- India from the Paleolithic Period to the decline of the Indus civilization
- The development of Indian civilization from c. 1500 bce to c. 1200 ce
- The early Muslim period
- The Mughal Empire, 1526–1761
- The reign of Akbar the Great
- India and European expansion, c. 1500–1858
- British imperial power, 1858–1947
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In the hills to the south of the Ganges (Ganga) valley, a group of sites has been assigned to the “Vindhya Neolithic”; for at least one of these, Koldihwa, dates as early as the 7th millennium have been reported. The sites contain circular huts made of timber posts and thatch; associated implements and vessels include stone blades, ground stone axes, bone tools, and crude handmade pottery, often bearing the marks of cords or baskets used in shaping the clay. In one case a small cattle pen has been excavated. Rice husks occur, though whether from wild or cultivated varieties remains to be determined. There exists considerable uncertainty about the chronology of these settlements; very few radiocarbon dates penetrate further than the 2nd millennium.
Earliest settlements in peninsular India
The earliest dates recorded for settlements in peninsular India belong to the opening centuries of the 3rd millennium. A pastoral character dominates the evidence. In the northern parts of Karnataka, the nucleus from which stone-ax-using pastoralists appear to have spread to many parts of the southern peninsula has been located. The earliest radiocarbon dates obtained in this area are from ash mounds formed by the burning on these sites of great masses of cow dung inside cattle pens. These indicate that the first settlers were seminomadic and that they had large herds of Brahman (zebu) cattle. The earliest known settlements, which were located at Kodekal and Utnur, date to about 2900 bce. Other important sites are Brahmagiri and Tekkalkota in Karnataka and Utnur and Nagarajunikonda in Andhra Pradesh. At Tekkalkota three gold ornaments were excavated, indicating exploitation of local ore deposits, but no other metal objects have been found, suggesting a relative scarcity of metals. These early sites produced distinctive burnished gray pottery, smaller quantities of black-on-red painted pottery, stone axes, and bone points, and in some instances evidence of a stone-blade industry. The axes have a generally oval section and triangular form with pointed butts. Among bone remains, those of cattle are in the majority, while those of sheep or goats are also present. Other settlements have been excavated in recent years in this region, but so far they have produced dates from the 2nd millennium, suggesting that the culture continued with little change for many centuries. Stone axes of a generally similar form have been found widely throughout the southern peninsula and may be taken as indications of the spread of pastoralists throughout the region during the 2nd millennium bce.
Earliest settlements in eastern India
Archaeologists have long postulated the existence of Neolithic settlements in the eastern border regions of South Asia on the basis of widespread collections of ground stone axes and adzes, often of distinctive forms, comparable to those of Southeast Asia and south China. There is, however, little substantial evidence for the date of these collections or for the culture of the people who made them. Excavations at one site, Sarutaru, near the city of Guwahati, revealed stone axes and shouldered celts (one of the distinctive tool types of the Neolithic) in association with cord- or basket-marked pottery.
The rise of urbanism in the Indus valley
From about 5000 bce, increasing numbers of settlements began to appear throughout the Indo-Iranian borderlands. These, as far as can be judged, were village communities of settled agriculturalists, employing common means of subsistence in the cultivation of wheat, barley, and other crops and in the keeping of cattle, sheep, and goats; there was a broadly common level of technology based on the use of stone for some artifacts and copper and bronze for others. Comparison and contrast of the high-quality painted pottery of the period suggest distinct groupings among the communities.
At a somewhat later date, probably toward the middle of the 4th millennium bce, agricultural settlements began to spread more widely in the Indus valley itself. The earliest of these provide clear links with the cultures along or beyond the western margins of the Indus valley. In the course of time, a remarkable change took place in the form of the Indus settlements, suggesting that some kind of closer interaction was developing, often over considerable distances, and that a process of convergence was under way. This continued for approximately 500 years and can now be identified as marking a transition toward the full urban society that emerged at Harappa and similar sites about 2600 bce. For this reason, this stage has been named the Early Harappan, or Early Indus, culture.
