Investigations of primary (also known as pristine) states around the globe have identified various prime movers that may have both exerted pressure toward the development of greater social and economic complexity and enabled this development to occur, leading to the emergence of civilization.
A view of the citadel mound at Mohenjo-daro, looking across to the building housing the Great Bath and behind it the “granary.” Data gathered at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa still dominate what is known of the Indus civilization. Though this is partly because these two cities are the most intensively investigated of Indus sites, it probably also genuinely reflects their preeminence in the Indus state. (Corel)
These include population growth, high agricultural productivity, environmental challenges, resource imbalance, and technological innovation. Other factors such as competition, craft specialization, and religion are also generally implicated in this development.
It is still not clear exactly what happened in the Transition period (ca. 2600-2500 BCE) to transform the regional traditions of the Early Harappan period into the unified Mature Harappan state and to cause the majority of Early Harappan settlements to be abandoned or destroyed and new settlements built in their place or in other locations. Many key developments must have begun during the Early Harappan period; others probably occurred only after the beginning of the Mature Harappan period.
Population Growth and Distribution
The prehistory of the Indo-Iranian borderlands shows a steady increase over time in the number and density of settlements based on farming and pastoral-ism. In contrast, the population of the Indus plains and adjacent regions lived mainly by hunting and gathering; the limited traces suggest their settlements were far fewer in number, and were small and widely scattered, though to some extent this apparent situation must reflect the difficulty of locating hunter-gatherer settlements. The presence of domestic animals in some hunter-gatherer settlements attests to contact with the people of the borderlands, probably in the context of pastoralists' seasonal movement from the hills into the plains. The potential for population expansion in the hills was severely limited, and so, from the fourth millennium into the third, settlers moved out from the borderlands into the plains and beyond into Gujarat, the first being pastoralists, followed later by farmers. The enormous potential of the greater Indus region offered scope for huge population increase; by the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Harappans are estimated to have numbered somewhere between 1 and 5 million, probably well below the region's carrying capacity.
The circumscribed mountain valleys of the borderlands, linked by a few routes, limited the potential for large political groupings to develop. In contrast, the wide plains had few physical barriers and were linked by waterways and relatively unrestricted land routes, encouraging the development of larger communities than before, better developed social networks, and wider political groupings; the response to this potential is reflected in the emergence of regional cultures marked by differences in material such as pottery. At the same time, although links between highland and lowland communities were maintained during the Early Harappan period, the contrasting potentials for integration in the lowland and highland regions probably meant that they were already developing in different directions. As a result, the people of the borderlands did not become part of the Mature Harappan state, though those of the southern borderlands (the Kulli region) enjoyed a special relationship with the Harappans.
The need for mechanisms of social control to manage relations within the larger, denser societies of the Early Harappan period must have led to the development of greater social and political complexity. Harappa was already a substantial town in the Early Harappan period, eventually covering around 25 hectares; this was probably the chief settlement of its region and may already have provided political leadership as well as goods and services for the region's rural inhabitants. Developments at Harappa may well hold the key to the emergence of the state.
Intensive Agriculture
High agricultural productivity was a necessary precondition for the development of civilization. The ability to produce an agricultural surplus allowed a population to grow and some portion of their society to specialize full-time in craft production or the exercise of power. Often the area of high agricultural productivity was environmentally circumscribed, restricting expansion outside the areas suited to the culture's agricultural practices.
The people of the Indo-Iranian borderlands evolved an economy that combined pastoralism, involving seasonal movement, with arable agriculture in the relatively restricted areas of suitable land. Limited rainfall encouraged the early development of methods of irrigation and water conservation. Colonization of the Indus region brought the major challenge of developing ways to cope with the opposite problem, an excess of water. Early settlements on the plains avoided the active floodplains, and it was probably not until the Mature Harappan period that the technology and the labor were available to tackle the problems of flooding by constructing settlements on massive platforms. It is still uncertain whether irrigation was needed for agriculture in the plains, but the preexisting knowledge of hydraulic engineering was essential for creating the wells, water tanks, and drainage systems needed by the Mature Harappan towns and cities.
