The Big Questions

• What is a civilisation?
• What was the earliest civilisation of the Indian Subcontinent?
• What were its major achievements?

What Is a Civilisation?

• The first human groups settled down, practised agriculture, developed technologies such as construction, metallurgy and transport, and moved towards ‘civilisation’.
• In general, the term is used for an advanced stage of human societies.
• To be precise, a ‘civilisation’ should have at least the seven characteristics below.

When did civilisation begin?

• All these characteristics are present in most societies in the world today.
• But civilisation began at different times in different parts of the world.
• In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) that happened about 6,000 years ago.
• The civilisation in ancient Egypt followed a few centuries later.
• Humanity would not have reached its present stage without the enormous contributions of those ancient civilisations.
• Our story here begins in the northwest region of the Indian Subcontinent.

From Village to City

• The vast plains of the Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan) and Sindh (now in Pakistan) are watered by the Indus River and its tributaries.
• This made the plains fertile and favourable to agriculture.
• A little further east, a few millenniums ago, another river — the Sarasvatī — flowed from the foothills of the Himalayas through Haryana, Punjab, parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
• In this whole region, from about 3500 BCE, villages grew into towns.
• With increasing trade and other exchanges, those towns further grew into cities — this transition happened around 2600 BCE.
• This development is also called the ‘First Urbanisation of India’.

Why the civilisation has several names

• Archaeologists gave it several names — ‘Indus’, ‘Harappan’, ‘Indus-Sarasvatī’ or ‘Sindhu-Sarasvatī’ civilisation.
• Its inhabitants are called ‘Harappans’.
• It is one of the oldest civilisations in the world.
• They are called Harappans simply because the city of Harappa (today in Pakistan’s Punjab) was the first of this civilisation to be excavated — back in 1920–21, over a century ago.

Match the Harappan city to its modern state or region

The Sarasvatī River

• The map shows the Indus (or Sindhu) and its five main tributaries; important cities such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa grew along those rivers.
• But there are also many sites along the Sarasvatī River.
• Today it goes by the name ‘Ghaggar’ in India and ‘Hakra’ in Pakistan — hence the name ‘Ghaggar-Hakra River’.
• This river is now seasonal, because it flows only during the rainy season.
• The Sarasvatī is first mentioned in the Ṛig Veda, an ancient collection of prayers.
• In that text Sarasvatī is worshipped both as a goddess and as a river flowing ‘from the mountain to the sea’.
• Later texts describe the river as drying up and eventually disappearing.

Town-Planning

• Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, now in Pakistan, were the first two cities of this civilisation to be discovered — their identification goes back to 1924, a century ago.
• Several sites followed in the Indus plains, which is why the civilisation was initially called ‘Indus Valley civilisation’.
• Later, other major cities were found — Dholavira (Gujarat), Rakhigarhi (Haryana), Ganweriwala (Cholistan desert of Pakistan) — and hundreds of smaller sites such as Lothal (Gujarat).
• Such discoveries continue even today.
• The Sarasvatī basin includes not only two major cities — Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala — but also smaller ones (Farmana in Haryana, Kalibangan in Rajasthan) and a few towns (Bhirrana and Banawali, both in Haryana).
• The map makes clear the high density of sites in that region.

How the cities were laid out

• The larger Harappan cities were built according to precise plans.
• They had wide streets, often oriented to the cardinal directions.
• Most cities seem to have been surrounded by fortifications.
• They had two distinct parts — the ‘upper town’, where the local elite probably lived, and the ‘lower town’, where common people lived.
• Dholavira was an exception — it had three distinct zones, not two, and the foundations of most buildings there were made with stones.
• Some large buildings seem to have been used for collective purposes — for instance, warehouses where goods to be transported were stored.
• Individual houses of various sizes lined the streets and smaller lanes.
• Remarkably, the quality of construction was the same for small and big houses.
• All those buildings were generally made of bricks.

The ‘Great Bath’ at Mohenjo-daro

• The purpose of some structures remains a matter of debate — the famous Great Bath is one such case.
• It is a small but elaborate tank measuring about 12 × 7 metres.
• It had waterproofing materials — such as natural bitumen, a form of tar — applied on top of carefully laid-out bricks.
• The tank was surrounded by small rooms, one of which contained a well.
• There was a drain in one corner to empty it from time to time and refill it with freshwater.

