DISCOVERY & EXCAVATION

 



The Indus Valley is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a population of well over five million. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed new techniques in metallurgy and handicraft (carneol products, seal carving) and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin. The civilization is noted for its cities built of brick, roadside drainage system, and multistoried houses.

The Indus Valley Civilization is also known as the Harappan Civilization, as the first of its cities to be unearthed was located at Harappa, excavated in the 1920s in what was at the time the Punjab province of British India (now in Pakistan). Excavation of Harappan sites has been ongoing since 1920, with important breakthroughs occurring as recently as 1999. There were earlier and later cultures, often called Early Harappan and Late Harappan, in the same area of the Harappan Civilization. The Harappan civilisation is sometimes called the Mature Harappan culture to distinguish it from these cultures. To date, over 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus river and its tributaries.

CHORONOLOGY

Date range	Phase	Era
7000 - 5500 BCE	Mehrgarh I (aceramic Neolithic)	Early Food Producing Era
5500-3300	Mehrgarh II-VI (ceramic Neolithic)	Regionalisation Era 5500-2600
3300-2600	Early Harappan
3300-2800	Harappan 1 (Ravi Phase)
2800-2600	Harappan 2 (Kot Diji Phase, Nausharo I, Mehrgarh VII)
2600-1900	Mature Harappan (Indus Valley Civilization)	Integration Era
2600-2450	Harappan 3A (Nausharo II)
2450-2200	Harappan 3B
2200-1900	Harappan 3C
1900-1300	Late Harappan (Cemetery H); Ochre Coloured Pottery	Localisation Era
1900-1700	Harappan 4
1700-1300	Harappan 5
1300-300	Painted Gray Ware, Northern Black Polished Ware (Iron Age)	Indo-Gangetic Tradition

MATURED HARAPPAN

Religious

The religion of Hinduism probably has its roots in the Indus Valley civilisation. Hindus and Indus people both worship a 'mother goddess' (her names includeParvati and Sakti), and both regard the cow as sacred. Hindus and Indus people both bathe in the River for religious purposes and consider rivers holy.

Some Indus valley seals show swastikas, which are found in other religions (worldwide), especially in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The earliest evidence for elements of Hinduism are alleged to have been present before and during the early Harappan period. Phallic symbols interpreted as the much later Hindu Shiva lingam have been found in the Harappan remains

Art & Artifacts

Science

• The people of the Indus Civilization achieved great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time
• Among the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures
• Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their hexahedron weights
• These chert weights were in a ratio of 5:2:1 with weights of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 units, with each unit weighing approximately 28 grams, similar to the English Imperial ounce or Greek uncia, and smaller objects were weighed in similar ratios with the units of 0.871.
• The weights and measures later used in Kautilya's Arthashastra (4th century BCE)
• Harappans evolved some new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin

Cities

 A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture is evident in the Indus Valley Civilization making them the first urban centres in the region. The quality of municipal town planning suggests the knowledge of urban planning  and efficient municipal  governments which placed a high priority on hygiene, or, alternatively, accessibility to the means of religious ritual.

Within the city, individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. From a room that appears to have been set aside for bathing, waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined the major streets. Houses opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. The house-building in some villages in the region still resembles in some respects the house-building of the Harappans.

The ancient Indus systems of sewerage and drainage that were developed and used in cities throughout the Indus region were far more advanced than any found in contemporary urban sites in the Middle East and even more efficient than those in many areas of Pakistan and India today. The advanced architecture of the Harappans is shown by their impressive dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms, and protective walls. The massive walls of Indus cities most likely protected the Harappans from floods and may have dissuaded military conflicts.

THE COLLAPSE & LATE HARAPPAN

Around 1800 BCE, signs of a gradual decline began to emerge, and by around 1700 BCE, most of the cities were abandoned. In 1953, Sir Mortimer Wheeler proposed that the decline of the Indus Civilization was caused by the invasion of an Indo-European tribe from Central Asia called the "Aryans". As evidence, he cited a group of 37 skeletons found in various parts of Mohenjo-Daro, and passages in the Vedas referring to battles and forts. However, scholars soon started to reject Wheeler's theory, since the skeletons belonged to a period after the city's abandonment and none were found near the citadel. Subsequent examinations of the skeletons by Kenneth Kennedy in 1994 showed that the marks on the skulls were caused by erosion, and not violent aggression. Today, many scholars believe that the collapse of the Indus Civilization was caused by drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia. It has also been suggested that immigration by new peoples, deforestation, floods, or changes in the course of the river may have contributed to the collapse of the IVC.

After 1900 BCE                       - The number of sites in India increases from 218 to 853
Around 1200 BCE                    - Excavations in the Gangetic plain show that urban settlement began
1800 BCE untill 325 BCE        - Late Harappan settlement of Pirak
c1000 untill 900 BCE               - Late Harappan or material culture still persisted and partially mixed      
                                                     with Grey Wav

LEGACY

Different cultures emerged after the collaption of Indus Civilization. The examples of cultures were Cemetery H culture, the earliest evidience was the cremation ritual of Indian that are being follwed till today, Oche Coloured Pottery culture expanded from Rajasthan into the Gangetic Plain.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Indus Valley Civilization has been tentatively identified with the toponym Meluhha, known from Sumerian recors. The mature phase or Harappan phase is the contemporary to the Early to Middle Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East. The Indus Valley Civilization records had been compared in particular with the civilization of Elam ( Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis) and with Minoan Crete, due to the isolated cultural parallels such as the ubiquitous goddes worship and depictions of bull-leaping.

PICTURES

CLOTHING STYLE IN ANCIENT INDIA

LADIES DURING ANCIENT LADIES

ARTIFACTS