Harappan Civilization | Michel Danino | India ki Khoj | 2019

I'm very delighted to introduce our last but not the least speaker professor Michele de Nino you know of our very own iit Gandhi Nagar so professor de Nino was born in France in 1956 and has been living in India since 1977 as an is an Indian citizen an independent student of Indian civilization he authored or edited several books on proto historical India Indian culture and Indian knowledge systems since 2011 he has been teaching courses on Indian civilization and heritage at IIT Gandhinagar where he's currently visiting professor he has also been assisting the archaeological sciences center that was created here in 2012 so you can think of this talk you know which is on the Harappan civilization as as a pair to your visit to Lothal the the archaeological site and Lothal and and and I hope that you know this talk will sort of give you you know a deeper perspective of that field visit that you all took on Thursday so thank you Michelle he really did adjust his his vacation schedule to be with us at the India Kukoc program and I thank you for that Michelle please this is an introduction that Michelle wrote himself which is why it is a modest introduction and I forgot to mention something that he doesn't like to mention that he has been awarded the Padma Shri award which is one of the most highest you know award given by by the Government of India in recognition for you know his his contribution in this in this area so you know since Michelle wrote his bio he very conveniently deleted that so thank you Donna for for reminding me it was important this is important I think you can if it's it's ok with the video it's ok we if we use this all right so good afternoon everyone and well I suppose it's a privilege to give you the last talk I hope you have not reached saturation point by now and there's an either irony which is that we end with the beginning in a way and well that's how it is it's it's it's maybe a better way to understand the beginning once you've seen something of the end because there is a certain process which Indian civilization followed for something like as we will see not far from 5,000 years before I I so I know that you've been to low Thailand our postdocs Roman and we see went with you and I'm sure they have explained very competently whatever can be seen of the site unfortunately much of the excavations that Lawton have been reburied because you know conserving excavated site is always a huge challenge technically and demands a lot of resources which India usually doesn't really have so the simplest way to preserve an excavation is to just Ribery it so whatever you saw is unfortunately in fact I'll show you a few slides of l'hotel which will not correspond to what you saw as a compliment but before we start I think we need to stop well glimpses certainly because that's all we can do in an hour or so in the slash because this civilization happens to have at least four names and it might have had a fifth which perhaps was the best of all so Indus Valley Civilisation is what you'll often hear but the the professionals have dropped the world valley though it remains in the popular culture because it's absolutely not limited to the Indus Valley anymore this where the initial sites then happen because archaeologists have a certain tradition that they sometimes name civilizations or culture after the first discovered site and this was Harappa in the Pakistan part of the state of Punjab so that's another world which is kind of neutral and which many archaeologists prefer we see why sometimes it is called Indus Valley Civilisation which has not been very widely accepted for for various reasons but lastly in the 1930s one archeologist who was working on those sites at that time proposed another term which was proto Indian civilization and the name might have stuck except that as you know India went through a partition and it so happens that mohenjo-daro and Harappa which were the first sites that were discovered Harappa first modular just a year after were are today in Pakistan and because of the relations between India and Pakistan is obvious that the Pakistani side would not accept a term like proto Indian civilization so anyway it doesn't matter it has three four names as long as we know what we're talking about that's all that matters we will see this locality which happens to be very views when to low tell if you want to see a second important Harappan site in Gujarat it is this one which is Dholavira it's far bigger than total and far more impressive but it requires spending a night there so it's about 300 kilometers from here so now the other critical term here is civilization I do not know I'm sorry your backgrounds I don't know what the streams of studies you're in but could you anyone throw a few things at me quickly as to what we have to understand by this word civilization which of course is all constantly debated among experts there is no standard definition but we can take an empirical one in fact I know we've had even you know a great Indian at the end of the nineteenth century who declared that humanity had not yet reached the state civilization at all so in other words there was no civilization before so it's it's a bit subjective but archaeologists have a certain fairly well-defined set of criteria for example if you take Paleolithic paintings you know some paintings in France and Spain date back to 40,000 years ago and very elaborate tech paintings technically pointing to a certain high culture but archaeologists will never call this stage of society a civilization so what is a civilization can you just yes please sorry sorry yeah if you've thrown a lot of things already a government so actually this will rather speak of a state more than a government because that's an entity and the government is the instrument of the state if you if you like then you said specialized crafts which is definitely true and nevertheless it doesn't mean that specialized crafts did not exist a little earlier in the Neolithic stage which precedes the stage of civilization you do have already some specialization but you're right it becomes very very clearly defined writing again there's a bit of a dispute among experts but let us agree that most civilizations did have writing they need writing to keep records bureaucratic records trade records so yes it usually comes along with that now this one very very critical visible feature what's the most visible feature of civilizations yes so this technically is known as urbanism because you do have buildings earlier but they're not monumental and they don't you know crystallize into something that you can identify as a city so once again you can endlessly you know split hairs if you want in the Neolithic stage you do have villages you have sometimes large