STUDYING THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

The Languages and Scripts

Much is known about the people of many early civilizations through their writings: These reveal not only the names and actions of kings and other leading figures but also much about the organization of society, laws, religious beliefs, education, economic organization, mythology, scientific understanding, and many other aspects of life. The Indus civilization, in contrast, has no deciphered writings, and the surviving texts are too short and cover too small a range of uses to provide any such information even if they were to be deciphered. Thus many aspects of the Indus civilization are unknown.

Among these is the very language of the Indus people. The majority of present-day inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent speak languages belonging to the Indo-European family. The most recent of these is English, spoken as a second language by most educated South Asians; the majority of them are Indo-Aryan languages that have been spoken by an increasing number of people since the second millennium BCE. But in the Indus period, Indo-European languages were probably not spoken by any group resident in South Asia, though this is strongly contested by a minority of scholars. Dravidian languages are spoken today by the inhabitants of southern India and by some groups elsewhere in the subcontinent, including Brahui in Baluchistan; these are the modern representatives of the language family to which, according to some scholars, the Indus language most probably belonged. However, languages of the Austro-Asiatic language family, today spoken by a few small tribal groups in India as well as over much of Southeast Asia, were probably also spoken in South Asia during the Indus period, and an early Austro-Asiatic language is an alternative candidate for the Indus language. There are other, less likely candidates among the minority languages of the subcontinent: Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in the Himalayas and belong to the Sino-Tibetan family; Burushaski, a language isolate, is spoken in the western Karakoram; and there were probably other languages in the Indus period that have left no living descendants.

Archaeological and Historical Methods of Age Determination

Crucially, an understanding of the past depends on being able to date, and thus order and relate, the materials produced in the past and the developments that took place. Stratigraphy and typology are essential tools for establishing relative dates, but absolute dating depends on the use of a number of scientific dating techniques, applicable only to certain materials. When written sources exist, historical materials can at times offer a precise local chronology, though many factors may introduce distortion or chronological uncertainty. An extra dimension of difficulty is added when, as with the Indus civilization, historical dates are derived from external sources, in this case Mesopotamia.

Archaeological Dating. When a site is excavated, objects and structures are generally found in a stratigraphic sequence of deposits of soil and other materials that have resulted from past human activities and occupation and from natural processes. The stratigraphic succession gives a relative chronology of the styles of artifact and architecture; recognizing known types of objects and structures in excavated deposits enables researchers to assign relative dates to the deposits; thus typology and stratigraphy collaborate in providing a relative chronology that can be placed in real time by dating some of the artifacts or deposits by historical or scientific means. Pottery—fragile but durable, widely used, with enormous potential for variation in form, manufacture, and decora-tion—is particularly useful as a typological dating tool, and pottery styles provide much of the dating for prehistoric sites in the Indian subcontinent. Pottery is not so useful for dating subperiods within the duration of the Indus civilization due to the Indus standardization of pottery styles; also, the longevity of certain styles (such as Siswal ware, which was used from Early Indus to Posturban times) makes them difficult to use as chronological markers.

Carbon-14 (radiocarbon) dating was the first radiometric dating technique to be developed, and today many scientific dating techniques are available.

This section of a trench at Harappa represents five hundred years of human activity: the successive layers of occupation within it run from the time of first settlement at the site until the beginning of the Early Indus period around 2800 BCE. In the foreground is the edge of a storage pit dug by the earliest settlers. (Harappa Archaeological Research Project, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)

Frequently these techniques are used to date the context in which archaeological material has been found rather than the material itself, making it vital to ensure that the material is securely linked to its context. Contamination of samples by younger or older material is also a potential problem. When a large number of dates can be obtained from a site, inconsistent dates can be weeded out, but when, as is common, only two or three dates are obtained (often due to financial constraints), it can be difficult to distinguish between dates that are wrong and those that are unexpected but accurate.

Due to statistical limitations on accurate measurement, most scientific dating techniques also have a degree of imprecision, which similarly can be reduced by dating a number of samples from the same context. Scientific dating techniques are nevertheless invaluable because they provide dates that are not reliant on potentially flawed historical or cultural assumptions.

Radiocarbon dating is the most commonly used technique because it can be applied to a range of organic material, including bone, which is often recovered from excavations. While alive, organisms take up the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (which makes up a tiny fraction of the carbon in the atmosphere), but uptake ceases after death, and the carbon then decays at a known rate: The amount remaining in the organism is therefore proportional to the time that has elapsed since its death. Because the proportion of radiocarbon in the atmosphere has fluctuated slightly in the past, dates in radiocarbon years (conventionally written ce and bce) have to be corrected to calendar dates (written CE and BCE) by reference to a calibration curve derived mainly from dendrochronology (tree ring dating).

Pottery, that almost ubiquitous material, cannot be dated by radiocarbon, but some success has been achieved in dating it by thermoluminescence (TL), although this technique is still relatively imprecise (around 10 percent of the sample's age). A number of other techniques dependent on the decay of radioactive material (radiometric techniques) are also available, but radiocarbon is the main one that has been used to date South Asian material.

Historical Dating. Although no historical materials survive from the Indus civilization itself, the Harappans were in trading communications with the literate civilizations of the Near East, Sumer and Akkad, from which there is a great deal of historical material. The first indication of the antiquity of the Indus civilization came from Mesopotamia where a few Harappan objects had been found associated with Akkadian and Ur III material. Indus artifacts, such as carnelian beads and seals, are now known from contexts ranging from the Royal Cemetery at Ur to the Kassite period (approximately mid third to later second millennia BCE). The sparse later material may have survived in Mesopotamia long after it was imported, and the majority of Indus objects come from contexts predating the Isin-Larsa period (early second millennium BCE). Although they contribute nothing to the internal chronology of the Indus civilization, historical dates from Mesopotamia are of great value in charting the development and changing patterns of trading relations through the Gulf, in which the Harappans played an important part.