Water Management

• The Harappans gave much importance to water management and cleanliness.
• They often had separate areas for bathing in their homes.
• These were connected to a larger network of drains, which generally ran below the streets and took the waste water away.
• In Mohenjo-daro, people drew water from hundreds of wells made of bricks — about 700 wells have been counted.
• They seem to have been regularly maintained and used for several centuries.
• In other regions water may have come from ponds, nearby streams or human-made reservoirs.
• At Dholavira (in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat), the largest reservoir measured 73 metres in length.
• At least six large reservoirs were built there with stones, or even cut into the rock.
• Most of them were connected through underground drains for efficient water harvesting and distribution.

What Did the Harappans Eat?

• The Harappans created many settlements along the banks of large or small rivers.
• A logical choice — not just for easy access to water, but for agriculture, since rivers enrich the soil around them.
• They grew cereals like barley, wheat, some millets, and sometimes rice.
• Also pulses and a variety of vegetables.
• They were the first in Eurasia to grow cotton, which they used to weave into clothes.
• They made farming tools, including the plough — some of which continue to be used by modern-day farmers.
• This intense agricultural activity was managed by hundreds of small rural sites or villages.
• Then as now, cities could survive only if enough agricultural produce from rural areas reached them on a daily basis.
• The Harappans also domesticated animals for meat and fished both in rivers and in the sea — known from the large numbers of animal and fish bones found during excavations.
• Scientific examination of clay cooking pots revealed expected remains (dairy products) and surprising ones — turmeric, ginger and banana.
• Clearly, their diet was quite diverse.

A Brisk Trade

• The Harappans were engaged in active trade — not only within their own civilisation (other cities nearby or far away), but with other civilisations and cultures within and outside India.
• Exports: ornaments, timber, some objects of daily use, probably also gold and cotton, and possibly some food items.
• The most favoured ornaments were beads of carnelian — a reddish semiprecious stone found mostly in Gujarat.
• Harappan craftspeople developed special techniques to drill them, so a string could pass through, and to decorate them in various ways.
• They also worked conch shells into shell bangles — which requires sophisticated techniques, as shell is a hard material.
• Imports are less clear, but probably included copper, since this metal was not so common back home.

Land, river and sea routes

• To conduct such trade they used land routes and rivers, and the sea for more distant destinations.
• This is the first intensive maritime activity in India.
• Quite a few Harappan settlements are located in the coastal regions of Gujarat and Sindh.
• Lothal, a small settlement in Gujarat, has a huge basin measuring 217 metres in length and 36 metres in width — just a little more than the length of two football grounds.
• This basin must have been a dockyard — a structure used to receive and send boats for further transportation of goods.
• Harappan objects have been found far away — a Harappan ivory comb (about 7 cm long) was found on the coast of Oman, and carnelian beads were excavated at Susa in present-day Iran.

The seals

• Elaborate trade requires traders to identify their goods — and each other.
• This seems to have been the chief purpose of the thousands of small seals excavated from many settlements.
• They were generally made of steatite, a soft stone hardened through heating.
• They measure only a few centimetres.
• They generally depict animal figures with a few signs of a writing system above them.
• That system and the symbolic meaning of the animal figures are yet to be understood.
• What is certain is that they somehow relate to trade activities.

The Lives of the Ancients

• Archaeologists have unearthed many objects made and used by Harappans.

Cultural and symbolic objects

The End or a New Beginning?

• Around 1900 BCE, this Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation — despite all its achievements — began to fall apart.
• The cities were abandoned one by one.
• Any inhabitants who remained adopted a rural lifestyle in the changed environment.
• It appears that the earlier government or administration no longer existed.
• Gradually the Harappans scattered over hundreds, if not thousands, of small rural settlements.
• They returned to rural settlements because a rural lifestyle gives easier access to food and water than an urban one — then as now, cities depended on villages for food and sometimes water.

What caused the decline?

• Long ago it was thought that warfare or invasions destroyed the cities — but there is no trace of warfare or invasion.
• The Harappans do not seem to have kept any army or weapons of war. As far as the evidence goes, it seems to have been a relatively peaceful civilisation.
• Two factors are currently agreed upon:

• There could have been other factors, but these two remind us of how much we depend on climate and the environment for our well-being.
• Although the cities disappeared, much of the Harappan culture and technology survived and was passed on to the next phase of Indian civilisation.

Master Questions — cover the whole chapter

Answer these six and you have revised every concept in the chapter.

Test Yourself — 25 Question Quiz