villages I'll show you one in that region you have sometimes things that begin to resemble towns so when is a village and village no longer a village but a town when is it town no longer town but the city so this there are certain gray RS but let's be simple cities urbanism a state specialized crafts writing and what else one or two more sorry ha I'm glad you bring this up because that's a big bone of contention among archaeologists some really put military as part of thee and and like Egypt for example and Greece and China of course all of them had powerful military organizations and yet this one doesn't have any trace of it and there are a few others like thee in Central Asia there was another contemporary civilization known as the bacteria margin archaeological complex of Oxus civilization also no trace of military so this there's there are relative views on this yes so surplus in agriculture very much because cities do not grow food and therefore you have to have this state we've been talking of has to have some measure of control on the agricultural output and make sure that the cities are sustainable from that point of view otherwise the concept of city will not work and trade so trade actually happens long before this stage of civilizations in the in the panel it ik already which means let's be simple more than twelve thousand years ago in most parts of the world you already have some trade it's it's very simple exchange about a trade with just a few craft products usually not much more than that but here we see trade expanding because there are not only internal networks within one civilization but and this is a critical or so criterion there are external trade networks which start being established and you find that all of these civilizations well not all of them at all points of time but at some point of time they all get into in touch with each other so so this is sorry so this is what we've just discussed and internal and external trade writing sophisticated technologies maybe we it was implied in the specialized crafts but it's a fact that without certain technologies appearing and especially the one technology which corresponds to the age of civilizations is very very but in parallel in close coordination with civilizations what is it I'm sorry no no not at all because in fact many civilization do not have currencies like this one will not have any coinage metal metallurgy yes so stone technology is not abandoned it continues they still make tools of stone not the same of course as in the Paleolithic and Neolithic but metals appear and metals mean a whole new range of developments of tools sometimes weapons if you have a military structure etc so this this you know creates so many more possibilities in the trade in the working of materials and and therefore basically what it all boils down is a kind of a step in the complexification of human society before that in the Neolithic you do have complex communities but this is nothing compared to this stage agricultural surplus so anyway there are debates and debates but I'm just keeping it simple so that we have this in mind and this in the Bronze Age since we spoke of metals just now and this is the age where copper and bronze which as you know is an alloy of copper and tin appear in many parts of the world independently there are many reasons for this which I won't go into but in the third millennium see and so that 2000 to 3000 BC which corresponds very much to the Indus and this world Valley should have gone I borrowed this map from somewhere so this turn mean an embassy is very much the the Millennium for this civilization at that time you have early Egyptian civilization in fact it begins from about 3000 and something BC Mesopotamia is earlier than Egyptian the first was a bottom in cities appear about 3500 BC or so and China little after it's like 2200 BC or so but the dates you know keep evolving as excavations come up with fresh materials so I'm no I'm not sure my knowledge is up-to-date as far as Chinese concern so what's interesting here and there's another one which should figure on this map which is in Central Asia which is here from about 2000 BC onward which is the access civilization I just mentioned so what's interesting is that many of these civilizations are actually in contact at some point of time and as you'll see a little later especially Indus with this one axis and with Mesopotamia this whole civilization here but not directly with Egypt only indirectly so as far as the dates are concerned this is miss of Pattaya but if we want to look at the let us forget the early phases because none of this civilization of course appear overnight on the landscape they all have long preparatory stages and and therefore if we look at the urban phases which is really what define civilization here it's 2200 for Mesopotamia which actually should now be 3500 as far as I know Egypt for the the urban phase will be about 2700 and for for the the mature Harappan or urban phase of the Harappan civilization is 2600 BC so anyway you see that there are things happen kind of in parallel between these civilizations there are reasons for this the the whole warming of the planet about ten twelve thousand years ago which triggered agricultural practices at at least five six different parts of the globe and and slowly population increases with a lot of agriculture produce with animal husbandry and once population increases there is a tendency to create those bigger and bigger clusters which eventually grow into cities but please note that this doesn't concern the whole of humanity there are many parts of humanity where the society does not feel the need to graduate if I may say so to the urban stage you have a lot of tribal societies you have a lot of Island societies that are quite happy remaining in a kind of either Neolithic phase you know the new Stone Age or what is sometimes called the Chalcolithic which is the Copper Age just a little before the Bronze Age where people are using Chalco that is copper and lytic stone tools but they they are in kinds of towns they don't feel the need to move to the next stage so so this is the background and now this is a map I once drew to show it's not perfectly up-to-date but almost to show the main sides of the civilization so please see here Harappa which as I said was the very first to be discovered on a tributary of the Indus River this huge river that flows through India today a Kashmir in particular Ladakh Kashmir and Pakistan and then mohenjo-daro so this is known as Punjab all this region this is known as Sindh in Pakistan and and there and then another number of sites followed this was only in the 1920s and 1930s and III won't have the time to tell you the the very interesting story of the discovery of that civilization and then this is the international border so