Bricks, Beads and Bones (Harappan Civilisation)

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XII (Themes in Indian History Part I), Chapter 1.

A railway built from a lost city

In 1875 Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), noted something strange. Contractors had carried away so many old baked bricks from the mounds at Harappa that they could lay tracks for about 100 miles of the Lahore to Multan railway. A whole city was being ground into ballast, and nobody knew what it was.

This chapter is about how that buried city was found, what it tells us about people who lived more than four thousand years ago, and what we still do not know. Because the Harappans left no text we can read, everything we know comes from archaeology: bricks, beads, bones, seals and the layout of the cities.

Names and dates

The civilisation is called Harappan because Harappa was the first site identified, and it is also called the Indus Valley Civilisation. Its whole span is divided into three phases, and the middle one is the city-building age.

Harappan pottery, bricks, seals, weights, beads and copper or bronze objects have been found across Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Sind and Punjab in Pakistan, and in the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. More than 2,000 sites are known, and nearly two thirds of them lie in the Saraswati basin. Five are counted as major cities: Rakhigarhi, Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Dholavira and Ganweriwala.

Food and farming

The Harappans grew wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea and sesame, and millets are found at Gujarat sites, while rice is rare. They kept cattle, sheep, goat, buffalo and pig, and bones of wild boar, deer and gharial show hunting or contact with hunters, plus fish and fowl.

How do we know they ploughed? Bulls are shown on seals and in terracotta, and terracotta models of a plough have been found at Cholistan and Banawali. At Kalibangan archaeologists found a ploughed field with two sets of furrows at right angles, which suggests two crops grown together. Since the region is dry, water had to be managed: canals are known at Shortughai, wells at many sites, and Dholavira has large water reservoirs.

A city built to a plan

Mohenjodaro is the best known city. It is split into two parts. The Citadel is smaller but higher, built on mud-brick platforms and walled. The Lower Town is larger but lower, also walled, with buildings on platforms. Building these platforms alone is estimated to have taken four million person-days, which tells us that someone could organise a very large workforce.

Standard bricks. Whether sun-dried or baked, bricks followed one ratio: length four times the height and breadth twice the height (4:2:1). The same ratio is found from Jammu to Gujarat.

Drains first, houses later. Streets and drains were laid out first, in an approximate grid with lanes meeting at right angles, and houses were built along them. Every house was linked to street drains. Main channels were set in mortar with loose brick or limestone covers that could be lifted for cleaning, and house drains emptied into sumps or cesspits. Drains are found even at smaller settlements like Lothal.

Houses. Many houses were built around a courtyard. There were no windows in the ground floor outer walls and the entrance did not give a view of the interior, which suggests a concern for privacy. Each house had its own brick-paved bathroom, many had staircases and wells, and Mohenjodaro had about 700 wells.

The Great Bath. On the Citadel stood a warehouse and the Great Bath, a large rectangular tank in a courtyard with a corridor around it and two flights of steps, north and south. It was made watertight by setting bricks on edge and using gypsum mortar. A smaller building to the north had eight bathrooms. The Great Bath was probably meant for a special ritual bath.

Citadel variations. At Dholavira and Lothal the whole settlement was fortified, with internal walls. Lothal's Citadel was not walled off but was built at a height.

Pause and predict: why would planners lay out the drains and streets before the houses?

Check your answer: Because the plan came first. Someone decided where the lanes and drains would run for the whole town, and builders had to follow it. This is one of the strongest hints of a central authority.

Rich and poor in the Harappan world

How do we tell whether some people were richer than others? Archaeologists look at what was buried and what was found in homes.

Burials. The dead were generally laid in pits, sometimes brick-lined. Some graves held pottery, ornaments (jewellery for both men and women) and occasionally copper mirrors. In the Harappa cemetery an ornament of three shell rings, a jasper bead and hundreds of tiny beads was found near a male skull. On the whole, precious things were not buried with the dead.

Everyday and luxury goods. Utilitarian objects such as querns, pottery, needles and flesh-rubbers are found throughout the settlements. Luxuries, meaning rare, non-local or technically complex objects like faience pots, concentrate in large settlements such as Mohenjodaro and Harappa. Gold jewellery comes only from hoards. Faience is a material of ground sand or silica mixed with colour and gum and then fired. A hoard is a set of objects kept in a container and never retrieved.

Beads, crafts and far-off trade

Chanhudaro is a tiny site, under 7 hectares compared with 125 hectares at Mohenjodaro, yet almost entirely given to bead-making, shell-cutting, metal-working, seal-making and weight-making. Beads were made of carnelian, jasper, crystal, quartz, steatite, copper, bronze, gold, shell, faience and terracotta. Steatite is soft and could be worked or moulded as a paste, and the tiny steatite beads remain a puzzle of technology. Carnelian's red colour was obtained by firing a yellowish raw material. Specialised drills have been found at Chanhudaro, Lothal and Dholavira.

The Harappans moved goods on bullock carts (terracotta models survive), along the Indus and its tributaries, and along the coast. Settlements were founded at the source of raw materials, which shows deliberate planning of supply.

