Earliest jigsaw
In 1946, a team of India's archaeological survey was
at one of its favourite digs when it stumbled upon 37
skeletons. Two lay on the steps of a well with visible
marks of head injury. Five were on the steps of another well
room. A few others were hastily buried as if the times were so
bad the dead could not be taken to the cemetery. "Men,
women and children seemed to have been massacred in the
streets and left dying or, at best, crudely covered without any
last rite," wrote Mortimer Wheeler, who led the expedition.
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Mortimer Wheeler |
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The archaeologists were at a site on the west bank of the
river Indus in what is now Pakistan's Sindh province. For veterans
of this dig, the area's local name seemed apt. The Sindhi
people of the area called it Mohenjo Daro, meaning mound of
the dead. But for the University of London-educated Wheeler,
it was time to revisit history textbooks. As an undergraduate,
he had learnt by rote a sentence in the Cambridge History of
India "The history of India is, in large measure, a struggle
between newcomers and earlier inhabitants."
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INDIA'S FIRST RECORDED CIVILIZATION
More than 1,500 sites of the Indus Valley civilization have been
discovered since 1924 when Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were
first excavated. Archaeologists believe the area is roughly the
quarter of Europe. Dholavira in Gujarat is the last major site
discovered. It was excavated in the 1990s. |
Click here to enlarge |
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Wheeler also recollected his mentor at the archaeological
survey, John Marshall, often said "the ancient people on the
banks of the Indus were Dravidians." In 1924 Marshall led an
expedition to Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, some 500 km
away, and announced "a civilization as ancient as
Mesopotamia and as grand as Egypt." The excavation doubled
the recorded age of civilization in the Indian
subcontinent--shifting it to about 2500 BC
from inscriptions of Ashoka in 250 BC.
Marshall could never forcefully claim the
Dravidian affiliation of the Indus Valley people.
For Wheeler, the 37 skeletons vindicated
his mentor. "It may be no conjecture...
Aryans slaughtered aborigine men, women
and children," he announced in a 1947 article
in the Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey.
Those were tumultuous times. The Indian
subcontinent was split into two nations and
buffeted by the violence of partition. Initial
reactions to Wheeler's announcement were muted. But the
English archaeologist had stirred up a hornets' nest. The
Aryan invasion theory was more than 70 years old then. But
several Indian nationalists and historians never accepted it.
Indologist P V Kane fired the first salvo.
Hindu nationalists were never at ease
with the Aryan Invasion theory. It
struck at the root of their belief that
the earliest Indians were Aryans |
In 1950, he denounced Wheeler and Marshall as typical
Englishmen "who find invaders everywhere." Kane argued
Mohenjo Daro was a large city and had there been an invasion
Wheeler should have found more than 37 skeletons. "If Dr
Marshall and Dr Wheeler had not been so blinkered they
would have seen the Indus people for what they were," he said.
He was referring to a seal dug out by Marshall. On it was
inscribed a horned person seated on a stool, its arms covered
with bangles, and it was flanked by small figures of tigers and
elephants. For Kane, this was the Vedic deity Pasupati, precursor
to Shiva. It was proof that Indus Valley
people were Aryans. But in a later article he
counselled caution the resolution to the
Indus Valley mystery lay in its seals. |
Inscribed on soft stones
In 1856, laying a railway line connecting
Karachi and Lahore British engineers John
and William Brunton found a city full of
hard well-burnt bricks. The city, near
Harappa, south of modern day Lahore, was
reduced to ballast. Agitated at the destruction,
the then director of the Archaeological
Survey of India, Alexander Cunningham,
moved into Harappa for a salvaging operation. In 1873, he
reported a "few odd little seals"--proof of writing in the
ancient Indus Valley.
In the next 40 years, archaeologists discovered a few seals
near Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. But the Archaeological
Survey of India was more interested in uncovering Alexander's
lost victory towers at the two sites. In 1922, Rakhal Das
Banerji, an archaeologist looking for the victory towers,
reported a large cache of seals. Cut out of steatite, a soft stone
easy to smoothe and carve, most seals carried a figure of an
animal and a row of symbols. Banerji's reports were a rage
with his superiors at the archaeological survey. Marshall set
out for Mohenjo Daro. Another team was dispatched to
Harappa.
In April 1924, Marshall wrote, "It looks we are on the
threshold of a discovery in the plains of the Indus Valley." By
September that year, he concluded Mohenjo Daro "is the
largest Bronze Age city in the world." The archaeologist was
delighted to walk down its streets well defined by the high
walls of homes, climb the stairways, peer down ancient wells
and stand in bathing rooms used over 4,000 years ago.
