[world-vedic] Ancient World's Largest Urban Civilization

[Guest guest]

A flurry of excavations has uncovered startling evidence that presents

a radically different picture of the Indus Valley civilisation -- and

calls for a complete revision of ancient Indian history.

 

By Raj Chengappa

 

Indus Valley To school students, history classes on the Indus Valley

civilisation have always been simplistic. Even dull. Most textbooks

talk of how the civilisation appeared like a meteor on ancient India's

skyscape, shone brilliantly for a while and then was snuffed out either

by marauding Aryans or sudden floods.

 

Archaeologist Ravindra Singh Bisht describes the syllabus as "dead

boring". He could be dead right. Egyptian mummies somehow seem to evoke

more interest than the town-planning feats of the Indus engineers. Did

you, for instance, raise your hands in class and ask just how stone-age

farming communities almost overnight took a giant leap forward and

transformed themselves into sophisticated urbanites living in cities so

well designed that Indians have never been able to replicate the

achievement even 5,000 years later? Did you actually believe that

poppycock about an Aryan blitzkrieg that wiped out a glorious

civilisation, plunging India into the dark ages for over a thousand

years?

 

You probably did. Now if Bisht has his way, you will have to relearn

ancient Indian history. For the past six years, the Archaeological

Survey of India (ASI) team headed by him has been systematically

excavating an Indus site called Dholavira on the salty marshes of the

Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. What they have been uncovering is turning

accepted notions on the Indus on their heads. Says Bisht: "Exploring

Dholavira is like opening a complete book on the Indus. We now have

answers to some of the most enduring riddles about the civilisation."

For starters, Indus town planners are not as "monotonous" and

"regimented" as archaeologists had us believe. In Dholavira they

display a surprising exuberance that expresses itself in elaborate

stone gateways with rounded columns apart from giant reservoirs for

water. Bisht also found a board inlaid with large Harappan script

characters -- probably the world's first hoarding.

 

While experts regard Dholavira as the most exciting Indus find in

recent times, archaeologists have excavated or are in the process of

digging up 90 other sites both in India and Pakistan that are throwing

up remarkable clues about this great prehistoric civilisation. Among

them: That Indus Valley was a misnomer and that in size it was the

largest prehistoric urban civilisation -- even bigger than Pharaonic

Egypt. That the empire was ruled much like a democracy and the Indus

people were the world's top exporters. And that instead of the Aryans

it was possibly a Great Depression that did them in. In Lahore, M.

Rafique Mughal, Pakistan's top-ranking archaeologist, says: "It is both

a revelation and a revolution. Our history textbooks need to be

rewritten."