The mountains to the north and northeast and the desert to the south formed natural barriers to agricultural expansion. The Greater Indus region was open at both ends, in Gujarat leading to the Deccan and in the east leading into the Ganges-Yamuna doab. However, given the crops and animals of the Early Harappans, neither the Deccan nor the doab offered anything like the potential of the Indus region, and there can have been little incentive to expand further at this stage.
Resource Imbalance and Trade
Civilizations often developed in areas where huge agricultural potential was balanced by a scarcity of important raw materials. Surplus agricultural produce could be used for external trade and channeled into supporting craft production, manufacturing goods also for trade. The need to organize these different economic sectors in order to obtain foreign goods and materials was often one of the main catalysts to the emergence of civilization. Most societies participated in trade networks that eventually brought in the resources of distant lands, but the mechanisms involved, such as gift giving between kin or exchanges between trading partners along an extended chain of neighboring communities, did not provide either the required volume of goods and materials or the necessary reliability of their supply; new and more organized mechanisms of trade and resource procurement had therefore to be developed.
The people of the Indo-Iranian borderlands and their neighbors in the greater Indus region had for millennia been part of networks that enabled materials to travel between the seacoast and the mountains and as far as Turkmenia. In the fourth millennium more organized trade networks developed across the Iranian plateau, from Mesopotamia to the Indus, with the growth of towns such as Shahr-i Sokhta that procured, processed, and moved desirable raw materials. The Early Harappans participated in these networks, but their widening settlement horizons brought them into contact with new communities and sources of material to the south and east. In particular, they gained access to the abundant copper ores of the Aravalli Hills, vitally important to a society that increasingly used metal artifacts. New sources close at hand lessened their involvement with the Iranian plateau trade network, though this continued at a low level. With the emergence of the lowland state, however, ties with the borderlands weakened and the trade route into Seistan ceased to be used.
The Early Harappans occupied a land that held many of the resources they required, while others could be obtained by trading with neighbors with whom they had long enjoyed cordial relations, such as the hunter-gatherer communities of Rajasthan, or to whom they had kinship ties, notably the communities still living in the borderlands. On the other hand, resources were not evenly distributed within the greater Indus region, and as communities spread toward the edges of the region, the managerial requirements of the trade increased. This situation is reflected at Harappa, where in the period just before the Transition materials from the south begin to appear in the settlement, reflecting a broadening of trade relations. Some materials were required for tools and everyday needs, while others, particularly those used for jewelry, had a symbolic significance, indicating social status or serving ideological or religious needs. It was therefore the need to organize resource procurement within the greater Indus region that was a key factor in the emergence of the Harappan state, rather than the need for an external trade network.
The Role of Navigation. The demands of the growing Early Harappan population for raw materials and other goods stimulated improvements in communications, drawing on the accumulated aquatic knowledge, expertise, and technology of the hunter-fisher-gatherer inhabitants of the Indus plains and coasts. The foundation of settlements in the Indus floodplains probably reflected the growing importance of river transport. Jansen (2002) argues that this was the case with Mohenjo-daro given that its location was otherwise unsuitable for settlement, at great risk from flooding by the nearby Indus. This pristine settlement was founded in the key central location midway between Harappa and the mountains on the one hand and Dholavira and the sea on the other, where the great highway of the Indus met a major route into the mountains via the Kachi plain and the Bolan pass. The enormous amount of labor involved in the creation of Mohenjo-daro's flood defense platforms (calculated at around 4 million man-days) indicates the existence of an authority able to plan the construction and to mobilize and feed the requisite labor force.
Though foreign trade played little part in the emergence of civilization in the Indus region, growing confidence in maritime technology and navigation soon enabled the Harappans to engage in seafaring, accessing the copper ores of Oman and subsequently the textiles and other desirable manufactured goods of Mesopotamia. By the late twenty-fourth century BCE, if not before, Harappan ships were docking in Sumerian ports. Settlements were founded in the Makran to extend the season when safe maritime transport was possible. Outposts were founded to procure raw materials, including Shortugai in Afghanistan. Dholavira thrived as the city controlling overseas trade; Mohenjo-daro enjoyed a preeminent role as the hub of the whole network, the point of intersection of all the routes, and Harappa flourished as the control center for the lucrative trade from the north.
