/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/INDIA: New Clues to End of Ancient Civilisation

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 18 2000 (IPS) - Were marauding Aryan horsemen responsible for the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation? Or did a prehistoric international trade depression finish off the Harappans?

The discovery, in June, of a major Harappan site at Muzaffarnagar district in India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state, has yielded new clues to the mystery of what actually happened to the people who built the world’s first planned cities and left behind an as yet undeciphered script.

The Aryan invasion theory, put forward by British archaeologists who first excavated the Indus valley sites in northwestern India early in the last century, and unquestioned for decades, is now being seriously challenged by the latest find.

According to leading Indian archaeologist Ravinder Singh Bisht, the people of Harappa — the first discovered city of the Indus Valley Civilisation — seem to have suffered a slow decline due to increasing aridity in their farmlands and loss of a flourishing trade with Mesopotamia.

Bisht, a senior Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) official with decades of excavating experience at major Harappan sites, expects Muzaffarnagar to disprove many of the myths that have surrounded the Indus Valley civilisation since Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were first excavated by Sir John Marshall in the 1920s.

As with the Harappan sites, this shows not a scrap of evidence that Aryan invaders had laid waste to the Indus valley civilisation and driven its supposedly Dravidian builders to the east and south of the Indian peninsula.

Muzaffarnagar is 1,000 km to the east of Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan’s Sindh province. To Bisht, the Muzaffarnagar find showed the eastward march of the inhabitants of the Indus valley as they searched for new farmlands and domestic trade opportunities for their fine products which included gold and silver jewellery, figurines and pottery.

In fact, the ASI and the local officials are trying to persuade farmers in Muzaffarnagar to return some of the Harappan gold and silver they carried away after one of them stumbled on the site in his fields.

“Such a large collection of 2000 BC jewellery has never been found at any other Harappan site,” said Komal Anand, ASI Director General. The excavation yielded 10 kg of jewellery in gold, silver, agate and onyx.

Equally important to archaeologists was the discovery of the baked bricks, ochre-coloured pottery with black motifs, vases, dishes in various shapes and sizes and jars, which are the hallmark of Harappan artefacts.

While Harappa and Mohenjo Daro gained worldwide fame because of their early discovery and excavation by the British, several other equally important site were uncovered after the departure of the British colonial rulers from the subcontinent in 1947.

These include Rakhigarhi in India’s northern Haryana state, Dholavira and Lothal in western coastal Gujarat state, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Indeed, the term ‘Indus Valley Civilisation’, is fast becoming a misnomer considering its ever-increasing geographical extent stretching 1,500 km from Sutkagen Dor close to Pakistan’s border with Iran to Muzaffarnagar.

There are no less than 1,400 Indus sites, including one as far south as Daimabad, near Mumbai in India’s southwestern Maharashtra state and another in northern Afghanistan. All of them show unmistakable signs of having been flourishing trade centres.

Wherever they went, the Harappans used the same size of bricks for their citadels and fortifications which must have inspired as much confidence in ancient traders as their standard weights and measures.

Ancient Mesopotamian texts speak of a flourishing trade in gold, ivory, copper and timber with at least two Indian settlements at Makkan and Meluha as far back as the third millennium B.C.

A number of Indus valley objects have been found buried in Mesopotamian graves and some dated 2,400 B.C have been recovered from Tel Asmar in modern Iraq. The famous limestone bust of a bearded and robed priest recovered from Mohenjo Daro is believed to be Sumerian art or inspired by it.

Excavations at Lothal, an Indus Valley port town on the Gujarat coast, resulted in the discovery of a 700-foot long dock built of bricks that was apparently a point of entry and exit for the Mesopotamian trade.

The numerous seals found at Lothal are believed to have been used to label imports and exports passing through the massive dock which was serviced by a 64-room warehouse.

According to Bisht, all this is evidence that the Harappans built up a huge business empire that collapsed under its own weight after trade ties with Mesopotamia snapped around 2,000 B.C. when that region was under attack by Aryan tribes like the Cassettes, Hittites and the Mitten.

Many early excavators of the Indus Valley culture easily assumed these Aryan tribes also invaded India and destroyed the Harappan cities although hard archaeological evidence has been missing. Vedic Aryan texts do show a disdain for urban life.

The Aryans did not make their appearance in India till 1,500 B.C. and, in all probability, came across the abandoned citadels of the Harappans with signboards that were as unintelligible to them as they have been to everyone else ever since.

British indologist David Frawley has described the Aryan invasion theory as more political than archaeological and one that served the purpose of dividing Indians between the Aryan north and the Dravidian south in colonial times.