CBSE Class 12 History

Why the civilisation is called Harappan

The first city of this civilisation to be found was Harappa, in what is now Punjab province in Pakistan, and archaeologists have a convention of naming a culture after the first site where its distinctive objects were identified. The civilisation is therefore called Harappan, and it is also called the Indus civilisation because many of its sites lie in the valley of the Indus and its tributaries. Its time is the Bronze Age of South Asia, and it is usually described as the first urban culture of the subcontinent.

Harappa was known to the British long before anyone understood what it was. Alexander Cunningham, who began the Archaeological Survey of India's work in 1861 and later became its first Director-General, visited the site and was given a seal found there, which he recorded, but he was looking for the cities that Chinese Buddhist pilgrims had described from the first millennium CE, and he did not place the seal in an earlier period. In the nineteenth century the ruins were also damaged: bricks from the mounds at Harappa were carried off and used as ballast for railway lines laid in the region (Cunningham himself noted that enough had gone to lay about 100 miles of the line between Lahore and Multan), which destroyed a great deal of the town's structure before any proper excavation.

The excavations of the 1920s

Excavation began in earnest in the 1920s. Daya Ram Sahni began work at Harappa in 1921, and R. D. Banerji, working in Sindh, began to dig at Mohenjodaro in 1922. Both men found objects of the same kind, notably stamp seals carrying a pictorial design and signs in an unknown script. When it became clear that two sites hundreds of kilometres apart had produced such similar material, John Marshall, the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey, announced in 1924 that a civilisation older than anything known in the subcontinent had been found.

Mortimer Wheeler, who became Director-General in 1944, brought a more systematic method to the work. John Marshall and the earlier excavators had dug in horizontal units, measured uniformly across the mound, whatever the soil showed, so that finds from different layers were grouped together; Wheeler insisted that the excavator follow the actual layers in the soil, the stratigraphy, because objects found in one layer are older than those found above it. He also took an interest in the fortified mound at Harappa and in the structures at Mohenjodaro.

After Partition in 1947 many of the major sites, including Harappa and Mohenjodaro, lay in Pakistan, and Indian archaeologists turned to finding sites on the Indian side. Kalibangan in Rajasthan was excavated from the 1960s, Lothal in Gujarat from the 1950s, Banawali and Rakhigarhi in Haryana later, and Dholavira in Gujarat in the 1990s, where R. S. Bisht led the work. Sites continue to be added, so counts of the number of Harappan settlements differ from one survey to the next.

Dating and phases

Archaeologists divide the history of the Harappan cultures into three phases. The cultures that came before the urban phase are called Early Harappan. The Mature Harappan phase, from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, is the period in which the cities and the shared features of the civilisation appear: planned towns, a common system of weights, seals, the script and the long-distance trade. After about 1900 BCE most of the mature cities were abandoned or reduced, and the cultures that continue in the same regions are called Late Harappan.

The Early Harappan cultures have a regional character and show a gradual growth in settlement, and some Early Harappan sites later became Mature Harappan towns, while others were abandoned. The continuity of crafts and pottery suggests that the Mature civilisation grew out of earlier local cultures and was not brought in from elsewhere.

Extent

The Mature Harappan civilisation spread over a very large area, much bigger than the Mesopotamian or Egyptian civilisations of the same time. Its sites are found from Afghanistan in the north-west to Gujarat in the south and from the Makran coast of Balochistan in the west to the Ganga–Yamuna doab in the east. The main concentrations were in the Indus valley and its tributaries, along the dried bed of the Ghaggar–Hakra in Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, and in Gujarat.

The sites were not all of one kind. A few were large cities, many were small farming villages, and some were specialised settlements. Chanhudaro in Sindh was almost entirely devoted to craft production, including bead-making. Balakot and Nageshwar, on the coast, were centres where shell was worked, and Shortughai in northern Afghanistan was a trading outpost close to a source of lapis lazuli, the blue stone that Harappan craftworkers prized. Others, such as Lothal, were ports or points of exchange between regions with different resources.

What archaeologists use as evidence

Because the script has not been deciphered, knowledge of the civilisation comes almost wholly from material remains. Archaeologists use the plans of settlements and houses, the tools and pottery, the remains of plants and bones of animals, the ornaments, seals and weights, and the burials. Finds are classified by material, such as stone, metal, bone, shell or clay, and also by function. Deciding on function is often difficult, because the same object may have served several purposes and because a modern archaeologist can only guess at what an unfamiliar object was for.

One method is to look for the thing in the present. An object whose purpose is uncertain may be compared with something similar in a later society or in a society that still uses it, and this has produced some well-known interpretations, but it is a source of error as well, since a similar form does not prove a similar meaning. Where a find is unusual, for example in a context apart from houses, archaeologists tend to read it as religious or ritual, and this habit has itself been questioned.

Archaeologists also study where an object is found. Finds within a house that cluster in one room suggest an activity done there, and finds that are rare and found in particular locations suggest a social difference between households. In the Harappan case the burial goods, the sizes of houses and the concentration of costly materials in certain places have all been used to argue about differences in status in the cities.