First Light on a Long - Forgotten Civilization Sir John Marshall

First Light on a Long - Forgotten Civilization

Sir John Marshall

Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Sehliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.

Up to the present our knowledge of Indian antiquities has carried us back hardly further than the third century before Christ. Of the long ages befor the coming of the Greeks and the rise of the Maurya dynasty; of the birth and growth of civilization in the great river basins ; of the cultural development of the races who one after another poured into the peninsula from the north and west - of these and other problems relating to that dim and remote past, archaeology has given us but the faintest glimmerings; for almost the only remains of those early times that have come down to us have been rough implements of the Stone and Copper Ages, groups of prehistoric graves in the south of the peninsula, and some rude cyclopean walls at Rajagriha in Bihar. On the other hand, from the third century B.C. onwards, we have, on the whole, a fairly clear idea of man’s handiwork in general ; of his religious and domestic architecture, of his formative arts, of his weapons and utensils, of his personal ornaments and his jewellery, his coins and gems, and of the scripts which he used in his writing. And whenever it happens that new antiquities come to light - no matter to what race or religion they may belong - it is invariably possible to assign them with confidence and within relatively narrow limits to their respective age or class.

Now, however, there has unexpectedly been unearthed, in the south of the Panjab and in Sind, an entirly new class of objects which have nothing in common with those previously known to us, and which are unaccompanied by any data that might have helped to establish their age and origin.
The two sites where these somewhat startling remains have been discovered are some 400 miles apart - the one being at Harappa in the Montgomery District of the Panjab, the other at Mohenjo-Daro, in the Larkana District of Sind. At both these places there is a vast expnanse of artificial mounds, evidently covering the remains of once flourishing cities, which, to judge from the mass of accumulated debris, rising as high as 60 ft. above the level of the plain, must have been in existence for many handreds of years. Such groups of mounds abound in the plains of the Indus, just as they do in Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile ; and they are specially conspicuous along the banks of the old, dried - up beds of the main stream and its tributaries, not only in Sind, but in Bahawalpur State and in the Punjab.

The opportunities ofr excavation, therefore, in this part of India may be regarded as almost limitless; and, when it can be carried out on thorough and systematic lines, there is no doubt that the field will prove a peculiarly fertile one. Up to date, however, the meagre resources at the disposal of the Archaeological Department have permitted it to undertake little morethan preliminary trial - digging on these two sites ; and it goes without saying that the remains disclosed are corespondingly limited. Yet, such as they are, they are full of promise.

At Mohenjo-Daro, the main street of the old city can still be discerned as a broad highway running from the south bank of the river towards the south - east, with houses fringing it on either side. What is surmised by the discoverer, Mr. Banerji, to have been the royal palace, stood at the point where this road emerged on to the quays of the river side. Opposite to it, in the now dry bed of the river, are several islands from which rose the principal shrines of the city, the hightest and, no doubt, the chief of them all, being a massive Buddhisit Stupa raised on a high oblong platform, and surrounded by subsidiary shrines and monastic quarters. These remains belong to about the second century A.D., when the Kushans were paramount in the north west of India ; and, judging by the finds already made  - particularly the urn burials, remnants of painted frescoes inscribed in Brahmi and Kharoshthi characters, new types of coins and other novel objects - there can be no doubt that their further exploration will result in welcome light being thrown on this very obscure period of Indian history.
Valuable, however, as these remains are likely to prove, it is not in them that the real interest of Mohenjo -Daro centres at the moment. Deep down below the Buddhist monuments described above, or at other parts of the site appearing close to the surface itself, there are at least two other strata of buildings belonging to much earlier epochs, and containing a variety of which can at present only be surmised. Among these older structures one group is especially worthy of mention. Besides various halls and passages and chambers, it includes a massive structure - apparently a shrine - with walls seven or eight feet thick, pierced by several conduits which, in the opinion of the excavator, served for carrying off the lustral water when the shrine or image within it was washed. In another part of the same group is what appears to be an altar built of small glazed bricks, and provided with a drain of similar brick work. Some idea of the appearance of these early buildings, and of their present state of preservation, is afforded by two of the photograps reproduced (Plate I), the one showing a staircase to the south - west of the shrine referred to, with a conduit in the foreground from which the covering of marble slabs has been removed; the other, illustrating the glazed - brick flooring in a bay on the western facade of the same shrine.

At Harappa, Mr. Daya Ram Sahni’s excavations disclosed as many as seven or eight successive levels, demonstrating the long and continuous occupation of the site during many hundreds of years perior to the third century B.C. ; and throughout most, if not all, of this long period, burnt brick of a good quality was used for building purposes. The site at Harappa, however, has suffered much from the depredations of railway contractors and others, and the structures brought to light are in a more fragmentary condition than at Mohenjo - Daro. On the other hand, the smaller antiquities are generally identical in character with those from Mohenjo - Daro, and some of them even are better preserved. These smaller antiquities from the two sites comprise new varieties of potteries both painted and plain, some fashioned by hand and some turned on the wheel ; terracottas ; toys ; bangles of blue glass, paste and shell ; new types of coins or tokens ; knieves and cores of chert ; dice and chessmen; a remarkable series of stone rings ; and most important of all, a number of engraved and inscribed seals. Iron does not occur at all, except in the latest deposits, and metal objects of any kind are scarce, particulary at Harappa.