Extent and chronology of Early Harappan culture
It is now clear that sites assignable to the Early Harappan Period extend over an immense area: from the Indus delta in the south, southeastward into Saurashtra; up the Indus valley to western Punjab in the northwest; eastward past Harappa to the Bahawalpur region of Pakistan; and, in the northeast, into the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana. In short, the area of the Early Harappan culture was nearly coextensive with that of the mature Indus civilization.
Radiocarbon dating of artifacts from a number of the excavated sites provides a fairly consistent chronological picture. The Early Harappan Period began in the mid-4th millennium bce and continued until the mid-3rd millennium, when the mature Indus civilization displaced it in many regions. In some regions, notably in Punjab, the mature urban style seems never to have been fully established, and in these areas the Early Harappan style continued with little or no outward sign of mature Harappan contact until about 2000 bce.
Principal sites
One of the most significant features of the Early Harappan settlements is the evidence for a hierarchy among the sites, culminating in a number of substantial walled towns. The first site to be recognized as belonging to the Early Harappan Period was Amri in 1929. In 1948 the British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler discovered a small deposit of pottery stratified below the remains of the mature Indus city at Harappa. The next site to be excavated with a view to uncovering the Early Harappan Period was Kot Diji (in present-day Sind province, Pakistan). A stone rubble wall surrounded this settlement, which appears to date to about 3000 bce. An even earlier example is Rehman Dheri, near Dera Ismail Khan, which appears to have achieved its walled status during the last centuries of the 4th millennium. There the roughly rectangular, grid-patterned settlement was surrounded by a massive wall of mud brick. Early Harappan Kalibangan (Kali Banga) in Rajasthan resembled Rehman Dheri in form. It later served as the basis for an expanded settlement of the mature Indus civilization. Still farther east in the eastern Punjab and in Haryana are many other Early Harappan sites. Among them several have been excavated, notably Banawali and Mitathal. Another example of a walled settlement of the period is Tharro in southern Sind. This was probably originally a coastal site, although it is now many miles from the sea. There the surrounding wall and the extant traces of houses are of local stone.
Subsistence and technology
Many of the excavated sites mentioned above have yet to be fully studied and the findings published, and knowledge of the various features of the life and economy of their inhabitants remains somewhat scanty. All the evidence indicates that the subsistence base of Early Harappan economy remained much as it had already developed at Mehrgarh some two millennia earlier; cattle, sheep, and goats constituted the principal domestic animals, and wheat and barley formed the staple crops. From Kalibangan and several other sites in Bahawalpur and Punjab comes intriguing evidence concerning the use of the plow. At the former site, excavators discovered what appeared to be a plowed field surface preserved beneath buildings from the mature Indus period. The pattern of crisscrossed furrows was virtually identical to that still employed in the region, the wider furrows in one direction being used for taller crops, such as peas, and the narrow perpendicular rows being used for oilseed plants such as those of the genus Sesamum (sesame). From Banawali and sites in the desiccated Sarasvati River valley came terra-cotta models of plows, supporting the earlier interpretation of the field pattern.
The evidence for the various Early Harappan crafts and their products also calls for further publication and detail before a firm picture can be obtained. Thus far, only a small number of copper tools have been found, and little can yet be confirmed regarding their sources and manufacture. A number of the settlement sites lie far from any sources of stone, and thus the regular appearance of a stone-blade industry, producing small, plain or serrated blades from prepared stone cores, implies that the raw materials must have been imported, often from considerable distances. The same assumption applies to the larger stones employed as rubbers or grinders, but in the absence of detailed research, no firm conclusions are possible. Related evidence does indicate that some contemporary sites, such as Lewan and Tarakai Qila in the Bannu basin, were large-scale factories, producing many types of tools from carefully selected stones collected and brought in from neighbouring areas. These same sites also appear to have been centers for the manufacture of beads of various semiprecious stones.
