Beadmaking had a long history in the subcontinent, but the Harappans developed a number of new and sophisticated tools and techniques for manufacturing more challenging types of bead, including drills capable of perforating long beads of hard stone. The Harappans were particularly fine lapidaries, making beads from a wide variety of semiprecious stones, particularly agate and car-nelian but also amethyst, chalcedony, jasper, onyx, rock crystal, serpentine, and many others, as well as from gold, silver, copper, shell, ivory, faience, terracotta, and steatite. Surprisingly uncommon were beads of lapis lazuli or turquoise, beautiful blue stones from southern Central Asia that had been valued in the region since early times. In general the Harappans seem to have preferred stones like agate and chalcedony that were harder to work but that retained a high polish, in contrast to the softer lapis and turquoise; imitations were also made in faience.
Workshops. A number of Harappan settlements in Sindh and Gujarat (source of much of the stone) operated substantial beadmaking establishments ("factories"). Beads were also manufactured in small workshops. The skills of the lapidary and the equipment used, including kilns, were equally applicable to the production of other objects in related materials, such as stone weights and amulets and steatite seals; these, therefore, were often made in the same workshops.
At Mohenjo-daro many workshops were found in individual houses throughout the city. In the Moneer area, one house yielded a large number of beads along with sixteen small weights and a set of copper scales. The dumps and eroded materials along the southeast edge of Mohenjo-daro's Lower Town contained a great deal of beadmaking debris including drills, grinding stones, and raw and worked pieces of many types of gemstone. Workshops making beads and other objects from steatite seem to have been separate from those making beads from other materials.
Large complexes included the beadmaking factory at Lothal, where a courtyard was the scene of the main manufacturing activities while accommodation and storage were provided by eleven small rooms that opened from it. Several jars set into the platform held beads in various stages of manufacture, and jars in the storerooms contained raw material. Another factory was found in the center of Chanhu-daro; this made a range of bead types and is at present the only workshop where the manufacture of the elongated carnelian beads is known to have taken place. A furnace with many flues is thought to have been designed for heating stone for beads and firing the steatite seals that were also made there.
Bead Manufacture. Different types of stone varied in their properties and therefore in the techniques by which they were worked. The quartz group, including the most commonly used stones such as agate, carnelian, and chalcedony, was shaped by knapping, sawing, and grinding, whereas for the rarely used lapis lazuli, the groove-and-splinter technique was apparently employed.
Carnelian, the red stone of which many Harappan beads were made, was created from a yellowish chalcedony by heating it, in a closed pot packed with sawdust, several times during the course of manufacture, gradually deepening its color. The fuel used was one that burned steadily at a relatively low temperature: this was probably charcoal mixed with reeds and cowdung. Heating also made the stone easier to work, and so other stones like agate were also often repeatedly heat-treated during manufacture. Even warming in the sun was effective. Several
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Part of a necklace found in a silver vessel at Mohenjo-daro. The necklace is composed of large beads of green stone separated by small gold beads, with pendant beads of jasper and agate separated by small steatite beads. Harappan lapidaries made extensive use of various types of chalcedony, such as agate, carnelian, and jasper, which could be highly polished, and of the versatile steatite, which was soft and therefore easy to work but could be hardened by heating. (J. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Open-topped circular kilns used for this purpose were found at Lothal; these had linked flues and a shared stoke hole in an underground chamber.
The lapidary began work on a bead by removing a few chips from the raw nodule to assess the quality of the stone. From this he or she could determine the most appropriate way to work the nodule so as to achieve the most attractive design. The lapidary then chipped the stone into a bead blank: a rough cube for making spherical beads or a cuboid or triangular-sectioned shape for making long beads. This technique produced one bead from each piece of raw material. A number of small beads could be made from a single cobble by knapping it into a shape from which it could be struck into sections, each of which was shaped in the same way into a blank. An alternative, used for example in the bead factory at Chanhu-daro, was to cut the material into a blank using a copper saw, probably with abrasives. Some blanks might break during manufacture, particularly the banded varieties since their veins could vary in their response to the knapping blows.
Next the blank was knapped into a rough-out of the desired shape. This was then ground down into a bead shape by rubbing it against a groove cut into the abrasive surface of a sandstone or quartzite block, probably using a wooden board to press it down, as is done today.