initially all these sites were in the in the Indus Valley hence the name Indus Valley but then much later a number of other sites were discovered this is in Balochistan and we'll see a few of these this is the the the Balochistan region of Pakistan and as I said 1947 this is the international border so all of these sites went over to Pakistan so indian archaeologist who till then had full access and had participated in the excavations in guangzhou daro harappa because this was all India suddenly you know we're left with almost nothing oh who knows because they were still two sides one is here rupa and another one here in the southern part of gujarat no I'm sorry this is this is it run through very close to load on these two way alone before the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan but these were the only two so in an archaeology started the excavating in some regions where there had been already some clues and in particular they found here along the dry bed of a river which today is known as the dagger chakra river Ganga in India and Hara in Pakistan this river had been identified with a river called Saraswathi in ancient Indian texts right in the 19th century so I will not tell you that whole story but it was understood that this was the relic of that river and very strangely along this dry but literally hundreds of size of that particular Harappan culture were identified so do not imagine that all of these sites have been excavated in fact only 10% no more than 10% perhaps even 5% of Harappan sites have been excavated how do i archeologist identify without excavating that aside belongs to a particular culture like the Harappan culture well they have certain techniques of exploration they will look at the pottery available on the surface sometimes they will take a try and trench to look at the chronology the vertical chronology they have certain techniques which are fairly reliable though once the site is properly excavated sometimes there are surprises there are more phases than we're taught and so on so it's an approximate picture and in fact every week or month two things happen fresh sites are discovered in Pakistan as well as in India that is to say identified and some sites disappear they disappear especially in the region close to Delhi you can see Delhi here the capital of India Haryana is full of Harappan sites I have only put a few of the main sites and every week a month some sites just are raised and disappear because of very rapid you know expansion of Indian cities mechanization of Agriculture also the fact that Indian laws about archaeology archaeological sites are a bit complicated and village is often a bit afraid that their land might be taken over the communication is not very good between the government and people you know on the land and sometimes it has happened that villages prefer to just remove a site just dig it out and you know put it all away from site so that they they don't have this fear that perhaps their land will be taken over there is also sometimes a kind of you know hope to find treasure and it has happened it has happened in fact about ten years ago in Uttar Pradesh absolutely unexpectedly somewhere in this region here between the yamuna and the ganges village of villages just plowing his field dug up some gold and when they the the village the whole village came and started digging they actually and something like 80 to 90 kilos of gold ornaments which say most of which they immediately melted and sold but some of it about 10 percent of it was preserved and I mean by the time you know the news spread the Archaeological Survey of India officials could come and still salvage that little bit it's very unfortunate because why was such a hoard of gold ornaments kept there will unfortunately never been known it's not the gold that is precious 90 kilos of gold anyways nothing but it's the the wealth of knowledge about the handicrafts about you know the the locality about the whole process of what brought this goal here that would have been so precious more than the gold itself in Gujarat this is therefore Luton and we are all here and this is the site of Dholavira which was on my very first slide which we'll come back to so there are many other sites which we will we'll visit a few as we proceed and this is the relic of this Gaga hakura River very very visible on the on Google Earth for instance where all these Harappan sites plenty of them are located this is the Yamuna River and this is the Ganges River so this in the Saraswati civilization term has been proposed and partly accepted by a number of resist but there are some controversies which I will not go into however this is a inventory of sites which I did some years ago it's not up to date but it still shows you we are talking purely about mature Harappan so that means urban stage sites and it shows you that there is a kind of a balance between India and Pakistan in fact India seems to have more Harappan sites today than Pakistan and Gujarat alone has a few hundreds though some of them are of mixed culture they are not pure happen and there are criteria to define pure Harappan some of them are mixed between the Harappan culture and a regional culture so these are the numbers that are there purely for the urban size the the the cities if you like and but today this is grown to perhaps 1500 or even 2000 nobody has a proper final inventory and this is a list that keeps growing was it we spoke of a state and for a long time there was a thought that mohenjo-daro which is certainly still today the most impressive Harappan city was perhaps the capital of this civilization and that it was a kind of an empire maybe you know the the first influential archaeologists who worked here where British mostly a little later some German French archaeologists also joined and they were always tempted to apply to this civilization which they had learnt in the Roman Empire in the Egyptian civilization and so on and therefore the word Empire was used which today is no longer quite accepted because the area is just huge I think I forgot to bring to bring out the area here yeah this is it 1 million square kilometers that's huge that's about one third of modern India it's a huge area and it's much much bigger than ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia where so to keep such an area and central capital here when you have sites which are actually 1500 kilometers away would represent a huge challenge so the current thinking is that rather there are if you see there are kind of equidistant large cities like Dholavira is here mojodojo is here Harappa is here there's another one here a huge one rocky Geary which is under partial excavation at the moment in India which is unfortunately occupied by several villages so it's not very very easy to have a complete idea of it but