Of all these antiquities the most valuable are the stone seals, not only because they are inscribed with legends in an unknown pictographic script, but because the figures engraved on them, and the style of the engraving, are different from anything of the kind hitherto met with in Indian art. Some of them are of steatite, others of ivory, and others of stone and paste. In shape most are square, and provided at the back with a boss pierced with a small hole for suspension. The animals engraved on them are in some instances bulls ; in others unicorns ; but it is to be observed that neither the Indian humped bull nor the water - buffalo occurs among them.

As to the strange pictographs which do duty for letters, three points are worthy of remark ; first, that the marks (apparently vowel signs) attached to many of the pictographs indicate a relatively high stage of development ; secondly, that some of the inscriptions from Mohenjo - Daro betray a later stage in the evolution of this script than those from Harappa ; thirdly, that they bear no resemblance whatever to any ancient Indian alphabet known to us ; but, on the other hand, they do bear a certain general affinity to pictographs of the Mycenacan age in teh Mediteranean area, though it is not possible to point to any of the symbols as being actually indentical.

Examples of the pictographic writing are found not only on the seal dies, but also (at Mohenjo - Daro) on certain oblong bars of copper which their discoverer assumes to have been coins, since they are similar in shape to the early Indian oblong coins known as ‘punch - marked’, though they do not correspond in weight with any recognized standards used in ancient India. Should this assumption of Mr. Banerji’s prove correct, it would mean that these coins may turn out to be the earliest in existence, since the first coins hitherto known to have been struck in any other country are the Lydian pieces of the seventh century B.C.

Notwithstanding that the curious ring stones mentioned above have been found in large numbers on both sites, the purpose to which they were put has hitherto quite baffled the ingenuity of the excavators; though, for reasons into which it would take too long to enter here, Mr. Banerji believes that they were in some way connected with the Bhartaris, or shrines of eternal fire. They are of all sizes, from that of a small napkin ring up to fifty pounds in weight. and are made of various coloured stones or marble; but what is particularly curious about them is that in many specimens the upper and lower surfaces are undulating.

Another remarkable and significant feature at the Mohenjo-Daro site is the character of the burial customs. In the earliest period the practice was to bury the body in a hunched position in a brick tomb, generally of square or oblong form. Later on (it may be very much later), the custom obtained of burning the body, as is commonly done in India to-day, and depositing the ashes in a small urn, which, along with two or three others, was placed inside a larger round jar, accompanied by several miniature vessels containing food, raiment, and so on.

To what age and to what people do these novel antiquities belong? Those are the two questions which will naturally occur to the reader, and to which a score of different answers may perhaps suggest themselves. As to the first question, all that can be said at present is that the period during which this culture flourished in the Indus valley must have extended over many centuries, and that it came to an end before the rise of the Maurya power in the third century B.C. So much may be inferred, on the one hand, from the presence of copper weapons, and the total absence of any iron on either site, as well as from the fact that none of the objects, except the bricks and a few toy terracottas, can be paralleled among the known antiquities of the Mauryan or subsequent epochs ; while the pictographic writing is totally distinct from the early Brahmi script which the Emperor Aoka employed throughtout the greater part of India, or from the Kharoshthi script which he used in his inscriptions on the North - Western Frontier.

As to the second question, it is possible, though unlikely, that this civilization of the Indus valley was an intrusive civilization emanating from further west. Painted pottery and other objects somewhat analogous to those from Mohenjo - Daro and Harappa have been found in Baluchistan ; and there are linguistic reasons for believing that it was by way of Baluchistan that the Dravidian races (thought by some writers to have been originally connected with the Mediterranean) entered India. Mr. Banerji himself is inclined to connect this culture of the Indus valley directly with the Aegean culture the Eastern Mediterranean, and holds that distinct affinities are traceable between the Minoan antiquities of the Cret, and those unearther by him at Mohenjo - Daro especially in regard to the painted ceramic wares and pictographic inscriptions. But the resemblances referred to are, at the best, problematical, and, in any case, too slight and intangible to warrant any inference being drawn as to a cultural connection between the two areas.

What seems prima facie more probable is that this forgotten civilization, of which the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo - Daro have now given us a first glimpse, was developed in the Indus valley itself, and just as distinctive of that region as the civilization of the Pharaohs was distinctive of the Nile. In the marvellous forward progress which mankind made during the Neolithic, Copper, and Bronze Ages, the great river tracts of the then inhabited parts of the world played a most important part ; for it was in these tracts that conditions were found most favourable for supporting a dense and settled population - namely, fertility of the soil, an unfailing water supply, and easy communications; and it was, of course, among such large and settled populations that civilization had the best chance of making progress. The debt which, in the early stages of its development, the human race owed to the Nile, to the Danube, to the Tigris, and to the Euphrates, is already well known. But how much it owed to the Indus and to the Ganges has yet to be determined. In the case of the Indus, it is probably true that successive migrations from outside had a useful effect, as they did in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, in promoting the development of indigenous culture; but there is no reason to assume that the culture of this region was imported from other lands, or that its character was profoundly modified by outside influences (See Plates I, II and III).  (Illustrated London News, 20 September, 1924, pp 528-532 and 548)