Indus Civilization:Cinderella of the Ancient World

[Guest guest]

Cinderella

of the Ancient World*

 

History begins at Sumer was the title of S.N.Kramer's major work

(1965) which reflects the prevalent view fostered by the West, that

civilization – life in cities – first began in Mesopotamia. Over

three decades later in BBC's superb TV series LEGACY [1997] Michael

Wood put forward the same idea: the first city in the world was Eridu

in Sumer. As though the Harappa Culture had not happened! No wonder

Geoffrey Bibby in his Looking for Dilmun described the Indus Valley

civilization as "the Cinderella of the ancient world".

 

At long last a historian of religion, a professor of computer

engineering and a vedic scholar have joined together to present a

contrary thesis at significant length, showing that civilization

began in the Indian subcontinent with what is popularly known as the

Indus Valley Civilization, which they correctly rephrase as the Indus-

Sarasvati Civilization. This Harappan world covered around three

hundred thousand square miles with over 2,500 settlements found so

far. Stretching from Afghanistan in the north to Godavari river in

the south and from the Indus in the west to the Gangetic plains in

the east, its size exceeds the combined area occupied by the Sumerian

and Egyptian civilizations and is much older, going back to the town

of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan [c. 6500 BC].

 

Mehrgarh disproves Gordon Childe's concept of a Neolithic revolution

followed by an urban revolution, because here already in the

beginning of the Neolithic age we have a large town, the largest in

the ancient world, covering over 168 acres, five times the size of

the contemporary Catal Huyuk site in Turkey which has been called the

largest Neolithic site in the Near East. In comparison, the entire

population of Egypt was around 30,000 persons around 6000 BC, around

the same as of Mehrgarh alone! And this is two thousand years before

Sumer. There is no break in cultural developments from Mehrgarh to

Harappa to modern India—here we have proof of the oldest living

civilization in the world.

 

To substantiate their thesis, after establishing the Vedas as the key

to understanding the world-view of ancient India, the authors

concentrate in the first half of the book on demolishing the myth of

the Aryan invasion and proceed to present the advanced Harappan

civilization citing major tectonic changes as the cause of the

abandonment of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. In the second part, they

discuss the cultural and spiritual legacy of ancient India to

highlight not only the profound spirituality but also how ritual gave

birth to science, particularly mathematics and astronomy. The work

concludes with a presentation of the perennial wisdom of the Vedas,

asserting its relevance for saving mankind from rushing lemming-like

to its own destruction and for enabling man to realise the potential

that lies at the core of his being.

 

The authors have to be complimented for pointing out that the

prevalent belief regarding the age of the Vedas as between 1200 and

1000 BC is based purely upon an ad hoc pronouncement by Max Muller

despite his admission in his last work [1900] that the date could as

well be 1500 as 15,000 BC! They proceed to show how the word "Aryan"

has been twisted to provide a racial connotation that it never had

(notably by Gordon Childe), paving the way for fascist racism. In

Darius' cuneiform inscription of 520 BC he alludes to making "the

writing of a different sort in Aryan, which did not exist before",

thus giving it a secondary meaning of language. Colin Renfrew has

recently reasserted this. Originally the word "arya" referred to a

quality of character: nobility, and "arya-varta" meant the abode of

noble people.

 

This book is one of the first to highlight the little known metal

artifact carbon-dated to 3700 BC of a head with moustache and hair

coiled with a tuft on the right that has been given the

name, "Vasishtha Head", now reposing in the Hicks Foundation for

Cultural Preservation in San Francisco. Pointing out the remarkable

accuracy of the weights found in the Harappan sites that follow a

binary system up to 12,800 units, and the meticulous geometric layout

of the towns, they bring home how scholars have neglected this

evidence of scientific knowledge on part of Neolithic humanity. They

list as many as 17 arguments to disprove Mortimer Wheeler's

melodramatic scenario of Aryan hordes destroying these cities. The

Rig Veda celebrates the seven rivers, specially Sarasvati, which

precedes the mythical Aryan invasion of 1200 BC by many centuries.

Astronomical configurations are mentioned that could have occurred

only between 2000 and 6000 BC. The Brahmanas and Aranyakas also

belong to the third millennium BC.

 

Most important is the fact that the archaeologically established

chronology for the cities shows them abandoned far before the alleged

attacks in 1500-1200 BC. Just as tectonic changes led to the sudden

collapse of the Akkadian empire after Manishtusu (2307-2292 BC), the

death of the Bronze Age city of Tiryns in Turkey and of Troy (level

VI) and the devastation of the Minoan civilization in Crete in about

1250 BC, so the Indian plate pushing into Asia was responsible for

the abandonment of sites like Mohenjo Daro following the drying up of

the Sarasvati River and its tributaries (the river had changed its

course at least four times) and the emergence of the Kashmir valley.

That is why the Indians migrated eastwards to the Yamuna-Ganga

valley, a hint of which is in the Shatapatha Brahmana (1900 BC) that

speaks of the conquest of the swampy area east of the Ganga by

Mathava Videgha. The Vedic people were also seafaring merchants, as

there is mention of sea travel in many hymns, and not just cattle

breeding nomads as the invasion model asserts. Seals dated to about

2400 BC found in the Middle East substantiate this. The standard

weights of Harappa were used in Bahrain (Dilmun), an inscription in

Harappan script has been found on the Oman coast and it is possible

that the Mesopotamian Meluha refers to Harappa. The authors very

convincingly aruge that the allegedly separate Vedic and Harappan

cultures are actually the same Indus-Sarasvati civilization and its

script is the origin of the Brahmi lipi.