Culture and religion
It may be concluded on the basis of pottery decoration that major changes were taking place in the intellectual life of the whole region during the Early Harappan Period. At a number of sites the pottery bears a variety of incised or painted marks, some superficially resembling script. The significance of these marks is not clear, but most probably they represent owners’ marks, applied at the time of manufacture. Although it would be an exaggeration to regard these marks as actual writing, they suggest that the need for a script was beginning to arise.
Among the painted decorations found on the pottery, some appear to carry a distinctly religious symbolism. The clearest instance of this is in the widespread occurrence of the buffalo-head motif, characterized by elongated horns and in some cases sprouting pipal (Ficus religiosa) branches or other plant forms. These have been interpreted as representing a “buffalo deity.” A painted bowl from Lewan displays a pair of such heads, one a buffalo and the other a Bos indicus, each adorned with pipal foliage. Other devices from the painted pottery may also have religious significance, particularly the pipal leaves that occur as independent motifs. Other examples include fish forms and the fish-scale pattern that later appears as a common decoration on the mature Indus pottery. Throughout the region, evidence supports a “convergence” of form and decoration in anticipation of the more conservative Indus style.
The remains discussed above, considered collectively, suggest that four or five millennia of uninterrupted agricultural life in the Indus region set the stage for the final emergence of an indigenous Indus civilization about 2600 bce. It could also be argued, however, that the substantial Early Harappan walled towns constituted cities. Much research, excavation, and comparative analysis are required before this fertile and provocative period can be understood.
The Indus civilization
Character and significance
While the Indus (or Harappan) civilization may be considered the culmination of a long process indigenous to the Indus valley, a number of parallels exist between developments on the Indus River and the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia. It is striking to compare the Indus with this better-known and more fully documented region and to see how closely the two coincide with respect to the emergence of cities and of such major concomitants of civilization as writing, standardized weights and measures, and monumental architecture. Yet nearly all the earlier writers have sensed the Indian-ness of the civilization, even when they were largely unable to articulate it. Thus, historian V. Gordon Childe wrote that:
India confronts Egypt and Babylonia by the 3rd millennium with a thoroughly individual and independent civilization of her own, technically the peer of the rest. And plainly it is deeply rooted in Indian soil. The Indus civilization represents a very perfect adjustment of human life to a specific environment. And it has endured; it is already specifically Indian and forms the basis of modern Indian culture. (New Light on the Most Ancient East, 4th ed., 1952.)
The force of Childe’s words can be appreciated even without an examination of the Indus valley script found on seals; the attention paid to domestic bathrooms, the drains, and the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro can all be compared to elements in the later Indian civilization. The bullock carts with a framed canopy, called ikkas, and boats are little changed to this day. The absence of pins and the love of bangles and of elaborate nose ornaments are all peculiarly South Asian. The religion of the Indus also is replete with suggestions of traits known from later India. The significance of the bull, the tiger, and the elephant; the composite animals; the seated yogi god of the seals; the tree spirits and the objects resembling the Shiva linga (a phallus symbolic of the god Shiva) of later times—all these are suggestive of enduring forms in later Indian civilization.
It is still impossible to do more than guess at the social organization or the political and administrative control implied by this vast area of cultural uniformity. The evidence of widespread trade in many commodities, the apparent uniformity of weights and measures, the common script, and the uniformity—almost common currency—of the seals all indicate some measure of political and economic control and point to the great cities Mohenjo-daro and Harappa as their centers. The presence of the great granaries on the citadel mounds in these cities and of the citadels themselves suggests—partly on the analogies of the cities of Mesopotamia—the existence of priest-kings, or at least a priestly oligarchy, that controlled the economy and civil government. The intellectual mechanism of this government and the striking degree of control implicit in it are still matters of speculation. Nor can scholars yet speak with any certainty regarding relations between the cities and surrounding villages. Much more research needs to be done, on many such topics, before the full character of the Indus civilization can be revealed.
