story of india by Michael wood

[Guest guest]

Indus civilization versus The Rig-Veda: in Black & White - 2

 

Mahada and Meghrgarh excavations

 

 

THE STORY OF INDIA

Michael Wood, BBC Books, 2007

 

Excerpts :

 

 

Mahada excavations

 

...... Excavations at Mahada have turned up the skeletons of one

community of hunter-gatherers; they were almost all around twenty

years old, one was around thirty, none was over forty. Their

material life, though, is depicted with brilliant vivacity on Late

Middle Stone Age paintings in the caves at Bhimbetka, which show the

communal animal hunts, the killings and propitiatory ceremonies of

these hunter-gatherers.

 

Of the early gods we know little, but looking at the dancing deity

at Bhimbetka with his bangles and trident, one can't help but recall

the image of the dancing Shiva seen on pilgrim posters today.

 

The mother goddess too, with her full figure and 'eyes like fish',

represents an ancient and irrepressible current in the Indian

imagination, which has never been forsaken in the face of the

monotheisms of Islam and Christianity, nor by the Westernization of

modern times.

 

What is certain too is that the symbols of procreative power - the

stone lingam and yoni (male and female principles) - that are found

in the worship of Shiva come out of the deep past. Not so long ago,

when archaeologists excavated a shrine near Allahabad, south of the

Ganges valley, a broken yoni stone from around 14,000 years ago was

instantly recognized by today's villagers.

 

These aspeccts of the indigenous culture of India are part of the

givenness of the deep past, which is shared by all Indians, whatever

their ancestry, language or religion.

 

 

Meghrgarh excavations

 

...... And among the most important archaeological discoveries of the

last hundred years was the breakthrough made out in the wilds of

Baluchistan.

 

...... The site spreads along the Bolan river, where the water comes

down steel blue and cold across a gravel bed a couple of hundred

yards wide. A century ago the river changed course, cutting through

the site and exposing a cliff-like cross-section of cultural

deposits. The first examination thirty years ago brought mind-

boggling results. Charcoal from one of the early levels gave a

carbon date of the sixth millennium BC, and there were 30 feet more

debris underneath it! To their amazeent, the French team realized

they had a site going back to before 7000 BC, not just centuries,

but millenia earlier than anything yet known in the subcontinent.

 

One of the biggest surprises was the scale of the place. The site

at Mehrgarh extended 1 mile along the river, nearly 750 acres in

all. One place remained where the mud-brick walls, 100 yards long

and 10 feet thick, still stood to a height of seventeen courses.

One of the precious gifts of archaeology is that from so far back in

the human past it can reveal such intimate details of the life

lived. Seldom on Earth can one so closely inspect the dwellings of

such distant ancestors. The packed, rectangular huoses were roofed

with cut branches, and walled with wattle reed and mud, just as

houses are still made in these hills today.

 

The people of Mehrgarh made beautiful pottery patterned with

geometric lines and given a lustrous burnished sheen like polished

walnut. Thre were numerous handmade terracotta figurines, female

figures, some holding a child.

 

The poeple here domesticated goats, sheep, cattle and water-buffalo,

though not the horse. From the sixth millennium BC cattle were the

cornerstone of their economy, but the river valley also teemed with

gazelle, spotted deer, blackbuck and wild sheep, the Indian elephant

and the rhino. Their chief crops were barley and wheat. From the

rampart of mountains on the western horizon, tipped with snow in the

spring, the waters of the Bolan river flowed down into the plain and

on to the Indus, providing a secure environment in which to sustain

human life; and, incredibly, human life lasted in this one small

place for over 4000 years.

 

The Mehrgarh excavation proved that there was settled, continuous

occupation in the Indus region dating back to approximately 7000

BC, 4000 years before the flowing of India's first cities.

 

During this same period agricultural communities were forming across

the ancient Near East, from Anatolia through Palestine to Iran.

 

Looking at it now, it is extraordinary to think that as late as the

1970s there was no evidence of agriculture in India much before 3000

BC, underlining what a revolution these new finds have brought

about. And this was not only a farming economy; there was craft

specialization, including steatite cutting and long-distance trade

in turquoise and lapis.

