The Indus Valley Civilization

Podcast Transcript

In 1922, archeologist Howard Carter stunned the world by discovering King Tut’s tomb in Egypt.

Two years later, his contemporary John Marshall published the results of his excavations of the Indus Valley.

Although it lacked golden artifacts, the discovery demonstrated that ancient South Asia was as advanced and complex as Egypt.

Learn more about the rise and fall of the Indus Valley civilization on Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I discussed the six cradles of civilization. They are Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Yellow River, Mesoamerica, Peru, and the subject of this episode, the Indus Valley.

The Indus River Valley in modern-day Pakistan is an arid region that does not appear to be a candidate for a flourishing river-valley civilization.

Eight thousand years ago, however, the region looked much different. It was a lush, green landscape teeming with abundance.

Between approximately 9,500 and 5,500 years ago, the region experienced a period known as the Holocene climatic optimum. The weather during this period indicated robust monsoons that filled lakes and rivers, creating a lush green landscape rich in plant and animal diversity.

This is a stark contrast to the region’s current weather patterns, which average only 14 inches of annual rainfall, most of which falls during the summer monsoon season.

The height of this climate pattern marked the beginning of civilization in India. Archaeological evidence indicates that the roots of urban life in India date back to 7000 BC.

The Indus River once had a companion, the Saraswati River, described in the Rig Veda as a mighty river. During this period, the Indus Valley may have resembled Mesopotamia, with a fertile valley between two major rivers that supported a civilization.

Shockingly, the river dried up well before the communities that wrote about it arrived in the region. Historians speculate that the river and its stories are far older than the Vedic culture, which described a river being as wide as the sea around 1500 BC.

Urban areas such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro thrived in the region beginning around 3000 BC. The valley between the two rivers produced a remarkable set of similar and connected sites.

Archaeologists have identified approximately 1,000 sites spanning approximately 400,000 square miles or 1 million square kilometers in this network of cities.

Studying the connections between the sites has proven difficult. The region appears to have a unified written language, yet it is limited in volume and remains undeciphered. Historian Michael Wood calls the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley the greatest mystery in archaeology.

It is a mystery so profound that the government of Tamil Nadu in India has offered a $1,000,000 reward to anyone who deciphers it. This mystery has made the study of Indus Valley history so difficult; it is almost entirely reliant on excavated artifacts.

The geography of Mohenjo-Daro has also made this a great challenge: the site’s excavation is very close to the water table in the region, and continuing to dig into the city’s foundation will result in the remains being flooded and destroyed.

Historical developments have also made this difficult.

The British built the railroads linking Lahore, Pakistan, to the region in 1856. As they laid the track in the Indus Valley region, they found hundreds of thousands of uniform sun-baked bricks.

Archaeologists assumed the buildings were from a much newer community and were not of grave historical importance.

They were wrong. The British used these bricks to lay the foundation of the railroad bed.

Amongst the ruins, they found small seal stones engraved with intricate drawings and inscriptions. The seal stones depicted animals, often a bull, an elephant, or a crocodile, and even mythical creatures like unicorns.

One of the most famous seals, the Pashupati Seal, is believed to depict the earliest images of Siva, a primary deity in Hinduism. The nature of this seal is one of the great mysteries of archaeology and could unlock the chronology of Hinduism, the world’s oldest known religion.

An archaeological study was commissioned at the site, but excavation didn’t begin until 1920.

The archaeologists did not find the remains of monumental public construction projects because, as it turned out, the region did not engage in such projects. The Indus Valley civilizations differ from those of Egypt and Mesopotamia in that they didn’t prioritize the construction of wonders on an incredible scale.

The civilization, like its ruins, was hidden behind a veil of practicality.

The excavation of the 1920s revolutionized historical thinking and transformed the global time line. Before the discoveries in the Indus Valley, the conventional wisdom held that the oldest cities in India were in the Ganges Valley and dated only to 1250 BC.

The core of the Indus Valley civilization was its two great previously mentioned urban centers, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Harappa was discovered in 1922, when John Marshall dispatched Indian archaeologists under the leadership of Daya Ram Sahni to excavate the site where railroad crews had found the seal stones.

In 1924, a second team was dispatched to examine Mohenjo-Daro, the “Hill of the Dead”, a site 200 miles from Harappa. The two excavations revealed a pair of large urban centers with populations estimated at up to 50,000.

The sites revealed symmetry between them, as the cities shared many common features. The two cities were each built with standardized mudbricks for their walls. The city’s defenses featured a citadel at the north end.

Both sites were laid out on the same rectangular grid pattern of right angles. Ceremonial bathing sites were central to each location, highlighting the importance of ritual bathing in India and early Hinduism.

Archaeologists were quick to conclude that the cities belonged to the same culture, and perhaps even shared the same governmental structure.

The most outstanding achievement of each city was a remarkably sophisticated sanitation system. Historians were stunned to learn that, in addition to the sewer system, houses also had gravity-fed water and private baths.

Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro had a street sewer system to remove waste from the city; this was a feature thousands of years ahead of major urban centers in Europe and America.

These innovations made Indus Valley cities the cleanest in the ancient world.

While there were no golden monuments or soaring public buildings, historians were nonetheless impressed.

Historian Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of UW-Madison, a veteran of the excavation of Harappa, offered this appraisal: But there’s more to society than big temples and golden burials. Those are the worst things that ancient societies did, because they led to their collapse.

An expert in ancient urbanization, Kenoyer argues that the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation exhibit a distinct form of urbanisation compared with those of its contemporaneous civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Reflecting an impressive legacy of long-distance trade, Indus Valley seal stones have been identified in the ruins of Mesopotamian city-states. The trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley is the first known example of long-distance trade in World History.

Merchants from the Indus Valley used the Indus River to reach the Arabian Sea; from there, they traveled nearly 2000 miles along the coast in small watercraft until they reached the Persian Gulf.

Successfully navigating thousands of miles across the open sea, long before the compass or the modern sail was invented, was a staggering achievement for a Bronze Age society.

The most prized item, and one found in Mesopotamia alongside the seal stones, weresdf beautiful jewelry items made from lapis lazuli and carnelian beads. These beads had to be drilled using a unique drilling technique developed in the Indus Valley.

Carnelian is a type of quartz and has a hardness of 7 on the Mohs hardness scale. While establishing long-distance trade networks is an impressive feat, drilling into carnelian quartz with precision is an incredible achievement for a Bronze Age society.

The inability to read the Indus Valley script has limited our understanding of the region’s political systems. Historians interpret the absence of monumental public buildings as a key indicator of the region’s political processes.

In traditional river valley civilizations, the political legitimacy of the ruler rested on their ability to harness resources to build massive structures.

Leaders of Mesopotamian city-states were expected to construct ziggurats for the region’s deities. Egyptian pharaohs were the most prolific builders of antiquity, producing a wide array of projects to bolster their political standing.

The absence of monumental public buildings in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro suggests that the region’s leaders may have been local economic or social elites whose legitimacy was tied to local affairs and trade rather than to monument building.

The Indus Valley Civilization did not come to an abrupt end; the state slowly eroded beginning around 1900 BC.

In a complete departure from traditional ancient civilizations, there is no record of military activity. There is no art depicting violence or conquest. The weapons found at the site are hunting weapons, in such quantity as to eliminate the possibility of organized military activity.

Funerary sites show no record of violent death at Harappa and only several from Mohenjo-Daro. The evidence points to a slow decline driven by the region’s climate transition.

The population in the region did not die in a mass death event; instead, they migrated to other regions of India. As they migrated, they brought their oral stories with them. Many of these stories appear in the sacred chronicles of the Rig Veda.

Around 6000 to 3000 years ago, A mass migration of people into India occurred during the Indo-European migrations from Central AsiaThe arrival of the Aryan people led to the creation of new linguistic and cultural traditions in India.

Their arrival also coincides with the beginnings of the Vedic literary tradition.

The Vedas introduced Hindu deities that would become fundamental to the faith. The Rig Veda tells the story of Indra, a heroic god who defeats a demon named Vritra.

Vritra has stolen the rains, causing drought and suffering amongst the people. Indra, using a magic lightning bolt, comes to the aid of the people and restores the rains.

The story of Indra provides further insight into Vedic India.

The story is an accurate appraisal of the climate changes occurring in India at the time. The Indus Valley became increasingly arid during the transition from city-states such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro to communities of Aryan populations.

The Vedas recount their interactions. The story isn’t one of an invading force replacing a community; rather, it is likely a parallel migration.

The early Indus Valley peoples had been leaving due to a changing climate, with the new Aryan population replacing them before migrating east themselves.

The Vedas chronicle this cultural collision. The Aryans didn’t arrive in India and immediately write the Vedas; this is not possible, as the Vedas contain historic information about the region that pre-dates their migration.

The Vedas are most likely a compilation of oral stories from the Indus Valley Civilizations, transcribed by the Aryans over nearly a millennium later, into a language we can read.

Any other explanation is unlikely; for this, we turn to the River Saraswati. It is mentioned more than fifty times in the Vedas; it is referred to as a “Great River,” characterized as one that flows “from the mountains to the sea.”

The Aryan Indo-Europeans could not have known the river’s magnificence, as it disappeared before it arrived, suggesting cultural exchange of oral traditions.

Because we have unable to unlock the writing system of the Indus Valley people, there is much we don’t know about their world. However, much can be inferred from archaeological evidence.

The Indus Valley Civilization appears to have been a place of peace, artistic refinement, and long-distance commerce. Their cities were exceptionally designed

Their demise wasn’t the story of an invading army; it was the story of agricultural failure driven by diminishing water resources and a changing climate.

While there is much we don’t know, what we do know shows that the Indus Valley remains one of the few places where civilization arose and became a foundation of the world we live in today.