Excavations in Cemetery R-37 at Harappa have uncovered the largest corpus of Harappa burials, numbering nearly two hundred, and those undertaken by the HARP team in recent years have given a particularly thorough picture of Harappan burial rites. A few graves have been excavated at other sites.
Burials were generally placed in an oval or rectangular pit, sometimes lined with mud bricks or containing a wooden coffin, whose wood usually survives only as a stain. The body was laid fully extended on its back, with the head to the north, feet to the south, the direction associated in later Indian religion with the Land of the Dead. At Rakhigarhi, some unusual grave pits were undercut to form an earthen overhang beneath which the body was placed. The top of the pit was then filled in with bricks to form a vaulted roof for the chamber. At Kalibangan, a layer of clay was placed on the floor of the grave beneath the body. Sometimes the deceased was wrapped in a cloth or reed shroud, and generally individuals still had the ornaments that they had worn in life. A number of pots were buried with them, sometimes arranged beneath the body. Sometimes a copper mirror was buried with a woman; this was possibly an object used shamanistically to look into the spirit world. Three or four graves at Lothal contained the bones of two individuals: This is not, as has been suggested, likely evidence of sati (widow immolation) given that at least one of these examples was a pair of males.
In some cases, the graves were marked by a low mound of earth or stones or, in one instance, of mud bricks. At Kalibangan, the graves were neatly arranged in groups of six to eight, and each may have been associated with a "cenotaph," a rectangular pit that was left open and in which a number of pots were placed, perhaps an offering place belonging to an individual family.
In contrast, the arrangement of burials at Harappa and Lothal was much more haphazard, later burials often cutting into and disturbing earlier graves, something that was rare at Kalibangan. Scant respect seems to have been accorded to burials when they were disturbed; jewelry was sometimes removed and broken pottery, old bones, and half decomposed corpses thrown into nearby pits. Human bones and teeth have been uncovered as stray finds at a number of sites, such as Rojdi, where two infants were also found buried beneath a house floor. A single skull placed in a jar was found in mound II at Chanhu-daro. At Mohenjo-daro a basket of bones was reported from House XXVIII in the VS area and a single skull in House III in the HR-A area. In the final occupation of the city, perfunctory burials in deserted streets and houses reflect the crumbling of civic society.
In one grave at Ropar in the Himalayan foothills, an individual was buried with a dog, echoing a practice among the people of the Northern Neolithic in Kashmir; perhaps this individual had a link with that culture. In other respects, the burials at Ropar resembled those from Harappa R-37.
It is possible that Harappan funerary rites may also have included other methods of disposal, such as deposition in water, cremation, or exposure to allow excarnation. One grave at Kalibangan contained the fractional remains of several individuals, including three skulls, and a casket holding a child's
A miniature mask of terra-cotta, made in a mold, from Mohenjo-daro. Such masks, perhaps fastened to puppets, were likely used as props in public narrations or enactments of religious stories. (J. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
The burial of a man, probably an important individual judging by the fine necklace he was wearing and by the quality of his treatment: he was wrapped in a shroud and placed in a wooden coffin before being buried in a rectangular grave in the cemetery (R-37) at Harappa. (J. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
Tooth. In several cemeteries cenotaphs have been found, containing only pottery. In a part of Kalibangan's cemetery separate from the graves, pots were set in round pits with no associated human remains. Similarly, in the cemetery of cairns at Dholavira, four circular pits and two rectangular cists (pits lined with limestone slabs and probably once covered by capstones) contained pottery but no bones, though in one cist there was a clay structure resembling a coffin.
Charred patches of earth were noticed in the Kalibangan cemetery that may relate to cremation. Several hundred urns containing pottery, ash, and bones were reported at Harappa, but in only one was any human bone found; it is therefore unlikely that these were really burial urns. Each of two houses in the VS area at Mohenjo-daro yielded an urn containing cremated human remains, and a platform with the remains of five or more cremations was uncovered in a test excavation in the Mature Harappan site of Tarkhanwala Dera in the Saraswati Valley.
The practice of including cenotaphs in cemeteries has Early Harappan antecedents in Gujarat, where urn burials without bones and pits containing only pottery are known from cemeteries at Nagwada and at Surkotada; a grave with fractional inhumation and another with a tiny amount of cremated remains were also excavated at the latter, and an extended burial was found at the former. These practices contrast with those of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, where contracted inhumation had a long history, suggesting they may have had a local origin.
Burials and Beliefs
These burial practices have provided tantalizing clues about Indus religious beliefs. Individuals were carefully buried wearing the clothing and ornaments that distinguished their place in society, in separate cemeteries outside the bounds of the settlement. The pots accompanying burials included painted dishes on stands and S-shaped jars, as well as plain lotas, beakers, and dishes, all likely to be vessels used for serving food and therefore probably related to providing food in the afterlife; sometimes animal bones show that joints of meat were included. Where disease or civic breakdown disrupted life, the established rites might not be performed, but traditional extended burials continued at Harappa in the lower level of cemetery H, showing that the decline of the civilization did not universally affect burial practices.
Except in unusual circumstances, therefore, it was clearly important that the Harappan individual was laid to rest in the appropriate manner. In many cases this involved a physical separation between the body and the ground, by means of a shroud, coffin, or layer of pottery or clay; it is tempting to see in this an aspect of the concern with ritual purity.
Once these rites had been performed, however, it did not seem to matter what happened to the body and to its accompanying offerings, given the way bones, pots, personal ornaments, and even incompletely decayed bodies were treated when they were encountered in digging a new grave. Perhaps the Harappans believed that the transition to the afterlife required a rite of passage that involved burial (or other rites of disposal for which there is no evidence) but that, after this was performed, the soul had departed and had no further use for its bodily remains.
Diverse burial practices within the Harappan realms, of which only extended inhumation is well documented, may have reflected a number of different factors, such as social status, ethnic affiliation, or religious beliefs.
World History