it's it's it's a huge city potentially potentially as large as Meru that although that is not yet proved so so there seems to be and there's another one huge one here in Pakistan which is called on marijuana so this is just a thought a conjecture that perhaps these were important regional powers and rather than a central capital it was a kind of a confederation though we should not imagine a formal a federated state the way we conceived it today so this is this is still unknown and the reason why this is one of the many question marks about the civilization you will hear a few more as I proceed the reason why we there are still so many unknowns is that unlike ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia the writing of this civilization has not been deciphered the Indus script is available only on very short inscriptions I will show you a few usually typically four five six signs rarely more the longest inscription is about twenty-three signs so unlike in Mesopotamia where you have tablets consisting of hundreds if not thousands of signs and there are actually pieces of literature there are long texts and they've been you know patiently deciphered here the inscriptions are so short and they are never bilingual and therefore the the the the real and final decipherment has never been agreed upon so therefore it's it's a mute civilization it doesn't speak to us it speaks to us only through the material remains nothing else so this creates special difficulties of course for the archaeologists to interpret what they see so they have to go by the material remains and of course urbanism is the first and most striking material relic of this civilization so here you have a view of the upper faiths the the the upper part of Maggio darou because most of the cities are divided into two in fact lo tell you might not have noticed but luteal also is divided into two and as you first enter and you have the on the left you will have the warehouse and then you see those bathing platforms I hope you saw them this is known as the upper a part of the town hotel is a town it's not a city but still it follows the same principles and this is above as you move towards the lower town you do move down and and then something it's a different landscape altogether so so this is a pattern which was adopted across this whole civilization this division in at least two zones if not sometimes three as we will see so here you have a lot of monumental buildings some of which I will come back to and further division into two parts this is the northern part of the Acropolis or upper town and this is the southern part of it and the the law modulo will be somewhere here to the right of the screen where most of the inhabitants will be living this is a place of prestige this is a place where obviously special people live obviously the rulers perhaps also the high administrators probably some of the high priests perhaps some important traders or community leaders there's a lot of perhaps in all this story but this is clearly not for the common inhabitant of modular oh I'll show you so this is a ground map of the important building some of which we will see in brief this was a great bath and the so-called granary this is a closer view of the of the so-called granary so why question marks because again and this is a very very major problem in archaeology even though you have a building in front of you you have to interpret it so the building is not an objective controversy but what it was used for who used it all of this can be controversial and again our archaeologists were British archaeologists they were used to like John Marshall later on Mortimer wheeler they were used to Roman Empire archaeology and in the Roman Empire you have granaries what is the granary it's a centralized centrally controlled structure where the state holds the grain and distributes it to the population so this requires a certain kind of state and and a lot of control over the arc the agricultural production here in fact there is no evidence that grain was ever stored and today the major in you know mainstream interpretation is more that it was a kind of a warehouse and in fact you see this division into separate plant form just as you saw at Lowton so there is actually no particular reason why this should be called a granary though you will see the term in a lot of books on the Indus civilization and then so this is some detailed view of it which I will I will skip then you have this so-called great bath complex where there is a basin here made of very very tightly lined bricks there was also a mortar of gypsum over the bricks and then some natural tar over the gypsum to make it waterproof but again all these terms are tricky you see the fact of naming something but there is archeology or history the moment you name you've already put a bias on what you are studying so great bath great perhaps because it seems to be a place of prestige in the whole architecture of no NGO thorough but bath might be wrong it's a basing 12 meters long seven meters wide and then you have all these cells around one of which as well as you can see here this cells where perhaps occupied by special people priests or whatever but initially it was conceived as a bath where you know like a kind of a Turkish bath this hypothesis was dropped the moment climatic conditions were taken into consideration there was no need of a Turkish bath in the in the heat of Sindh and so some other ecologist said that it could be the pleasure part of the of the royal family it's quite possible but it could be something quite different also it could be for example a place for rituals a kind of a temple pond Basin which was also proposed by many people so we we have to eventually the best you know approach to my mind is to keep all the hypotheses always present in our mind and not necessarily this unless there is some strong evidence towards one interpretation or another so this is a ground plan of the great bath which was certainly a very elaborate structure and now we move to the lower area of noises ro where as you see it's quite different it's actually still point planned in the sense that just in as in the Acropolis I forgot to mention that the streets were oriented north-south and east-west so here the orientation is a little bit more approximate but still visible and there are kind of blocks there are blocks of houses which are organized along these streets and those have been well studied in fact though it looks a bit messy an Italian archaeologist was able to prove that there are no more than five to six ground plans of houses here and all of them are following one or the other of these five to six house plans from the small ones to the very largest ones it's all very carefully planned and not randomly built at all there's another reason why it's not randomly