The chronology of first-millennium Mesopotamia is well established; in earlier periods, however, there are major uncertainties. The internal chronologies of a number of long "floating" sequences of events are secure, but they are separated by periods of uncertain duration, one of which, unfortunately, falls between the Akkadian and Ur III empires in the middle of the period when the Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations were in trading contact. Several points in these chronologies are fixed by the observation of datable astronomical events such as the movements of the planet Venus. However, there are generally several possible occurrences of these events within the relevant time span, with the result that there are currently three different and plausible chronologies for Mesopotamia in the second and later third millennia BCE (known respectively as the High, Middle, and Low Chronologies). The Middle Chronology is most frequently adopted, for the convenience of having consistency among the writings of different scholars: Following this chronology, the dates for the period that runs from the beginning of the Akkadian Empire to the fall of the Ur III Empire, when trade flourished between southern Mesopotamia and the Indus, are 2334 to 2004 BCE; the High and Low Chronologies would shift the dates backward or forward by about half a century.

South Asia's earliest historical date is the Persian conquest of the northwest around 530 BCE, when the Early Historic cities were flourishing in the Ganges Valley and beyond. In addition, a number of Indian historical sources cover the period from the sixth century BCE onward, providing reasonably secure dates for a number of rulers, religious figures (including the Buddha), and events. Indian oral literature, later committed to writing, survives from earlier times, going back around a millennium. The earliest is the Rigveda, a religious text that seems most likely to refer mainly to the second half of the second millennium BCE. This places it some centuries later than the date, around 1900 BCE, of the decline of Indus urbanism, but makes it contemporary with some of the Posturban Harappan cultures of the northwest.

Sources for Studying the Indus Civilization

For nonliterate cultures and for those, like the Indus civilization, whose writings are undeciphered, archaeological excavation and reconnaissance are the main sources of material used to reconstruct and interpret the past, but the skills of many other disciplines are also utilized. In South Asia, ethnography is particularly valuable, shedding considerable light on industrial and economic practices. Historical sources, though absent from the Indus civilization itself, are abundant in Mesopotamia and provide some useful information on trade; later South Asian oral and written history also offers valuable insights into what may have survived from the Indus period into later times.

Archaeological Sources. Archaeology makes it possible to reconstruct many details of the daily life of individuals and communities in the past and to gain some understanding of how human societies have developed. To this end archaeologists make use not only of the archaeological techniques of field survey, excavation, and typological analysis, but also of techniques adapted from other disciplines, such as aerial photography, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeozoology, and of the technical expertise of other fields, such as physics, chemistry, soil science, medicine, and linguistics. The artifacts made by the Indus people, including pottery and jewelry, and their works of art, such as the rare statues and the abundant figurines and seal carvings, give some insight into their aesthetic sense and artistic ability, as well as providing some information about vanished aspects of their lives, such as clothing, and slight clues to their religion. Typology and chemical and physical analyses of artifacts offer insights into the practical and social uses to which these objects were put as well as into the movement of goods and materials and the relationships between communities. Detailed studies of artifact distributions and their relationship to architecture and other features can contribute a great deal of information on past activities, such as the methods employed in craft manufacture or the practices related to death and burial, as well as shedding some light on social organization: Such studies recently at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have seen considerable success.

Domestic architecture, unusually well known in the Indus civilization, can reveal many aspects of daily life, while the relative paucity and considerable diversity of Indus public architecture fuels much speculation about the ritual practices and social and political organization for which these buildings were required. The early scholarly concentration on cities and towns has been balanced by some recent investigations of smaller sites. Extensive surveys have shed considerable light on regional settlement patterns and changes in the landscape, particularly in the river systems, contributing significantly to an understanding of both the development and heyday of the Indus civilization and its later transformation from an urban civilization into smaller-scale farming societies spread over a more extensive area. Taphonomic agents, such as alluviation and erosion, however, have destroyed or concealed settlements in many areas, skewing the picture. Pollen analysis has produced a limited amount of information on past environment. Plant remains have also yielded some data on the economy of the Indus civilization, its successors, and its predecessors, and animal remains have provided a great deal more.

The analysis of human bones and other remains can reveal details of people's physical lives, such as their diet and the environmental stresses, diseases, or injuries they suffered. Such analysis may also give insights into population history in particular establishing the extent to which outsiders have been involved in shaping major developments in the subcontinent. Unfortunately, most of the burial places of the Indus people have eluded discovery, and physical anthropological data are therefore relatively limited.

Other Sources. Mesopotamian texts refer to sea trade with a number of cultures, among whom the one known as Meluhha has been confidently identified with the Indus civilization. Some light has therefore been shed on the development, nature, and conduct of international trading relations, in which the Indus civilization was a major participant, Indus traders traveling to Mesopotamia and even taking up residence there.

Later Indian texts can also be useful in providing clues to aspects of life in the Indus civilization. The earliest extant texts, the Vedas, were composed by Indo-Aryans, who are recognized by the majority of scholars as having been outsiders who entered the subcontinent during the second millennium. Comparisons between Vedic practices and those attested in later texts, therefore, may allow some earlier practices to be sifted out, and attempts can then be made to identify evidence of these among Indus material.

Ethnographic observation of groups operating in circumstances similar to those of the past may provide additional insights into economic practices, manufacturing techniques, the use of particular tools, the function of certain architectural features, and so on; this is particularly relevant in South Asia, which has many unbroken traditions of domestic, industrial, and other activities and whose population includes many pastoralists, as well as tribal groups who pursue a way of life similar in some ways to that of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the region in antiquity.