A central perforation was made in short beads by chipping from both ends, creating an hourglass-shaped hole. Longer beads, however, were perforated using a microdrill whose head was made of hardened copper or phtanite. Often the tip of the drill was tubular, allowing it to hold a fine abrasive. Drill bits were made in the same workshops as the beads. The bit was mounted on a wooden rod that was rotated using a bow. A cap of stone or shell on the wooden shaft protected the hand as the beadmaker exerted pressure on the drill to keep it seated in the bead. Dripping water may have been used to prevent the bead and drill bit overheating. After drilling, more grinding put the finishing touches to the bead, before it was polished, probably by being tumbled in a bag with other beads and some fine abrasive.
Patterned Beads. Banded or variegated agate, jasper, and onyx were particularly prized, since they could be worked so as to expose bands around the bead or a series of circles over its surface; some had eye patterns of concentric circles. These beads were imitated in painted fired steatite, faience, etched car-nelian, laminated shell, and painted terra-cotta. One eye bead from Harappa was of gold inlaid with a disc of steatite.
Carnelian. Carnelian beads were frequently decorated with designs in white or sometimes black. These often imitated the patterns on banded agate but also included trefoils or geometric patterns. These are generally erroneously described as etched carnelian beads. The designs were actually painted on with a bleaching agent; this may have been a solution of calcium carbonate or, as in modern times, a mixture of sodium carbonate and juice from the shoots of a caper bush (Capparis aphylla). The beads were allowed to dry and were then
A carnelian bead decorated with an eye pattern in white. This was made by painting on a solution of a bleaching agent and then heating the bead, causing the painted area to lose its color. (Harappa Archaeological Research Project, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Heated, bleaching the surface where the paint had been applied. Over time the bleached area, which is weaker than the rest of the bead, has often eroded away, giving the impression of etching. Sometimes the whole bead was whitened in this way and designs were then painted on in black, possibly using a solution of copper nitrate or metallic oxide. Imitations of etched carnelian beads were made in painted steatite and faience.
Exceptional slender carnelian beads as much as 13 centimeters in length required extraordinary skill in their creation. Rectangular blanks for these beads were sawn from blocks of fine-quality, heat-treated raw carnelian and roughly shaped by indirect percussion. The beads were then ground into shape and special drills tipped with Ernestite bits in various sizes were used to create the long perforation. Many beads broke at this stage in their manufacture. The task was slow and hard, and it would have taken a lapidary about two weeks to manufacture a single such bead. An ornament made from these beads, such as the belt found in the Allahdino hoard, which contained thirty-six, could therefore represent the entire output of a skilled lapidary for a year or more. The manufacture of the Ernestite drill bits was also arduous, each one probably taking around a day's labor. Imitations were made of these beads in red-painted terra-cotta and were assembled into similar ornaments.
Steatite Microbeads. Equally amazing are the beautiful white steatite microbeads measuring only 1 by 1-3 millimeters. These were worn in long strings, each of which contained hundreds of beads, and have been found in a number of towns and cities. One man buried at Harappa wore a head ornament made from many strings of these microbeads. A cache buried in the rural settlement of Zekda in Gujarat numbered around thirty-four thousand beads, packed in ash inside two carefully sealed small pots. Clues revealed by examination under a microscope enabled three investigators, Hegde, Karanth, and Sychanthavong (1982), to reconstruct a possible method by which these beads may have been manufactured. They concluded that the raw stone, which is quite soft, was ground into a fine powder and mixed with water to make a paste. This was then extruded and cut into lengths. No suitable device for doing this is known; they suggested using a perforated copper disc with a fine copper wire soldered to pass centrally into each hole. Paste forced through the holes would emerge as tubes that could be cut into tiny lengths, perhaps using a hair. A tray of ash beneath to catch the beads would prevent them sticking to each other or getting damaged. The beads were fired at a high temperature, around 900 degrees Centigrade, converting them from the soft steatite paste to the extremely hard white material of the finished beads.
Another possible method, attested in the Moneer area at Mohenjo-daro and at Chanhu-daro, involved incredibly fine skilled working. A block of steatite was shaped into a tiny approximately cuboid shape that was perforated by drilling from both ends. This was then sawn into thin discs. Alternatively, as seems to have been the case at Harappa, thin steatite sheets were sawn and divided into roughly square discs that were then perforated. These discs were tightly strung together on a thread, so there was no possibility of lateral movement, and the string of bead blanks was rubbed against a grindstone until the beads were worn circular. The beads were then fired to whiten and harden them. It is incredible that it was possible to make such minute beads in this way and, given the hundreds used to make an ornament, also incredible that such a time-consuming process was undertaken.