 

In the fifth millennium BC builders at Mehrgarh used the long plano-

convex brick found later in Indus cities, and cotton was already

cultivated as a mainstay of India, as it is to this day.

 

These new discoveries show beyond doubt that the rise of

civilization in the Indus was an Indian phenomenon; it did not, as

was previously believed, arised from the diffusion of cultural ideas

from Iraq.

Indeed, there are recongnizable traits in today's culture going back

to the Mehrgarh world.

 

Mehrgarh (and twenty villages like it are now known) ws already long

lived when changes arrived around 4500 BC, perhaps with the arrival

of new migrants from the Iranian plateau. These were possibly, as

we shall see, speakers of an early form of the Dravidian languages

still spoken widely over southern and eastern India.

 

During the last period of its life (3500-2500 BC), Mehrgarh was part

of a wider cultural zone extending into Iran, whose people used

stamp seals in terracotta, constructed a large, brick-platform

monumental complex, made figurines of the mother goddess with

pendulous breasts and fantastical headdresses, and bore some

similarity to the brilliant culture than thriving in Iraq.

 

Then, in 2500 BC, the place was abandoned to be replaced by a new

settlement, Naushero, 5 miles away, with massive brick

fortifications and impressive buildings, including what may be a

temple. This settlement would last all the way into what we call

the Harrappan age - the age of cities and writing.

 

So at last archaeologists have been able to trace Indian

civilization to one of its roots.

The root went back to 7000 bC, and it was indigenous.

Until then hunter-gatherers had lived all over the subcontinent, as

they still do, though now being squeezed out by post-Independence

nation states.

 

In these villages of Baluchistan direct continuities can be traced

with the world of historical times, when, in the third millennium

BC, huge cities arose, with writing, architecture and long-distance

commerce, heralding the birth of Indian civilization.

(p.20-23)

 

 

The discoveries of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro

 

...... The finds at Harappa, and at Mohenjo-Daro in Sind in late

1923, took place in the same period of eighteen months or so that

saw Leonard Woolley excavate the tombs of Ur in Iraq, and, of

course, Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Although the finds at Harappa were less spectacular in terms of

artifacts, the significance of the dig went way beyond either.

 

The discoveries here and at Mohenjo-Daro represented the beginning

of the history of the Indian subcontinent, taking its cities back to

3000 BC - before the Pyramids of Gaza.

 

Until the dig at Harappa, it had been widely believed in Europe that

civilization in India was a foreign import, that it was the creation

of the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, and the Judaeo-

Christian traditon of the Near East, with a little help from their

ancient predecessors in Egypt and Babylon.

 

Indian Brahmin priests, however, had asserted that their own

civilization went back thousands of years. Their tradition of the

great war in the epic poem the Mahabharata took it back 5000 years,

while their traditional genealogies, the ancient text known as

Puranas, contained king lists that, if taken literally, would take

Indian chronology back to the Bronze Age. In the eighteenth century

some Western thinkers had been prepared to take these ideas at face

value and to seek connections (however misguided they might seem

now) with ancient Egypt and the Bible. But the colonial orientalist

project tended in the main to dismiss Hindu thought as superstition

and fetishism, a more 'primitive' stage of culture, which needed to

be emancipated by the science, reason and religion of the West. No

one believed that an indigenous Indian civilization could go back

far before the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean..........

 

 

The joint Pakistani and US team is currently engaged in a new dig.

Rolling back the frontiers of knowledge still further, it is now

possible to trace the links with the earlier Baluchi sites excavated

by the French in Mehrgarh, and to put the Indus cities in the

context of a 10,000-year history of civilization in the

subcontinent.

 

Mark Kenoyer, the American on the team, ..... told me:

'Even in today's Harappa you can see the legacy of the Indus cities

reflected in the layout of houses and settlements, and in the

traditional arts and crafts, which still use the old techniques. We

have even found little clay toys that are identical to the ones made

in the Punjab until today. These are the living links between the

people of the Indus cities and the later population of Pakistan and

India.'

(p. 28-29)