bit I will even highlight it a little later so he here is for example one of the largest houses in this area it has a central courtyard and all these rooms organized around it but next to that you will have like here for example modest houses or medium houses and very interestingly as far as the architecture can inform us on the society there doesn't seem to be a great shop demarcation between different layers of the society obviously they were richer people the traders tend to have larger homes perhaps as I said the administrators were not living here at all but on the Acropolis but you do not have an area where you have only large and rich houses and another area like a slum when you have only the poorest people it doesn't seem too as far as can be seen it is all in all intermingling in in the same areas which is what we see here so so in other words it looks as if but we have to be very careful with all these statements it looks as if the Harappan society is not highly stratified there are different communities no doubt there are portals there are metal workers there are constructors there are town planners there are agriculture is of course in the rural settlements there will be people managing the sanitation system which I will show you there are administrators of obviously so all these you know specializations do exist but it looks as if to a large extent they are kind of living together as in the same areas if so that is a remarkable feature which is quite unlike modern Indian cities if you go to many Indian cities you can tell that especially the new layouts rather than the old towns you will see that there are certain posh areas where you know that only rich people will be living and on the country you have very very modest if not slummy areas so the the the the demarcation is quite visible so this is the this large street we are looking at and these are very Lakes of the buildings no roofs have been preserved and as you can see this is all made of bricks modular oh is entirely built of bricks mostly baked bricks fire bricks hundreds of millions of them and in fact this was one reason why the Western especially European archaeologists who initially worked at mohenjo-daro in the 1920s and 30s and 40s we're a bit disappointed because you see one they discovered this new civilization they were hoping for something like in Egypt you know you have extraordinary pyramids colossal temples fantastic tombs extraordinary treasures absolutely nothing of this exist here so they found it a bit of a boring civilization and one of them Mortimer wheeler spoke of miles upon monotonous miles of brickwork you know with almost no distinctive feature so you had a kind of humorous I mean he was joking but still you could see that he is disappointed so be what makes this civilization different and a certain unique features which you know take a little bit more effort to identify and we'll be doing that now so this is an example of a small Lane in mohenjo-daro where you see several stages of reconstruction but right here in front of you is one of these remarkable features which early archaeologists did not notice can if you have is there anybody here who's done some civil engineering for example you should be able to tell us what's absolutely remarkable about what you see here no so you are just like the first archaeologists looking for treasure and seeing just plain bricks but there's something extraordinary about these bricks yeah but a bit more precisely a bit more precisely look at the different layers runners as they're called the manner in which they've been laid yes no doubt but for them to be laid in this manner they have to fulfill a very simple condition which is that the length has to be twice the width because only if the length is twice the breadth the width can you have them alternately lengthwise and widthwise and lengthwise and widthwise and this in masonry today is called the English bond because it was considered in Europe to be a major discovery having bricks twice as long as the wide it might look perfectly obvious to you there's nothing obvious about anything in in human evolution and and this will allow you to have structurally in structural engineering this is known to be the the strongest bond you can have with the least amount of material if you do not have this proportion you will have to have many many more you know much thicker walls and even then they may not be quite as bonded or structurally strong as they are here with just one to two bricks widthwise so it should be renamed properly speaking it should be renamed the Harappan bond but the english are a bit possessive about their discover any way that doesn't matter there's another quite remarkable feature which took a bit of time to be properly understood which does figure in indian textbooks though it's not quite well explained which is drainage now drainage did exist in Egypt and Mesopotamia but usually it was exclusive to the place where the Pharaoh lived that is to say the palace and just immediate surroundings or the king put'em young but not it did not exist sanitation drainage did not exist in the let us say the areas where the common people lived here it did and you see here in modular oh these are places where bathrooms are located I'll show you the butter bathrooms don't imagine a modern large comfortable bathroom there are very tiny bathing platforms and I hope you saw them at l'hotel in fact i dro tell they tend to be a little bigger than those in mohenjo-daro you might have seen those square platforms as you enter the site passing after passing the warehouse on your left they would have been immediately on your right though only three or four are left now the way there was a dozen now what you see here is a street which has been excavated actually this was all covered you normally you won't see anything you just see the ground so this has been completely excavated and this underground drains individual drains connecting to a common drain under the street ground level is what came to light and this is all over the city wherever archaeologists have excavated they found this Sanitation system now there are certain conditions because again it doesn't seem perhaps very impressive at first sight it's actually something quite remarkable because under what simple condition will a drain work slope exactly you need a slope now when we have a city and modular is supposed to be about 400 hectares nobody actually knows because even some probing is far away have still dug up some Harappan bricks so nobody is quite sure what the x-final extent of modular would be we don't we don't actually know but if all of that extent you have such a drainage system how do you control the slope over such a huge area it means and this is the the important discovery with the early archaeologists missed that the drainage