Harappan Era: Breakthroughs & Enigmas (3000 BCE - 1700 BCE)

The hauntingly beautiful ruins of the Harappan city of Dholavira lie on a small crescent-shaped island called Khadir in the middle of the Greater Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. It is surrounded on all sides by salt and a salty marsh today. But it was not always like this. Around 4,000 years ago, in its heyday, Dholavira was a vibrant port site and an emporium of the Bronze Age world, where ships from the Indus and the Persian Gulf called in with exotic fare like lapis lazuli, turquoise, copper, wood and fine cloth. All this was traded for goods made at Dholavira and its hinterland. In fact, archaeologist R S Bisht, who excavated the site, calls Dholavira the site with the first recognised ‘Special Economic Zone’ or ‘SEZ’ in the subcontinent because half the citadel was a series of workshops accessible only through the upper town where the elite lived. Today, when the term is popular, it is almost unbelievable to think there was a ‘SEZ’ 4,200 years ago! The Kutch, is still rich in minerals such as chalcedony, chert, ochres, white clay, Fuller’s earth (mung mitti), glass-sand, salt, gypsum, different types of rock and building materials, and these were all exploited by the Harappans. There is clear evidence of bead-making at Dholavira from the earliest period onwards. What’s more, stone pillar members from Dholavira have been excavated as far away as Mohenjodaro and at Harappa, over 700 km away! But that’s not all. Dholavira and the Harappan world in general throw up many more exciting and fantastic facts about what life was like thousands of years ago. Decades of painstaking excavations and research have pulled out a wealth of information. And as any archaeologist working on this era will tell you, the information available in textbooks or for public access, are decades behind actual work on the ground. We go wide across the Harappan world and deep into sites and reports, to piece together what we know – as of now based on excavations, climate records, tectonic history, the many attempts to decipher the script and scientific research . A Different World Dholavira, which was discovered in the 1970s by archaeologist J P Joshi (former Joint Director of the Archaeological Survey of India) had the amazing good fortune to have never been re-occupied after its abandonment at the end of the Bronze Age. Here, you will find evidence of the rise of the city to its prime and the devastating changes that ensured its slide into oblivion. Around 1900 BCE, tectonic movement in the Yamuna Divide of the Himalayas dried up the Saraswati River. This was because of the rerouting of the Sutlej into the Indus and the Yamuna into the Ganga. The Nara (the lower half of the Saraswati) River, which ran parallel to the Indus, dried up, no longer flowing into the Rann. The mouth of the Indus then slowly moved towards the east, and the Rann, never a very deep sea, was filled with silt. Dholavira, with its cyclopean walls and impeccably organised water management system and town planning, was soon in decline as its access to the sea was cut off. It never recovered. It is important to note that, today, when we look at the crumbling metropolises of the Harappans in their dusty settings, we are not seeing them as they were in their heyday. Around 4,500 years ago, these cities were at their peak. They were bustling centres of urbanism amid lush fields on the banks of mighty rivers. Ports like Dholavira, Desalpur, Padri and Lothal were within sight of the sea, not stranded on dusty flats or surrounded by salt flats. We need to understand the change in climatic conditions and the environment that turned verdant lands into dust bowls. Research by teams specialising in geology, hydrology, geography, palaeobotany, environmental studies and climate sciences have done yeoman service to the cause of Harappan archaeology by helping us reconstruct the days of yore. What Happened To the Harappans? In the 100 years since its discovery in 1921, we now know that the Harappan Civilisation was the most widespread civilisation of its time. It was more than twice as large as either the Egyptian or the Mesopotamian civilisations. The discovery of Harappa and the sites thereafter, opened up layers and layers of the subcontinent’s past, catapulting its antiquity over 3,000 years back. If the early excavations carried out at the site of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro gave us insights into the advances in urbanism perfected by the people living here, subsequent excavations – a flurry of them all the way from 1938 at Amri, Nal, Chanhudharo, Kot Diji and many other sites, and more recently, sites like Rakhigarhi, Farmana, Bhirrana and Binjore – revealed an even hoarier past. We now know more than ever before about the Harappan world. For long, there have been threebig questions that have dogged us about the Harappans: Where did they come from? What did they write about – the challenge of deciphering their script and What happened to them? The earliest supposition was that the Indus Valley civilisation was an extension of the mighty Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia or perhaps of the Elamites of Iran. It seemed impossible to believe that this was a completely autochthonous culture, one that had developed indigenously. But subsequent excavations at sites like Kot Diji were already pushing back the antecedents, when French archaeologists Jean Francoise and Catherine Jarrige excavated the sites of Mehrgarh and Naushero, and took back the antecedents of the Harappans, in a direct genealogy, all the way back to the pre-pottery, Neolithic culture dateable to 8000 BCE. Mehrgarh & the Dawn of a Civilisation (8000 BCE - 2500 BCE) Today, not only do we know about the antecedents of the Harappans, we also know of contemporary cultures in Kashmir that seem to have been influenced by them. At the Neolithic site of Burzahom in Kashmir, we see a pot with motifs uncannily reminiscent of Kot Diji (over 1000 km away). We also have very early Neolithic sites in the Ganga Valley at Jhusi (the location of the ‘Triveni Sangam’ outside Allahabad) going back to 7000 BCE, and at sites like Lahuradewa in eastern Uttar Pradesh dated to 6500 BCE. As far as the end of the Harappans was concerned, there was a fair share of postulations and hypothesis too. The era of the Second Urbanisation in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab or plains was separated by at least 1,000 years from the last known, Late Harappan sites (around 1500 BCE). Because so little was known of this intervening period, it was often called a ‘Dark Age’. The first person to really come up with what seemed a plausible theory on this period was Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. After studying the excavations at both Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, he concluded that the evidence pointed towards a large-scale invasion of the Harappan Civilisation by an Aryan horde that h ...