Faience
By the early fourth millennium, artisans in the Indo-Iranian borderlands had devised a technique of coating steatite beads with a mixture of copper, lime, and clay before firing, to produce hard beads with a blue glaze. From this the Harappans went on to develop faience, using a different method to that employed in contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. This resulted in a stronger material that could be made into slender objects such as bangles. Much of the raw material used in making faience probably came from the waste from lapidary and seal-making workshops.
Harappan faience was manufactured in two stages. First rock crystal was ground to a powder and mixed with a flux and with the appropriate coloring material, of which the Harappans employed a considerable range, producing not only blue and blue-green but also white, red, buff, and brown faience. In some cases, two colors were used in the same object, as for example in some
A unique faience plaque found in a workshop at Harappa. On this face there is a four-sign inscription, beneath a box filled with dots; on the other a scene showing two bulls fighting beneath the spreading branches of a massive tree. The plaque was formed between two molds, probably carved from steatite. A mold and the fan-shaped faience tablet made in it were also recovered from this workshop, along with beads of agate and other types of stone, gold, and steatite, and miniature tablets and other objects of faience and steatite. (Harappa Archaeological Research Project, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Tablets and beads from Harappa. The mixture was melted at a temperature of 1,000-1,200 degrees Centigrade, producing a glassy material, which was again ground to a fine powder. This was mixed with a flux and some water to form a paste. Tiny pieces of bone consistently associated with, and embedded in, vitreous slag at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Chanhu-daro suggest that calcined bone (containing calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate) may have been used as the flux in manufacturing faience.
The faience paste was shaped by hand or pressed into a mold to make small objects: beads and other jewelry such as bangles and ear ornaments, tablets, and charming little figurines that included monkeys and squirrels. A large number of molded miniature inscribed tablets, possibly amulets, are known from the later levels at Harappa. Tiny faience pots were made by molding the paste around the outside of a small bag filled with sand. Once formed, the sand was poured out and the bag removed. The faience objects were then dried in the air, allowing the flux to migrate to the surface. Finally they were again fired at a high temperature, around 940 degrees Centigrade, to produce the finished objects, which had a sintered interior and a glazed exterior.
Faience objects are widely known from Harappan sites, and they continued to be made in the Posturban period in the eastern region. Faience was produced at a number of sites; at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Chanhu-daro, faience and steatite were often worked in the same workshops.
A further technological development is evidenced shortly after the Harappan decline: A bead dated around 1700 BCE was recovered from a hoard at Harappa and proved to have been made of brown glass, the earliest glass known in South Asia.
Steatite
Steatite is a soft material that was easily carved with tools of flint or copper, or possibly shell, but it becomes very hard when heated. It was used mainly for making seals and beads. At Harappa, one workshop in mound E manufactured faience and steatite beads and steatite tablets. Debris in the workshop included a steatite mold used to make fan-shaped molded faience tablets, and two discarded steatite tablets incised with the same poorly executed inscription, perhaps practice pieces.
Steatite's refractory properties also made it an ideal material for making molds for metal casting. At Harappa, a number of straw-tempered dishes were found, coated all over in steatite. Straw-tempered clay was used in pyrotech-nological contexts, for example for crucibles; the steatite coating seems to have been put on to allow these dishes to withstand very high temperatures; however, their purpose is unknown. A series of small refractory bars, probably from a kiln or furnace, were found at Chanhu-daro; they had been made of clay mixed with a considerable amount of ground-up steatite.
Seals. The distinctive Indus seals were usually made of steatite, though other stones such as agate were sometimes used. Seal carving must have been a specialist skill since the seals are very small and the quality of workmanship and artistry high. Unfinished seals are widely known, showing that seals were manufactured at many centers, including Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Chanhu-daro, and Lothal.
The seal maker first sawed a thick square block of steatite. He then roughly shaped the back by sawing off slices of steatite from each side, leaving a portion for the boss in the center. Next the front of the seal was carefully carved with a burin to produce an incised design, so that it would leave a design in relief when it was pressed into clay. A few unfinished examples suggest that a grid was drawn on the seal to allow the design to be properly laid out within the restricted space. An animal or scene was carved on the lower portion and a short inscription was added across the top; this may have been drawn by a literate specialist rather than the seal maker, since literacy is likely to have been confined to an elite few. The back was then completed, using a knife to form a hemispherical boss with a central groove over the outside from top to bottom. A hole was cut through the center of the boss by drilling from each side. This was the weakest point on the seal and was liable to break if the owner was unlucky. Finally a paste of powdered steatite and an alkaline flux mixed with water was spread over the surface of the seal and it was fired to harden and whiten it. The steatite paste fused to form a glazed protective surface over the seal.