system was integrated at the initial stage of planning of the city and today there's no doubt about it Macaulay Anson you might have seen his name on the preceding slides I borrowed some of his images is a German architect come archaeologist who did a lot of study of all these features till till a few years ago and he found he measured that flow and he found that it is consistently 1 to 2 centimeters per meter all over the city 1 to 2 centimeter per meter doesn't look like much but it's enough for water to flow and in that is extraordinary there is no intensity today as far as I know modern indian city which can boast of such a system i've lived into three cities and everywhere the drainage system most of the time was made after long after the city had somehow spread into existence and therefore there is no control over the slope sometimes they arise sometimes they're wrong sometimes there's no slope at all and that's why you know when it rains heavily you find only the water overflowing because because they don't work so what they did was that if you remember this this well I can just come back to this plan all these blocks these blocks of houses were actually built on artificial platforms of bricks this was discovered later they were not built just on the ground and the engineers we have to use the word engineer it's absolutely legitimate who planned all this sanitation system adjusted all the various levels of those platforms where the house was built later on to make sure that the whole sanitation system would work so this is one of the you know discrete but impressive achievements of this civilization very elaborate Town Planning and this is another there's another important conclusion which stares at us here we don't see them here these are not actually man-horse is just the the bricks covering here are missing but they will be manholes I think I'll sly later on there will be regular manholes where somebody can go down and not only inspect but clean there will be something like the if I take a cross section with a slope which I exaggerate here there will be something like this you see and this is known as a sump where any solid matter can will be you know the water will slow down and it will be dropped here so you have a manhole you'll have a removable slab above this and therefore we know for sure that there must have been a municipal force what as we would call it today municipal workers sanitation workers whatever who would regularly go about the city and clean the drains otherwise they would not have been functional very soon they would get clogged because that's what drains always do so so therefore we have a very well organized municipal task force all over the city which points to a fairly strong administration at least efficient so these are the kind of messages that that come to us this is one house in modular which is particularly large and belonged to a trading traders family this is known because some seals were found there in high concentration and seals were used in the trade I'll briefly mention that later and here what you see there are two three very interesting things here one is this red arrow which points to you cannot read perhaps this is this is terracotta pipe so they found when they when they were excavating that this particular wall had a vertical terracotta pipe terracotta as you probably know means baked clay vertically embedded in this wall and so the archaeologists you know proposed which is the most reasonable assumption that probably there must have been a bathroom upstairs and water would be taken upstairs actually some of these houses even had their own wells you can see the stairs here at least in one or two places here or so so this this had at least two stories two levels and very likely the owners of this house lived on the first floor because you know modular does not have paved roads it's all mud ruins there must have been a lot of dust about the city maybe some noise we don't know and living upstairs would be more comfortable for some people especially those who can afford such a house and so this is this points to not only an individual bathroom but a bathroom on the first floor which is quite amazing the second point here is this inner courtyard and if you travel through India you will see that this design was adopted and repeated in in many parts of India especially rural India where you know if you if you go to Europe for example the most important part of the house is usually the facade it's you know what looks outside and you have a lot of rooms facing the facade in this four climatic reasons or various other reasons it's exactly the opposite there is no facade you will not see anything from outside all the rooms are inward looking not outward looking so architecturally speaking this is a very Indian feature because you know Europe's climate is generally cold so you want to capture the Sun you want to have more rooms facing the sunlight here it's exactly the opposite there's a lot of heat so you you will not want the the sunlight to enter from outside plus there may be a lot of dust and noise from the street again so this is what explains this organization of rooms around the central courtyard and that's a very very Indian way of dealing with especially in rural parts of India many residences even today are organized just like that fortifications as we see here from Harappa now we're discovered in several sites and we will see mahalo may have had fortifications but they have not been identified as yet however in Hara path some parts were found to be fortified and multimap wheeler who was called from the second world war front to India to hand the Archaeological Survey of India he was Brigadier and he was a very competent archaeologist expert in Roman Empire archaeology and he immediately when he discovered this immediately declared that this was a citadel this is a military term and that these web defenses so after this there's been a lot of debate on what are these fortifications because as I mentioned earlier there's not been any trace of an army there's not been any depiction of warfare on any of the Harappan art do you see people fighting each other for example you see a lot of it in Egyptian art Mesopotamian art there are no weapons of war there are no helmets no certain no swords no shields there are of course axes there are various things that could be used in warfare but they're also mainly tools as far as is known so they could have been defences maybe to protect the cities from some neighboring populations that might not have been so happy about the existence of the Harappan cities but this is all speculation there have been our alternative proposes that some of them were used for protection against floods because many of these cities were established on the edge of fairly large rivers not although