptures fit in your hand. Craftsmen carved figures in steatite and limestone, modelled many terracotta figurines of people and animals, and made bangles and necklaces of gold, agate, jasper and a glassy faience (a glazed paste of crushed quartz) in white, blue and green.
The most famous is a bronze figure 10.5 cm high, found by Ernest Mackay at Mohenjo-daro in 1926 and known as the “Dancing Girl”. It was made by the lost-wax method: the figure was modelled in wax and covered in clay, the clay was heated so that the wax ran out, and molten metal was poured into the hollow it left. Whether she is dancing, nobody knows; the nickname is modern.
Trade with Mesopotamia and beyond
The cities lived on trade. Pack animals, river boats and bullock carts moved goods inside the Indus region, probably cotton, timber, grain and livestock above all, while beads, shell ornaments and metal tools made by specialist craftsmen spread across it. Further away, Indus goods reached Central Asia, the Gulf and the cities of Mesopotamia and Iran, such as Ur and Susa.
Mesopotamian texts of the third millennium BCE speak of trade with seafaring lands called Magan and Meluhha, near South Asia, and Indus objects have turned up at Mesopotamian sites. Dholavira, on its island in Gujarat, sat on the sea routes towards Magan, the Oman peninsula, and Mesopotamia.
What happened after 1900 BCE?
Around 1900 BCE the big cities began to decline. The end was slow: over the following centuries the civilisation broke up into regional cultures that kept some of its crafts and symbols. Seals, writing and standard weights fell out of use as the ruling groups lost control of the long trade networks that had held such a large area together.
Rivers were part of the cause. Around 1700 BCE the tributaries of the Ghaggar-Hakra were diverted, so the river dried up, while the Indus shifted its course and flooded. People moved to the central Indus valley, the plains of the Ganges and Yamuna, and Gujarat. The old idea of an invasion by “Aryans” who destroyed the cities has been rejected by most scholars, because there is no archaeological, biological or literary evidence for it.
Some things lasted. Ways of building, crafts and perhaps parts of social life carried on into the cities of the Early Historic period, from about 600 BCE. Who ran the Indus cities is still an open question, and it may stay open until the script is read.
Where to see it
The two great excavated cities are Mohenjo-daro in Sindh and Harappa in the Punjab, both in Pakistan; in India, Dholavira in Gujarat is one of the best preserved. The Priest-King and the unicorn seal are in the National Museum in Karachi, and the Dancing Girl is in the National Museum in New Delhi.
Sources
- J. M. Kenoyer, “Around the Indus in 90 Slides”, introduction and essays 2-8, and slide records (Priest King, Unicorn Seal, Weights, Bath Area), harappa.com.
- J. M. Kenoyer, “Mohenjo-daro: An Ancient Indus Valley Metropolis”, harappa.com.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro” (138) and “Dholavira: a Harappan City” (1645).
- National Virtual Library of India, museum record “Dancing Girl”, National Museum, New Delhi.