Ivory, Bone, Horn, and Antler
Ivory, from wild or possibly domesticated elephants, was used for a wide range of small objects that were common in Indus towns, often outnumbering their counterparts in bone. These included sticks for applying makeup, carved cylinders, combs, pins, and beads. Inlays for boxes or furniture were also cut out of ivory. Small ivory representations of creatures such as fish and hares may have been amulets.
There were ivory-carving workshops in a number of towns and cities, including Lothal and mound ET at Harappa, where bone and antler were also worked. Unworked tusks are known from a few sites. These were probably sawn into sections using small, narrow-toothed metal saws and worked into the required shape with metal chisels, gouges, knives, and tubular drills. Pieces might be finished by polishing with an abrasive.
Bone was used for many everyday artifacts, such as handles for metal and flint tools, weaving equipment, beads, tools for smoothing and decorating pottery, awls, needles, and many other small objects. Unmodified bones were probably used as soft hammers for flint knapping. Horn and antler may have been used in similar ways, and antlers were also employed as picks or punches.
Gaming Equipment. Board games seem to have been popular among the Harappans. Most gaming boards were probably made of embroidered cloth, as they are today, but some were engraved on bricks or made of terra-cotta. The arrangements of boxes and lines suggest that there were a number of different games. Gaming counters and dice for use in these games were made of a variety of materials such as bone, shell, stone, or terra-cotta, those of ivory being the finest. There were various different pairings of the dots on the opposite faces of the cubical dice, including the modern arrangement in which the dots always add up to seven. Beautiful counters, thin rectangular rods engraved with dots and lines, their tops often in the shape of ducks, duck heads, or other animals or birds, were carved from ivory or bone.
Other Crafts
The Harappans must have practiced other crafts, but little is known of these because the objects themselves have disappeared. Instead, there are various indirect clues to what was made and how: traces left on other objects; tools and surviving elements in other materials; and information from modern practitioners of traditional crafts.
Wood. Small traces of wood found in various settlements show that the Harappans utilized timber from a variety of trees, including teak, sissoo, rosewood, deodar, pine, jujube, acacia, and elm, as well as bamboo. Wood was extensively used in buildings, both for structural elements and for fixtures, for
Three fine decorated rods carved from ivory, found at Mohenjo-daro. These may have been used as gaming counters or in divination. (|. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Building many of the Harappan boats (although reeds may also have been used), and for making the carts so clearly depicted in models, which had a wooden frame and solid wheels constructed of planks.
Shell and ivory inlay pieces were used to decorate wooden furniture, such as the low stools sometimes depicted on the Indus seals. Shell inlay manufacture was among the crafts practiced in the final period of Mohenjo-daro's occupation, a counter to the usual picture of urban decline. Beds made of a wooden frame strung with a rope lattice in use today may have had their counterparts in Harappan times. Several terra-cotta model beds found at Kalibangan had corner posts, but the covers depicted on them concealed other details of their frames. Stains in the soil in Harappan graves occasionally show the use of wooden coffins; one at Harappa, of which fragments survive, was made of rosewood with a deodar lid.
Trees may have been felled with bronze flat axes or axes of stone, though the latter are rarely found. Timber was cut up with bronze saws and adzes, and carpentry and joinery work was executed with a range of metal tools, including chisels, gouges, drills, and knives. Stone blades were also used. Wooden surfaces could be smoothed on grindstones or with rasps made of cuttlefish "bones." The latter, known from the site of Othmanjo Buthi, could also be ground up to make an abrasive paste. A biconical terra-cotta pestle from Harappa has been identified as possibly a sander.
Though little evidence survives, it is likely that the Harappans used wood in many other ways, for example for household objects such as boxes or dishes and perhaps for figurines. One of the working platforms in mound F at Harappa had traces of a wooden mortar of jujube wood. The artistry displayed by the Harappans in other media suggests that many wooden objects would have borne carved or painted decoration.
Textiles. Most of the crafts discussed so far were practiced by specialists, producing goods for wide distribution. Textiles, on the other hand, were probably made in every home to meet the family's needs, though there may also have been larger-scale production. Spindle whorls have been found in many houses, their diversity of form a contrast to the more usual uniformity of Harappan artifacts, underlining the domestic nature of spinning. Possible loom weights suggest that some households may have used large upright looms to weave cloth (this seems unlikely since Barber [1991, 240-254] shows that upright looms were a European development, whereas the Near East and regions to its east used horizontal ground looms; the "loom weights" may have had other uses). A small backstrap loom was most probably used by many women, weaving narrow bands of cloth. Fairservis (2002) has suggested that many of the perforated rectangular clay objects usually identified as model cart frames (with holes into which wooden sticks could be slotted) may actually have been weaving shuttles; these have been found on many sites. At Allahdino hundreds were associated with perforated discs (probably spindle whorls rather than model cart wheels) and pillow-shaped clay objects with a central groove, which Fairservis interpreted as loom weights. It is therefore possible that Allahdino was an establishment particularly concerned with textile manufacture.