Beyond the Indus: Oman and Mesopotamia. Copper probably also came from Oman, because both Omani copper and Harappan artefacts contain nickel, and a Harappan jar with a thick black clay coating was found in Oman. Mesopotamian texts of the third millennium BCE mention three lands.

Contact was probably by sea, and seals show pictures of boats.

Seals, script and weights

Seals and sealings. A bag of goods was tied and the knot covered in wet clay, which was then stamped with a seal. If the sealing was unbroken, the bag had not been tampered with, and the stamp also told who had sent it. Seals are the most distinctive Harappan artefact, usually of steatite, with an animal motif and a line of writing.

The script. It is still undeciphered. It is not alphabetic because it has between 375 and 400 signs, far too many for an alphabet. It was written right to left, as the wider spacing on the right and cramping on the left show. The longest inscription has about 26 signs. Writing also appears on copper tools, jar rims, tablets, jewellery and bone rods, and on the large inscription at Dholavira.

Weights. Weights were usually of chert and cubical, with no markings. The lower denominations were binary (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) and the higher ones decimal (160, 200, 320, 640). Metal scale pans have also been found.

Pause and predict: brick sizes, weights and seals look alike from Jammu to Gujarat. Does that point to many separate towns doing their own thing, or to something shared?

Check your answer: To something shared. Such uniformity across a huge area suggests a common system, though historians disagree on whether it was a single state.

Who ruled the Harappans?

Evidence for organisation is strong: uniform bricks, pottery, seals and weights, well-placed settlements and the need to mobilise huge labour. But no royal tomb or palace-like display has been found. A large building at Mohenjodaro was labelled a "palace" but yielded no spectacular finds, and a stone statue was named the "priest-king" by comparison with Mesopotamia.

Two views. For the exam: The uniformity and planning of the Harappan world indicate some central organisation, possibly a single state. Another reading: Historians have offered at least three explanations. One view says there were no rulers and everyone was more or less equal. Another says there were several rulers, one in each city. A third says a single state governed the whole civilisation, which fits the uniform artefacts and planning. The evidence does not settle the matter.

Religion: what the objects might mean

Archaeologists interpret terracotta figurines of women with elaborate head-dresses as mother goddesses. The Great Bath and the fire altars at Kalibangan and Lothal are seen as ritual structures. One seal shows a cross-legged figure surrounded by animals, called "proto-Shiva". Conical stones were identified as lingas.

Two views. For the exam: Early archaeologists read the cross-legged seal figure as an early form of Shiva as Pashupati, and conical stones as lingas. Another reading: Later scholars noted that in the Rigveda, Rudra is neither Pashupati nor a yogi, so the figure may be a shaman, a person claiming magical and healing powers and the ability to communicate with the other world. The scholar Mackay also thought the conical stones may have been gamesmen. Any religious reading of Harappan objects remains an interpretation.

The end of the cities

By about 1800 BCE most of the Mature Harappan sites in regions such as Cholistan were abandoned, while new settlements grew up in Gujarat, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. At the Late Harappan sites that survived, weights, seals, special beads, writing and long-distance trade were gone, craft specialisation faded and house building got worse. Rural "successor cultures" took over.

Suggested causes include climatic change, deforestation, excessive floods, shifting or drying rivers and overuse of the land. These may explain particular settlements, but none alone explains the end of the entire civilisation. The common thread seems to be the loss of the unifying element, perhaps the Harappan state.

Finding the Harappans: a chain of archaeologists

Cause → effect: why Cunningham missed it. Cunningham followed the accounts of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims and assumed that Indian history began with the cities of the Ganga valley. Because of that framework, a seal that did not fit seemed unimportant, and it took nearly half a century for the Harappan civilisation to be recognised.

Digging method. Marshall dug in horizontal units of fixed thickness and ignored stratigraphy, the study of the layers of a site. Wheeler corrected this by following the layers of the mound, so that artefacts could be assigned to the right period. Sterile layers, which have no traces of culture, show a time when the place was abandoned.

The massacre that never happened. In 1947 Wheeler linked skeletons at Mohenjodaro with the Rigvedic Indra, called puramdara, the fort-destroyer, and suggested that invaders had destroyed the city. In the 1960s George Dales showed the skeletons did not belong to one period, which ended the "Mohenjodaro massacre" idea.

DNA from Rakhigarhi. Teams from Deccan College Pune, CCMB Hyderabad and Harvard Medical College studied skeletons from Rakhigarhi. The study concluded that the Harappans were the indigenous people of the region, with genetic roots going back to about 10,000 BCE, and that the population shows continuity without a break.

Two views. For the exam: The Rakhigarhi DNA study is presented as evidence of indigenous continuity and no large-scale Aryan immigration. Another reading: Scholars still debate whether, and when, groups from Central Asia entered the subcontinent, and how genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence should be combined. Historians therefore treat DNA as one source among several.

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: Kings, Farmers and Towns picks up the story of early historic cities, where texts and inscriptions give us far more to read than the Harappan script does.
• Method: Thinkers, Beliefs and Buildings reads monuments and sculpture as evidence, another case of reconstructing the past from objects.