17 Civilization in the Indus Valley

Civilization in the Indus Valley

Civilization of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa | Aryans Invade, Conquer and Make War in the Indus Valley |Aryans, Beginning Hinduism and the Vedas...

Civilization of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa

A chaos of water flowing down from mountains in the north formed tributaries that merged into the Indus River. Sometime around 6000 BCE a nomadic herding people settled into villages just west of theIndus River. There they created order for themselves, growing barley and wheat using sickles with flint blades, and they lived in small houses built with adobe bricks. After 5000 BCE the climate in their region changed, bringing more rainfall. Apparently they were able to grow more food, and they grew in population. They began domesticating sheep, goats and cows and then water buffalo. Then after 4000 BCE they began to trade beads and shells with people in the distant areas of central Asia (around the Caspian Sea) and other areas west of the Khyber Pass. And they began using bronze and working metals. With time and experience they were improving their technology.

The climate changed again, bringing still more rainfall, and on the plains along the Indus River grew jungles inhabited by crocodiles, rhinoceros, tigers, buffalo and elephants. By around 2600, a civilization as grand as that in Mesopotamia and Egypt had begun on the Indus Plain and surrounding areas. They had covered sewers and, drainage systems beneath their streets. By 2300 BCE this civilization reached maturity and was trading with Mesopotamia. Seventy or more cities had been built, some of them upon buried old towns. There were cities from the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains toMalwan in the south. There was the city of Alamgirpur in the east and Sutkagen Dor by the Arabian Sea in the west.

The greater Indus region was home to the largest of the four ancient urban civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia and China. It was not discovered until the 1920's. Most of its ruins, even its major cities, remain to be excavated. The ancientIndus Civilization script has not been deciphered.

Many questions about the Indus people who created this highly complex culture remain unanswered, but other aspects of their society can be answered through various types of archaeological studies.

Harappa was a city in the Indus civilization that flourished around 2600 to 1700 B.C.E. in the western part of South Asia.

The Harappans used the same size bricks and standardized weights as were used in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira.These cities were well planned with wide streets, public and private wells, drains, bathing platforms and reservoirs. One of its most well-known structures is the Great Bath of Mohenjo Daro.


There were other highly developed cultures in adjacent regions of Baluchistan, Central Asia and peninsular India. Material culture and the skeletons from the Harappa cemetery and other sites testify to a continual intermingling of communities from both the west and the east.Harappawas settled before what we call the ancient Indus civilization flourished, and it remains a living town today.

Ghaggar-Hakra River

There may have been another large river that ran parallel to and east of the Indus at some time in the past. The northern part of its now usually dry bed is called "Ghaggar" in India and "Hakra" in Pakistan. This group of channels is sometimes referred to as "Saraswati" and is associated by some with the Saraswati River of theRg Veda).

Its lost banks are slowly being traced by researchers. Along and within its dry bed, archaeologists are discovering a whole new set of ancient settlements. 

Meluhha

Ancient Mesopotamian texts speak of trading with at least two seafaring civilizations - Magan and Meluhha - in the neighborhood of South Asia in the third millennium B.C.E. This trade was conducted with real financial sophistication in amounts that could involve tons of copper. The Mesopotamians speak of Meluhha as a land of exotic commodities. A wide variety of objects produced in the Indus region have been found at sites in Mesopotamia.

This site tells the story of the ancient Indus Civilization through the words and photographs of the world's leading scholars in the US, Europe, India and Pakistan. It starts with the re-discovery of Harappa in the early 19th century by the explorer Charles Masson and later Alexander Burnes, and formally by the archaeologist Sir Alexander Cunningham in the 1870's. This work led to the the first excavations in the early 20th century at Harappa by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, and by R.D. Banerji at another Indus Civilization city, Mohenjo Daro.

One of these cities was Mohenjo-daro (Mohenjodaro), on the Indus River some 250 miles north of the Arabian Sea, and another city wasHarappa, 350 miles to the north on a tributary river, the Ravi. Each of these two cities had populations as high as around 40,000. Each was constructed with manufactured, standardized, baked bricks. Shops lined the main streets of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and each city had a grand marketplace. Some houses were spacious and with a large enclosed yard. Each house was connected to a covered drainage system that was more sanitary than what had been created by the civilization in Mesopotamia. Mohenjo-daro had a building with an underground furnace (a hypocaust) and dressing rooms, suggesting bathing was done in heated pools, as in modern day Hindu temples.

The people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa shared a sophisticated system of weights and measures, using an arithmetic with decimals. Whether these written symbols were a part of a full-blown written language is a matter of controversy among scholars, some scholars pointing out that this and the brevity of grave site inscriptions and symbols on ritual objects are not evidence of a fully developed written language.

he people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa mass-produced pottery with fine geometric designs as decoration, and they made figurines depicting their attitudes. They grew wheat, rice, mustard and sesame seeds, dates and cotton. And they had dogs, cats, camels, sheep, pigs, goats, water buffaloes, elephants and chickens.

Then, between 1800 and 1700 BCE, civilization on the Indus Plain all but vanished. What befell these people is unknown. One suspected cause is a shift in the Indus River. Another is that people dammed the water along the lower portion of the Indus River without realizing the consequences: temporary but ruinous flooding up river, flooding that would explain the thick layers of silt thirty feet above the level of the river at the site of Mohenjo-daro. Another suspected cause is a decline in rainfall.

Agriculture declined and people abandoned their cities in search of food. Later, a few people of a different culture settled in some of the abandoned cities, in what archaeologists call a "squatter period." Then the squatters disappeared. Knowledge of the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa civilization died – until archaeologists discovered the civilization in the mid-19th century.