A small (broken) bone plaque from Ravi period Harappa with at least three lines of four holes may have been a device used to keep a number of separate strands from tangling, for example when warping a loom or when twisting cord. In the latter case either the strands or the plaque could be turned to ensure that the cord twisted evenly (Barber, personal communication).
A scrap of cloth from a bag was found at Mohenjo-daro, preserved in the corrosion products from two silver jars. This was made from cotton, a plant that had been cultivated in the subcontinent since the fifth millennium BCE. Evidence of cotton cloth similarly preserved on silver or bronze objects is also known from Harappa, Chanhu-daro, and Rakhigarhi and possibly from Lothal, where unidentified plant fibers were found on a piece of copper. Other traces of Indus textiles include the impressions of cotton fabric on the inside of faience vessels, the imprint of rougher cloth and of cord on the reverse of sealings that had been fastened on sacks, and marks on the base of pottery vessels (and in one case a brick) that had stood on cloth to dry before firing. These show that the Indus people were making cotton cloth of various grades, including very fine fabrics closely woven from thread so fine that it has been suggested that it was spun on a spinning wheel. The fabrics revealed by these data seem all to have been plain weave.
The exuberant geometric decoration on some pottery may reflect textile designs. Large jars set into the floor of one structure at Mohenjo-daro may have
The impression of a textile left on the surface of a terra-cotta toy bed. The threads were finely spun and the cloth tightly woven in a plain weave, which was typical of Harappan cloth. (Harappa Archaeological Research Project, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Been for dyeing, and brick-built basins in other buildings there and in other settlements have also been identified as probable dyeing vats. The HARP excavations of one of the circular brick floors in mound F at Harappa revealed a deep depression containing greenish layers of clay; it is possible that this resulted from indigo dye preparation. It is likely that cloth was dyed various colors. At present the only surviving evidence of dyes comes from the cotton fragment found at Mohenjo-daro, which had been dyed red with madder root and fixed using alum as a mordant. However, other local plants such as indigo, found at Rojdi, and turmeric were probably also used for dyeing, producing blue and yellow respectively.
Cotton was certainly used for making cloth, but other textiles may also have been made. Wool and goat hair may have been used since the Harappans kept sheep and goats, although there is no evidence that they had woolly sheep. If woolen textiles were imported from Mesopotamia, it is possible, though less likely, that the Harappans also imported wool from which to weave woolen textiles themselves. Flax might have been used too, but at present the earliest evidence of its use in India comes some centuries after the Harappan period.
Silk is also a possibility. Although Chinese silk from the domestic silkworm was not traded to regions west of China until considerably later, India has several of its own wild species of moth that produce silk, including Antheraea assamensis (maga), Antheraea mylitta (tussah), and Samia cynthia (eri). This is inferior to Chinese silk, but it was extensively used in India in historical times. Like many forest products, the cocoons of these wild silkworms were collected in recent times by hunter-gatherers, who traded them with settled people. The Harappans could similarly have obtained supplies of raw silk from the hunter-gatherers with whom they traded various commodities. Currently the earliest evidence of silk in India is from the midsecond millennium BCE, but it is not unlikely that it was used by the Harappans.
Mats made from reeds and grasses and woven or coiled baskets have also left an impression on clay objects set down on them and on the clay floors on which they were set, as well as impressions of roof matting in surviving ceiling plaster. Floors or walls may have been covered with textiles: Kenoyer (1998, 159) has pointed out the similarity between a type of small curved knife made by the Indus people and knives used today to cut the pile of carpets, suggesting the possibility of carpet manufacture (although pile rugs would also have required wool).
Leather had probably been used for clothing in earlier times (as the evidence from Mehrgarh suggests) and may still have been so used in the Mature Harappan period by some sectors of the community or for some types of clothing. Leather would have had many other uses also, for buckets and other containers, for straps and belts, possibly for footwear, perhaps for sails, and for coverings; it was a substitute for cloth in many situations and could also be used to hold liquids.
World History
