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Indus Valley Civilization Indus Valley Civilization The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age and Rakhigarhi,[24] Rakhigarhi in Haryana, India, being civilisation (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 the largest Indus Valley Civilization site with 350-hectare BCE, pre-Harappan cultures starting c.7500 BCE[3][4]) (3.5 km2) area.[3][25][26][27] in northwest Indian subcontinent (including present day The Harappan language is not directly attested and its af- Pakistan, northwest India[5]) and also in some regions [6][1] filiation is uncertain since the Indus script is still unde- in northeast Afghanistan. Along with Ancient Egypt ciphered. A relationship with the Dravidian or Elamo- and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisa- Dravidian language family is favoured by a section of tions of the Old World, and the most widespread among [28][29] [7] 2 [8] scholars, while others suggest an Austroasiatic lan- them, covering an area of 1.25 million km . It flour- guage related to Munda.[30] ished in the basins of the Indus River, one of the major rivers of Asia, and the now dried up Sarasvati River,[9][10] which once coursed through northwest India and eastern Pakistan [6] together with its tributaries flowed along a 1 Discovery and history of excava- channel, presently identified as that of the Ghaggar-Hakra tion River on the basis of various scientific studies.[11][12][13] Due to the spread of the civilization along both the river valleys, some scholars use the term Indus-Sarasvati Civilisation.[14][15] At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a pop- ulation of over five million.[16] Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed new techniques in handicraft (carnelian products, seal carving) and metallurgy (copper, bronze, lead, and tin). The Indus cities are noted for their urban planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage systems, water supply systems, and clusters of large non- residential buildings.[17] The Indus Valley Civilization is also known as the Harap- pan Civilization, after Harappa, the first of its sites to be excavated in the 1920s, in what was then the Punjab Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, with the Great Bath in the province of British India, and is now in Pakistan.[18] The front discovery of Harappa, and soon afterwards, Mohenjo- Daro, was the culmination of work beginning in 1861 with the founding of the Archaeological Survey of In- dia in the British Raj.[19] Excavation of Harappan sites has been ongoing since 1920, with important break- throughs occurring as recently as 1999.[20] There were earlier and later cultures, often called Early Harappan and Late Harappan, and pre-Harappan cultures, in the same area of the Harappan Civilization. The Harappan civilisa- tion is sometimes called the Mature Harappan culture to distinguish it from these cultures. Bhirrana in Haryana, India may be the oldest pre-Harappan site, dating back to 7570-6200 BCE.[3][21] By 1999, over 1,056 cities and settlements had been found, of which 96 have been excavated,[22] mainly in the general region of the Indus and the Sarasvati River[23]and Early Harappan Period, c. 3300–2600 BCE their tributaries. Among the settlements were the ma- jor urban centres of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro (UNESCO The ruins of Harappa were first described in 1842 by World Heritage Site), Dholavira, Ganeriwala in Cholistan Charles Masson in his Narrative of Various Journeys 1 2 2 CHRONOLOGY called Brahminabad. Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt bricks, and, “convinced that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I wanted”, the city of Brah- minabad was reduced to ballast.[32] A few months later, further north, John’s brother William Brunton’s “section of the line ran near another ruined city, bricks from which had already been used by villagers in the nearby village of Harappa at the same site. These bricks now provided bal- last along 93 miles (150 km) of the railroad track running from Karachi to Lahore”.[32] In 1872–75 Alexander Cunningham published the first Harappan seal (with an erroneous identification as Brahmi letters).[33] It was half a century later, in 1912, that more Harappan seals were discovered by J. Fleet, Mature Harappan Period, c. 2600–1900 BCE prompting an excavation campaign under Sir John Hu- bert Marshall in 1921–22 and resulting in the discov- ery of the civilisation at Harappa by Sir John Marshall, Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni and Madho Sarup Vats, and at Mohenjo-daro by Rakhal Das Banerjee, E. J. H. MacKay, and Sir John Marshall. By 1931, much of Mohenjo-Daro had been excavated, but excavations con- tinued, such as that led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944. Among other archaeologists who worked on IVC sites before the independence in 1947 were Ahmad Hasan Dani, Brij Basi Lal, Nani Gopal Majumdar, and Sir Marc Aurel Stein. Following the independence, the bulk of the archaeolog- ical finds were inherited by Pakistan where most of the IVC was based, and excavations from this time include Late Harappan Period, c. 1900–1300 BCE those led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1949, archaeolog- ical adviser to the Government of Pakistan. Outposts of the Indus Valley civilisation were excavated as far west as Sutkagan Dor in Baluchistan, as far north as at Shortugai on the Amu Darya (the river’s ancient name was Oxus) in current Afghanistan, as far east as at Alamgirpur, Uttar Pradesh, India and as far south as at Malwan, in modern day Surat, Gujarat, India.