some are away from rivers also but it's probable that the important trading cities we're on the edge like mohandro that all like Harappa rocky gary Kalimantan we will see and so on we're probably on the edge of reverse because of communication you see the reverse where the the fastest way to carry goods a way to to other other parts of the Harappan world or beyond so there might have been partly protection against plants there also and this is something which I think most archaeologists agree upon these fortifications may have been a means to control the movement of goods in and out of the cities and this seems confirmed by the very narrow entrance into the city which is something that will be a kept in much much later classical India we will see some cities with the very same kind of narrowed entrance with the gods rooms on either side so that you know people moving in and out can be controlled and even in classical Indian texts we have such descriptions of gods standing at the entrance of the city and you know for to tax the goods they have to have a narrow entrance so this is another interpretation to define the urban state the Harappans we're obviously had a very strong concept of urbanism their own consent and maybe they were not comfortable with a city you know which was undefined in space and they needed some fortifications to say that you know this is the space of the city it's quite possible and also this has been proposed by an American come Russian archaeologist pol serve as a symbol of authority perhaps this is an interesting speculation anyhow the the gateways are very small you see the worker here for example so this is Harappa and this is one of the gateways where we're in fact in this precise location a number of had happen weights I will show you the weights in a few minutes where found which means that the goods were weighed and and this strengthens the interpretation of control of trade this is Carla bangin on an the on the Saraswathi or Galarraga River which was discovered in the 1950s and excavated to some ten years later and here again very interestingly we see this division between Acropolis upper City and Lower City which as I said kind of exists also yeah thank you and you find here a very interesting alignment of the streets with right angles and at the same time the the all the habitations are supposed to be in the lower part this is again a place of prestige which is not very well understood a lot of trade going on with these through these entrances again so this and in fact the proof of the trade activity is seeing here what you see is a you know what archaeologists called luxury the proof of luxury which is basically something superfluous which you don't need in your day-to-day life and the luxury item here are those flooring tiles which are made of terracotta again of baked clay and this is something which obviously show some economic effluents for those people to be able to afford Lotan I will simply take you briefly through what you saw I don't you must have seen this plan in the museum so I will not spend too much time on it except that this is definitely not to scale and the boats are far too big compared to the actual basin was there any water in it when you visited it though it was completely dry yeah there's not a good dry time of the year and you might have noticed because you came this way you might have stood there you might have noticed that a lot of these bricks are actually decaying and this archaeological survey is not sure how best to preserve them so this is the warehouse and this is part of the conjectured building of the Citadel or Acropolis and this is the Lowertown so this is it when it is full of water after a good monsoon there's been some dispute on whether it was actually Dockyard where boats came up and docked to take goods but I think this is the strongest hypothesis I will I'll skip the details there is no better alternative in any case these are some of the bathing platforms which were excavated the totally twelve of them and you can see again the individual drains and the common drain so whether it is water or with a small site town or whether this is a huge city like one Jotaro basically these concepts are the same and that is something very important the sharing of a number of concepts throughout the civilization this is the original warehouse and fortunately the bricks you saw ricans Terry created bricks they are not the original ones I believe they crumbled to a large extent after the excavation and just a few minutes will conclude the the visit through the civilization this is the bazaar street much of which is now buried again where a lot of workshop small habitations are located in the lower part of the town and now Don Avira in which was my very first slide which is that huge city about 47 hectares within the fortifications and nobody really knows how much outside which is divided into now not two but three parts the upper town or Acropolis the middle town and town which was mostly kept for water harvesting so this is the difference between De La Vina and modular oh is that modular was completely made of bricks because the value of Singh the Indus is is completely an alluvial Valley there is no no stone material available there whereas Lord Allah Villa is on a small island which is a rocky island in what is known as the run of kuch very close to Pakistan today and and you can see one of the monumental entrances into the the part of the part which is called the castle which is this heavily fortified area here so these are some of the guards rooms as you enter the castle so that is all again for control of trail this is a real creative computer image of this whole castle of Dholavira these are some streets very again perfectly well aligned streets at right angles so all these concept are shared across the whole civilization and and this is in the middle town of Dholavira more and more houses so only the foundations have remained because they are of stone the actual buildings which were of bricks have vanished by now I think I will stop here will don't need too many further details maybe we can have a few questions if you wish and only sum up the rest of what I had planned to say that there's quite a lot of evidence of strong agricultural production and control the the main items which were grown where crops like barley and wheat later on rice also comes into the picture quite a lot of domestication of animals for consumption cattle and fall and even rabbits and so on so the this the as far as the skeletal studies of Harappan skeletons have been made those people were quite well well fed when nourished there's not much sign of undernourishment there are lots of crafts but let us say the you know the artistic production of the Hara pans was very fine but always on a very small scale they did not produce