Chronology
The first serious attempt at establishing a chronology for the Indus civilization relied on cross-dating with Mesopotamia. In this way, Cyril John Gadd cited the period of Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 bce) and the subsequent Isin-Larsa Period (2017–1794 bce) as the time when trade between ancient India and Mesopotamia was at its height. Calibration of the ever-growing number of radiocarbon dates provides a reasonably consistent series from site to site. The broad picture thus obtained suggests that the mature Indus civilization emerged between 2600 and 2500 bce and continued in full glory to about 2000 bce. Thereafter the evidence is still somewhat unclear, but the late stage of the mature culture probably continued until about 1700 bce, by which time it is probably accurate to speak of the Post-Urban, or Post-Harappan, stage.
Extent
All the earlier writers have stressed the remarkable uniformity of the products of the Harappan civilization, and for this reason they provide a definite hallmark for its settlements. The more-recent evidence suggests that, if the outermost sites are joined by lines, the area enclosed will be a little less than about 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km)—considerably larger than present-day Pakistan—and if, as is generally inferred, this cultural uniformity coincided with some sort of political and administrative unity, the size of the resulting “empire” is truly vast. Within this area, several hundred sites have been identified, the great majority of which are on the plains of the Indus or its tributaries or on the now dry course of the ancient Saraswati River, which flowed south of the Sutlej River and then, perhaps, southward to the Indian Ocean, east of the main course of the Indus itself. Outside the Indus system a few sites occur on the Makran Coast, the westernmost of which is at Sutkagen Dor, near the present-day frontier with Iran. These sites were probably ports or trading posts, supporting the sea trade with the Persian Gulf, and were established in what otherwise remained a largely separate cultural region. The uplands of Baluchistan, while showing clear evidence of trade and contact with the Indus civilization, appear to have remained outside the direct Harappan rule.
To the east of the Indus delta, other coastal sites are found beyond the marshy salt flats of the Rann of Kachchh (Kutch) and in the interior of the Kathiawar Peninsula (Saurashtra). These include the estuarine trading post at Lothal on the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), as well as many other sites, some of which are major. West of the Indus River a number of important sites are situated on the alluvial Kachchhi desert region of Balochistan, Pakistan, toward Sibi and Quetta. East of the Indus system, toward the north, a number of sites occur right up to the edge of the Himalayan foothills, where at Alamgirpur, north of Delhi, the easternmost Harappan (or perhaps, more properly, Late Harappan) settlement has been discovered and partly excavated. If the area covered by these sites is compared with that of the Early Harappan settlements, it will be seen that there is an expansion in several directions, along the coast to both the west and the east and eastward through the Punjab toward the Ganges-Yamuna Doab.
Planning and architecture
The Harappan sites range from extensive cities to small villages or outposts. The two largest are Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, each perhaps originally about a mile square in overall dimensions. Each shares a characteristic layout, oriented roughly north-south with a great fortified “citadel” mound to the west and a larger “lower city” to the east. A similar layout is also discernible in the somewhat smaller town of Kalibangan, and several other major settlements appear to have shared this scheme. Other major sites include Dholavira and Surkotada near the Rann of Kachchh; Nausharo Firoz in Balochistan, Pakistan; Shortughai in northern Afghanistan; Amri, Chanhu-daro, and Judeirjo-daro in Sind; and Sandhanawala in Bahawalpur. Among the smaller sites, special interest attaches to Lothal, where a number of unique and problematic features were discovered in excavations. Of all the sites, Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Kalibangan, and Lothal have been most extensively excavated, and more can be said of their original layout and planning. Thus, they are considered in greater detail below.
At three of the excavated major sites, the citadel mound is on a north-south axis and about twice as long as it is broad. The lower city is laid out in a grid pattern of streets; at Kalibangan these were of regularly controlled widths, with the major streets running through, while the minor lanes were sometimes offset, creating different sizes of blocks. At all three sites the citadel was protected by a massive defensive wall of brick, which at Kalibangan was strengthened at intervals by square or rectangular bastions. At Kalibangan, traces of a somewhat less substantial wall around the lower town have also been discovered. In all three cases the city was situated near a river, although these courses are now extinct.