 

The excellent analysis of data from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh

points out the use of the potter's wheel, bow drills and

domestication of cattle in the early fourth millennium, much before

the so-called invasion. There is a direct development from Mehrgarh

to Mohenjo Daro and the Rig Veda. The arguments could have been even

stronger if the authors had cared to consult K.D. Sethna's very

important book, Karpasa in Prehistoric India (Biblia Impex 1984).

Cotton finds mention in the earliest Sutras but is absent from the

Vedas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas. Hence, if the Rigvedic people came after

the Harappans, how can they be ignorant of cotton? Similarly, rice is

not known to the Rigveda and the Avesta, while it is present in

several Harappan sites within and outside the Indus valley.

Therefore, the Rigveda has to precede the Harappan Culture. Silver is

known from 4000 BC only, and is not found in this Veda, which must

therefore antedate it. Sethna's Problem of Aryan Origins (Aditya

Prakashan, 1992) provides some more clinching arguments that the

authors would have done well to study: Harappan seals with evidence

of spoked shells are dated to 1960 BC far before the supposed

invasion which Wheeler claims to have introduced the chariot and

spoked wheel; evidence of equine remains is available dated before

2000 BC and even at Hallur in Karnataka c. 1800-1500 BC. Therefore,

the Aryans whom Asko Parpola and Wheeler would like to immigrate to

India c.1600-1400 BC cannot have introduced the horse in the Deccan

centuries before their arrival! If the horse is a conclusive sign of

Aryan presence, then it is in India long before the Harappan

Civilization in Neolithic sites. Moreover, a terracotta horse-like

figurine with a saddle on its back has been found in Balu in the

Harappan urban phase. Sethna also provides evidence, going back to

much before the second millennium BC of heavy flooding of Harappan

settalements, with five floods found in Mohenjo Daro itself, each

lasting for several decades. Considerable rise in the coast-line of

the Arabian Sea is also a geological fact he cites. Hence there is no

need to posit an invading Aryan horde to demolish imaginary dams

where natural forces are at work. Further, points out Sethna, if

invasion came from the north, why is it southern Mohenjo Daro instead

of northern Harappan sites that shows noticeable decline in material

prosperity? The coup de grace is administered with evidence from

undersea excavations at Dwaraka, dating the submergence to c. 1400

BC, tallying with statements in the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa. If

the Kurukshetra war occurred around this time, surely the period of

the Rig Veda would have to be considerably anterior to it and by no

means c. 1500 BC. How could the Aryans invade just a couple of

centuries before the great war? Necessarily, therefore, the Rig Veda

precedes the Harappa Culture that ended around the middle of the

second millennium BC.

 

In their presentation of the antiquity of the Indian Civilization the

authors lose the advantage of brilliant research by Sethna in his

Ancient India in a New Light (Aditya Prakashan, 1989) that cites

convincing evidence for identifying Megasthenes' Sandrocottus with

Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty. Megasthenes' references point to

the Bhagavata Vaisnavite cult of the Guptas and not what the Mauryas

practised. The Mehrauli Iron Pillar inscription is by Sandrocottus-

Chandragupta-I whose term for the invading Greeks is "Vahlika" which

fills in the puzzling gap in Indian records regarding incursions by

them. Scholars have blindly accepted Fleet's chronology of Fa-Hien as

visiting during the reign of Chandragupta II, though he does not

mention any king and his descriptions of social conditions to not

tally with the Gupta regime. Similarly, Fleet misrepresents Al-

beruni's travelogue. The Arab categorically refers to the Gupta Era

as celebrating the end and not the beginning, as Fleet states, of a

dynasty that had come to be hated. Fleet even conjectured Skandagupta

battling the Huns though there is no such reference in the Junagadh

inscription of Rudradaman-I as Sethna proves. The Ashokan monuments

have affinities not with Achaemenid art but with Mesopotamia and

carry on the tradition of the realistic treatment of the Indus seals,

the hall at Mohenjo Daro and the high polish of Harappan jewellery.

Inscriptions at Mandasor of Dattabhatta and Yasodharman are analysed

by Sethna to clear many misconceptions about the date of Ashoka whom

he establishes at 950 BC, with Buddha's death in 1168 BC and

Mahavira's in 1165 BC. This would have convincingly supported the

effort of the book under review to illuminate the dark backward and

abysm of a critical portion of our antique time.

 

If the thesis the three authors have presented motivates those

interested in the history of the birth of civilization to thing

afresh, untrammelled by preconceptions foisted by western scholars

and their Indian followers over the last hundred years, it will be a

consummation devoutly to be wished.

 

– Pradip Bhattacharya

International HRD Fellow (Manchester)

Author of the entry on the Indus Civilization in the Dravidian

Encyclopaedia

August 12, 2001

 

*In search of the cradle of civilization by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash

Kak, David Frawley

Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1999, pp. xxi+341, index & bibliography,

Rs. 395.