Harappa & the Indus

Every Indus city was planned. Streets ran on a rough grid, the main avenues north to south and east to west, and the city was divided into a raised citadel, walled and built on a brick platform, and a larger lower town of houses and workshops. At Harappa the mounds of the citadel and the town, and a separate walled area to the north with rows of small houses, furnaces and circular working floors, show how the city was organised.

The bricks themselves were standard. Whether at Harappa on the Ravi or at Lothal in Gujarat a thousand kilometres away, fired bricks were made in the same proportions, 1:2:4 in thickness, width and length. Houses of one or two storeys turned blank walls to the street and opened onto inner courtyards, many with their own well, bathing platform and latrine.

No ancient people took water more seriously. Mohenjo-daro had some seven hundred wells. Bathrooms drained through clay pipes into covered brick drains that ran along every street, with inspection holes and soak pits, far in advance of anything in the world until Roman times.

The Great Bath on the citadel of Mohenjo-daro, about twelve metres by seven and over two metres deep, was made watertight with fitted brick and a layer of bitumen. At Dholavira in the dry Rann of Kutch, the people cut great reservoirs in the rock and channelled every drop of monsoon water into them.

The cities lived on the flood plains of the rivers. The farmers grew wheat and barley in winter, and in summer millets, rice, sesame, peas and beans, the same double cropping that still feeds the Punjab. They were among the first people in the world to grow cotton and weave it. They kept humped zebu cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats and chickens.

At Kalibangan a ploughed field from before 2600 BCE has been excavated, its furrows crossing at right angles for two crops grown together. Terracotta toy carts show the bullock cart, almost unchanged in four and a half thousand years.

Indus craftsmen were famous across Asia. They drilled long beads of red carnelian with stone drills so fine that a single bead could take days, and etched them with white patterns; such beads have been found in the royal graves of Ur. They made glazed faience, the first glazed ceramic of South Asia; bangles of shell, copper and clay; bronze cast by the lost-wax method; and wheel-turned pottery painted red and black with fish-scales, pipal leaves and peacocks.

They worked copper from the Aravalli hills and Oman and alloyed it with tin, arsenic and lead. They did not use iron. At Banawali a touchstone streaked with gold shows how they tested precious metal.

Thousands of small square seals of carved steatite, two to four centimetres across, have been found. Most show an animal, often the one-horned 'unicorn' before a stand, sometimes a bull, an elephant, a rhinoceros or a tiger, with a short line of signs above it. They were pressed into clay to seal bales and jars of goods.

The script has between four and six hundred signs. Most inscriptions are only about five signs long; the longest has thirty-four. At Dholavira a signboard of ten large signs once hung over a gateway. No bilingual inscription has ever been found, and the script remains undeciphered: the language of the first Punjabis is still unknown.

Indus weights were cubes of polished chert, made in a system that doubled from small units and then rose by tens, and they were the same in every city. Measuring scales of shell and ivory have been found; one from Lothal is divided into units of under two millimetres. The same weights were still in use in the time of Kautilya's Arthashastra two thousand years later.

Merchants traded across the Iranian plateau and Central Asia and, by sea through the Gulf, with Mesopotamia, which called the land Meluhha. Indus carnelian, ivory, timber, cotton and pearls went west; Indus seals have been found at Ur and Kish, and there was a Meluhhan village in Mesopotamia with its own interpreter.

There are no great palaces in the Indus cities and no tombs of kings, and no building that is clearly a temple. Houses vary in size but not greatly. Whatever ruled these cities did not glorify itself in stone.

Figurines of women, perhaps mother goddesses; seals showing a horned figure seated in a yogic posture among animals, the so-called Pashupati; the pipal leaf; fire altars at Kalibangan; and the ritual bath itself hint at beliefs that some see continuing into later Indian religion. The people buried their dead with pots and ornaments in cemeteries outside the walls.

From about 1900 BCE the great cities slowly emptied. Their drains choked, houses were rebuilt badly over old ones, the script and the seals fell out of use, and people moved into smaller villages, many of them eastward towards the Yamuna and the Ganges.

There was no great invasion. The monsoon weakened over centuries, and the Ghaggar–Hakra river system, fed by the monsoon and by rivers that shifted their courses towards the Indus and the Yamuna, dried into seasonal streams. Cities crowded together suffered from disease; skeletons from the late cemeteries at Harappa show more injuries, leprosy and tuberculosis. Trade with Mesopotamia faded. The urban civilisation dissolved back into the villages from which it had come.

Around 1829 the deserter and explorer Charles Masson saw the mounds of Harappa and described a ruined brick castle on the Ravi. Alexander Cunningham visited in 1853 and 1872 and published a strange seal with an unknown script; by then the engineers of the Lahore–Multan railway had carried away so much of the ancient brick as ballast that about 160 kilometres of track were laid on it.

In 1921 Daya Ram Sahni began excavating Harappa, and in 1922 R. D. Banerji began at Mohenjo-daro. In September 1924 Sir John Marshall announced to the world a lost civilisation as old as Sumer. Partition in 1947 split the finds: the Priest-King stayed in Karachi and the Dancing Girl went to New Delhi. Since 1986 the Harappa Archaeological Research Project of Richard Meadow and Mark Kenoyer has excavated the city year after year.

The Indus world never quite disappeared. The bullock cart, the double harvest of wheat and rice, cotton cloth, the shell bangle and the kohl stick, the tandoor-like clay oven, the craft of drilling carnelian beads in Gujarat and the shape of village houses all carry its memory.

And the land is the same: the plain of the five rivers, the floods of the monsoon, the bricks of the old cities still turning up in village walls. Harappa lies twenty-four kilometres from Sahiwal, eight kilometres from the river that once fed it. It is the first chapter of the Punjab's story.