The most common building material at every site was brick, but the proportions of burned brick to unburned mud brick vary. Mohenjo-daro employs burned brick, perhaps because timber was more readily available, while mud brick was reserved for fillings and mass work. Kalibangan, on the other hand, reserved burned brick for bathrooms, wells, and drains. Most of the domestic architecture at Kalibangan was in mud brick. Brick was generally bonded in courses of alternate headers and stretchers—the so-called English bond. Stone was rarely, if ever, employed structurally. Timber was occasionally used as a lacing for brickwork, particularly in large-scale work such as the defenses or the granary at Mohenjo-daro. The common bricks were made in an open mold, but for special purposes sawed bricks were also employed. Timber was used for the universal flat roofs, and in some instances the sockets indicate square-cut beams with spans of as much as 14 feet (4.5 metres).
The houses were invariably entered from the side lanes, with the walls to the main streets presenting a blank brick facade broken only by the drainage chutes. Apart from domestic structures, a wide range of shops and craft workshops have been encountered, including potters’ kilns, dyers’ vats, and the shops of metalworkers, shell workers, and bead makers. There is surprisingly little evidence of public places of worship, although at Mohenjo-daro a number of possible temples were unearthed in the lower city, and other buildings of a ritual character were reported in the citadel. The size of houses varies considerably. At the one extreme are single-roomed barracks, with cooking and bathing areas formed within by partition walls, and at the other are large houses around a central courtyard or sometimes with a set of intersecting courtyards, each with its own adjoining rooms. Nearly all the larger houses had private wells. In many cases brick stairways led to what must have been upper stories or flat roofs. The bathrooms were usually indicated by the fine quality of the brickwork in the floor and by waste drains.
Important sites
Mohenjo-daro
The mounds of Mohenjo-daro lie near the right bank of the Indus in the Larkana district of Sind province. The excavations revealed that the lowest level of former occupation was covered by deposits of alluvial silt to a depth of about 30 feet (10 metres), attributable to annual flooding. The lowest levels are thus below the present-day water table and are still largely unexcavated. As noted above, the main features of the layout of Mohenjo-daro are a citadel to the west and a lower city and grid of streets to the east. Enough has been said of the general features of the lower city to make it unnecessary to say more of the considerable areas excavated in that part. The citadel, however, demands further attention. In the citadel the English archaeologist Sir John Hubert Marshall discovered a massive platform of mud brick and clay approximately 20 feet (6 metres) in depth, above which were six main building levels. Under this platform lay the remains of the early period. It is probable, but by no means certain, that the platform was raised as protection against floods. Both it and the great brick defensive wall around the perimeter were built at the beginning of the intermediate period.
The main buildings of the citadel all apparently belong to the same period. The most striking of these is the Great Bath, which occupies a central position in the better-preserved northern half of the citadel. It is built of fine brickwork, measures 897 square feet (83 square metres), and is 8 feet (2.5 metres) lower than the surrounding pavement. The floor of the bath consists of two skins of sawed brick set on edge in gypsum mortar, with a layer of bitumen sealer sandwiched between the skins. Water was evidently supplied by a large well in an adjacent room, and an outlet in one corner of the bath led to a high corbeled drain disgorging on the west side of the mound. The bath was reached by flights of steps at either end, originally finished with timbered treads set in bitumen. The significance of this extraordinary structure can only be guessed at, but it has generally been thought that it is linked with some sort of ritual bathing. To the north and east of the bath were groups of rooms that evidently were also designed for some special function, probably associated with the group of administrators or priests who controlled not only the city but also the great state that it dominated. To the west of the bath a complex of brick platforms about 5 feet (1.5 metres) high and separated from each other by narrow passages formed a podium of some 150 by 75 feet (45 by 22 metres), which has been identified by Wheeler as the base of a great granary similar to that known at Harappa. Below the granary were brick loading bays. In the southern part of the mound an oblong “assembly hall” was discovered, having four rows of fine brick plinths, presumably to take wooden columns. In a room adjacent to this hall, a stone sculpture of a seated male figure was discovered, and nearby a number of large worked-stone rings, possibly of some architectural significance. It seems certain that this area was invested with some special significance and may well have been a temple or connected with some religious cult.