any monumental art as the Egyptians did however they had a number of trade secrets there will not be time to talk about them but which may some of their typical objects like the beads especially the long carnelian beads carnelian is a form of agate you might have seen them in the museum they had the secret of drilling of these long beads nobody could do that the way they did it and this where these beads were extremely prized in Mesopotamia and they're found in a lot of royal graves all the way to mr. Putterman so developments were trading with what is today Iran Iraq much of the Gulf like the Emmy race Oman there's a strong Harappan presence all over that region and a little bit with Central Asia also they might essentially as far as we can see I mean this is again a very very partial view I keep in mind we have only 10 percent of the excavated sites even those eyes are very partly excavated but as far as we can judge the main occupation of the elephants was trade craft production and trade not military production and there are certain other unique cultural features which if for example the complete invisibility of the ruins you see in Egypt for what strikes you first and foremost is the presence of the Pharaoh the deification of the Pharaoh the scholar cell theorem is created just for the farmer to be buried you know there's absolutely nothing like that in the Harappan world there is not even a single depiction of any figure of which can safely say that this was the king of this was the emperor of the source whatever the ruler so the rulers are invisible and yet they are very present because we can see how the you know Sanitation system the drainage was maintained carefully there's a lot of civic order unlike perhaps modern Indian cities where things often look much more chaotic there's a lot of lot of evidence of civic order for example mohenjo-daro this large street had regular garbage bins made of clay large ones where people deposited the garbage and the garbage itself has been well researched so so this there's a lot which talks about civic order and a considerable amount of planning some artistic production and a lot of these traditions have actually survived into later India but that would be a whole different topic bye and I'll close with this by about 2000 BC or 1900 BC so after 6 or 7 centuries there is a kind of decay taking place and by 1900 BC most of the cities are just abandoned either they are just emptied and people grow elsewhere or they the people who keep living on the cities have reverted to a kind of village lifestyle they are no longer living in the city as urban people citizens of cities but just like villagers and they will build their homes by you know plundering the former material not following any plans whatsoever no more sanitation no more of these serious characteristic I didn't have time to show you characteristic of the Hopman trade so a lot of things disappear at the same time a lot of the cultural inputs of the era pans still get transmitted and this has been well documented and they survived into the later periods so that would be a whole different topic very interesting but that's only what I could do too you a kind of a taste of what is a little you know remarkable about this civilization not always visible to the you know doesn't hit you the way a pyramid hits you but nevertheless all of these civilizations had their own very specific well-defined developments and it's interesting that even though some we're closing in touch for example Mesopotamia was very closely in touch with the Harappan civilization and talks about it in fact in the Mesopotamian tablets the name used for the Indus civilization is maloha or sometimes transcribers maluca so this is the world the name that Mesopotamian tablets use to speak of the goods that come to it from the Indus region so they were very closely in touch and yet they maintained the individuality 'z so clearly there was not much of you know mutual influence except as far as some craft objects are concerned so and the last thing I would like to say is that this interaction not only we see no trace of warfare within the Indus civilization there's absolutely not a single example of man-made destruction anywhere but its interactions with Mesopotamia or the Gulf or Central Asia seem also to happen without any any military clash whatsoever so this is something you know different from for example the interaction between Egypt and Mesopotamia was always punctuated by Wars this is a different phenomenon happening here so why did it end apparently because of climatic changes they were not only there was a big drought striking many parts of the globe from 2200 BC this is well documented now through a number of paleoclimatic studies all the way to North America much of Africa much of Asia this whole subcontinent were affected by this dry of course a drought is a relative phenomenon doesn't mean that there are no rains at all but it means that there's a considerable drop in the precipitations so this is one factor which is involved more and more secondly this Gaga accra or sarasvati River seems to have dried up about this time because suddenly all of its sites are abandoned so there are some tectonics events which I usually use to explain this phenomenon and all of that happening at the same time seems to have triggered a kind of degeneration degradation in the civilization since we do not exactly know how it was control rule-governed over this huge region it's very difficult to you know explain how the the devolution took place and the loss of control what those threads that we are kind of holding it all together how do you become a part first of all we would have to understand those mechanisms of integration much much better so until then the exact chain of events that triggered the end of this phase of Indian urbanism remain matter of speculation the next stage of urban development in India will be more than a thousand years later and this will be in the Ganges region so to the east of this civilization where you have cities and very ancient cities like you've heard all of you have heard of Banaras Varanasi there are many others this will happen in the first millennium BC so there's a kind of a thousand years gap where apparently there are no cities anymore in India and then urbanism reappears and it's a whole different phase of Indian civilization so this is a as I said this is just a glimpse if there is time for some questions feel free

Channel: IIT Gandhinagar

Views: 30,133

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Keywords: IITGN, IITGN 2018, IIT, GANDHINAGAR, INDIA, Harappan Civilization, INDIA KI KHOJ, Archaeological Sciences Centre, Indian civilization, heritage, Indian culture and knowledge systems

Id: _s5EDxuL0Vs

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019