High-Risk Lands
Unpredictable and unreliable climatic or environmental features, particularly those affecting the water supply vital for agriculture and life, often encouraged early societies to rely on religious leaders credited with the power to placate the gods and control events. A knowledge of astronomy could provide the vital calendric information needed to time the crucial activities of the agricultural year; often this knowledge was confined to the religious authorities, enhancing their power.
When people from the borderlands settled on the plains in the fourth millennium, they had to adjust to a very different environment from the one they knew. The Indus Valley was a highly productive agricultural region but one that was extremely unpredictable: The extent and location of the annual flood-waters were very variable and the river prone to shifting its channels. The need to control the uncertainties of this new life must have increased reliance on the religious leaders. The extent of Harappan astronomical knowledge is revealed by the cardinal orientation of the streets of later Harappan towns. This knowledge may have been developed in response to the need for ways to determine the timing of the seasons and the natural cycles dependent on them. The nakshatra star calendar appears to go back at least to the late fourth millennium, when the heliacal rising of the star Aldebaran marked the beginning of the year at the vernal equinox. Aldebaran became progressively less satisfactory as a marker, and, from around 2700 BCE, the Pleiades became the constellation whose heliacal rising came closest to the spring equinox.
During the Transition period most Early Harappan settlements were abandoned and some were destroyed by fire, perhaps to ritually purify the site. New settlements were constructed that followed certain principles, such as cardinal orientation and the provision of systems for removing wastewater, suggesting the widespread adoption of a new ideology. It is tempting to associate this with the major calendric change from Aldebaran to the Pleiades as the marker of the spring equinox, some time in the period 2700-2500 BCE: such a change, relating as it did to the organization of the agricultural year, was likely to have been made within a strong ideological setting. Whether this was the case or not, it still seems probable that the emergence of the Harappan state took place in the context of the widespread adoption of a unifying ideology, linked to religion, that specified the proper way to do things. Such an ideology dictating uniformity would have been a powerful means of uniting a society whose composition was heterogenous, as was that of the Indus region.
Harappa may have been the first city of this civilization. The city developed organically and without the marked and sudden transformation that characterized so many other settlements. It is at Harappa that evidence of the early development of writing has been found, as well as an Early Harappan stone weight. In the early Mature Harappan period, both mound AB and mound E were walled, and in some parts platforms were constructed. It may have been in this region that the idea of the Harappan urban form developed, including platforms and walls, cardinally orientated streets, hydraulic engineering and the importance of water, houses constructed of bricks of uniform size and proportions, and a walled subsection of the settlement that probably housed public buildings of various sorts, as well as standards for the form and decoration of artifacts, and the correct materials to be used for making particular objects, especially those with a symbolic significance. Harappa was the major settlement of the Kot Diji regional tradition, the largest of the Early Harappan groups. From there, the ideology may have spread out like a wave into the neighboring cultural areas, influencing new construction and reconstruction.
Conflict
In many of early civilizations, competition among communities for resources, becoming scarce as the population continued to rise, spiraled into warfare. Power came to rest in the hands of those who could mobilize force to defend their own community and to expand its resources at the expense of its neighbors. This led to the emergence of territorial states that were unified by military force and within which there were social inequalities reflecting differential access to resources. Defense was also required against the inhabitants of neighboring regions where resources were restricted.
The Indus civilization seems to have been exempt from this move toward conflict and militarism. One reason was that the abundant resources of the Indus region seem to have been more than adequate for the Harappan population, so there was no intercommunity competition. Another was the absence of envious neighbors: The people of the Indo-Iranian borderlands were related by past kinship ties and some probably still descended to the plains to pasture their animals in the winter months and engaged in mutually beneficial trade. Similarly, the hunter-fisher-gatherer and farming communities of adjacent regions, including the Aravallis and the Himalayas, had more to gain by peaceful cooperation than by raiding. Militarism therefore played no part either in the emergence of Harappan civilization or in its continued cohesion. Instead, the state seems to have been held together by ties of economic cooperation and shared ideology.
World History