[34] In 2010, heavy floods hit Haryana in India and dam- aged the archaeological site of Jognakhera, where ancient copper smelting furnaces were found dating back almost 5,000 years. The Indus Valley Civilization site was hit by almost 10 feet of water as the Sutlej Yamuna link canal Skull of Indus Valley inhabitants, Indian Museum overflowed.[35] in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab, where lo- cals talked of an ancient city extending “thirteen cosses" 2 Chronology (about 25 miles), but no archaeological interest would at- tach to this for nearly a century.[note 1] Main article: Periodization of the Indus Valley Civiliza- In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham, later direc- tion tor general of the archaeological survey of northern In- dia, visited Harappa where the British engineers John The mature phase of the Harappan civilisation lasted and William Brunton were laying the East Indian Rail- from c. 2600 to 1900 BCE. With the inclusion of the pre- way Company line connecting the cities of Karachi and decessor and successor cultures — Early Harappan and Lahore. John wrote: “I was much exercised in my mind Late Harappan, respectively — the entire Indus Valley how we were to get ballast for the line of the railway”. Civilization may be taken to have lasted from the 33rd They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines, to the 14th centuries BCE. The early Harappan cultures 3 while smaller isolated colonies can be found as far away as Turkmenistan and in Gujarat. Coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor[40] in Western Baluchis- tan to Lothal[41] in Gujarat. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus River at Shortughai in north- ern Afghanistan,[42] in the Gomal River valley in north- western Pakistan,[43] at Manda,Jammu on the Beas River near Jammu,[44] India, and at Alamgirpur on the Hindon River, only 28 km from Delhi.[45] Indus Valley sites have been found most often on rivers, but also on the ancient seacoast,[46] for example, Balakot,[47] and on islands, for example, Dholavira.[48] There is evidence of dry river beds overlapping with the Hakra channel in Pakistan and the seasonal Ghag- gar River in India. Many Indus Valley sites have been discovered along the Ghaggar-Hakra beds.[49] Among them are: Rupar, Rakhigarhi, Sothi, Kalibangan, and Ganwariwala.[50] According to J. G. Shaffer and D. A. Lichtenstein,[51] the Harappan Civilization “is a fusion of the Bagor, Hakra, and Koti Dij traditions or 'ethnic groups’ in the Ghaggar-Hakra valley on the borders of India and Pakistan”.[49] According to some archaeologists, more than 500 Harap- pan sites have been discovered along the dried up river Indus Valley pottery, 2500–1900 BC beds of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries,[52] in contrast to only about 100 along the Indus and its [53] are preceded by the Mehrgarh (c.7000-3300 BCE), with tributaries; consequently, in their opinion, the appella- Bhirrana even dating back to 7570-6200 BCE, according tion Indus Ghaggar-Hakra civilisation or Indus-Saraswati to a December 2014 report by the Archaeological Survey civilisation is justified. However, these politically inspired of India.[3][4] arguments are disputed by other archaeologists who state that the Ghaggar-Hakra desert area has been left un- Two terms are employed for the periodisation of the touched by settlements and agriculture since the end of [36][37] IVC: Phases and Eras. The Early Harappan, Ma- the Indus period and hence shows more sites than those ture Harappan, and Late Harappan phases are also called found in the alluvium of the Indus valley; second, that the Regionalisation, Integration, and Localisation eras, the number of Harappan sites along the Ghaggar-Hakra respectively, with the Regionalization era reaching back river beds has been exaggerated and that the Ghaggar- to the Neolithic Mehrgarh II period, the discovery of Hakra, when it existed, was a tributary of the Indus, so which “changed the entire concept of the Indus civiliza- the new nomenclature is redundant.[54] “Harappan Civi- tion”, according to Ahmad Hasan Dani, professor emer- lization” remains the correct one, according to the com- itus at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
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