His protege, Wheeler, in contrast wasn't very impressed
with the town planning. He began digging at the Indus Valley
in the late 1930s and, for a while, was not excited with the regimented
planning of Mohenjo Daro.
The 37 skeletons broke the monotony.
Wheeler, who often read Max Mueller's
commentaries on the Rig Veda, was
intrigued by the German Indologist's
description of the Aryan chief Indra wreaking
havoc on citadels, puras. "Where are--
or were--these citadels," Wheeler wondered.
He seemed to have found an answer
at Mohenjo Daro.
Hindu nationalists, who believed
Aryans were the original inhabitants of the
country, were never comfortable with theories
about Aryans sacking ancient cities. The social reformer Vivekananda, for example,
asked in a fit of rage "In what Veda
do you find the Aryans came from a foreign
land? Where do you get the idea they
slaughtered aborigines?"
Shiva v Indra
Wheeler's theories provided an archaeological
prop against such tirade. "On circumstantial
evidence, Indra stands accused," he wrote before retiring as the
head of Pakistan's Archaeological Survey. Back in the UK, he
hosted TV shows to popularize archaeo logy.
In one of the shows, he recollected the Mohenjo Daro carnage
site "Indra might have won the battle, but Shiva won the
war." The English archaeologist was getting back at P V Kane.
"The brutish Aryans imbibed many ideas from the people of
the ravished Indus cities, one of them being Shiva worship."
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In early Dravidian languages
the word for fish sounds like
that for star. What was it in
Harappa?r |
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Wheeler's second question
Wheeler was also given to doubts "Who knows what the residents
of Mohenjo Daro called their city?" he once asked. A
Spanish Jesuit was hard at work finding answers. Henry Heras
made Bombay, now Mumbai, his home in the 1920s and
turned his attention to the Indus Valley script in the 1930s.
These were exciting times for those studying the Indus Valley
people. In 1929, an Oxford PhD candidate G R Hunter submitted
his thesis, an analysis of 750 inscribed objects from
Mohenjo Daro and Harappa--everything that had been excavated
up to 1927. Hunter listed all the signs in the inscriptions,
Symbols of fish and jar were common, Hunter wrote in a
1934 work, The Script of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. Heras
worked on Hunter's compendium for nearly two decades, also
mastering languages of the Dravidian family. He put the
knowledge to good use in analyzing the fish sign. Heras suggested
the sign ought to be read as min, the most commonly
used word for fish in Dravidian languages. But his knowledge
of Dravidian languages told him the sign was
not a straightforward indicator. It did not
mean fish. In the proto-Dravidian language the
word for fish sounds almost like the word for
star--min or fish, and min or star are homophonic.
"So min could also mean star," wrote
the priest who liked to call himself a Spanish
Dravidian. He also took cue from Marshall and
other Indus Valley archaeologists. They had
noticed some people in Mohenjo Daro speaking
Bruhui, a language of the Dravidian family.
About two million nomadic people in Pakistan's Baluchistan
province still speak Bruhui. By 1946, Wheeler's theories were
further reason to seek Dravidian affiliation.
Rest in peace Indra
A Spanish Jesuit and a colonial government archaeologist
holding forth on origins of civilization in the Indian subcontinent
wasn't good for the pride of nationalist historians. In
1953, A D Pusalker, president of the Indian History Congress,
joined the debate. "The enemies of Aryans were of dark complexion,
indistinct speech, lovers of darkness as contrasted
with Aryans who loved light. Can these epithets be applied to
city dwellers of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro?" he asked.
By that time archaeologists had revealed nearly 1,000
Indus Valley sites, covering an area almost a quarter
Europe. They had dug out pottery depicting foliage,
sometimes a strutting peacock, or a horned deer turned
towards a stylized tree. Some terracotta figurines had a
childlike air about them, others were remarkably vivid in spite
of their small size. There was a bronze statue of a slender
limbed girl, which historians call the 'Dancing Girl of
Mohenjo Daro'.
But the hornets' nest stirred by Wheeler had not been put
to rest. In 1964, American archaeologist George F Dales
reopened the case. The 37 skeletons dug out by Wheeler
belonged to different periods. "Decades, even centuries separated
the deaths. Some skeletons did bear cut marks. But the injuries had healed," Dales wrote.
This was a nice salve for nationalist historians smarting
under the charge that Aryans had laid ancient cities to waste.
Dales' discovery had exonerated Indra of Wheeler's charge.
Many saw the American archaeologist's findings as proof of
Aryans being indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.
But Dales, who died in 1992, never supported these theories.
He believed more digs might yield clues to "the elusive
Indus script". In 1986, he set up the Harappan Archaeological
Project--an effort of archaeologists, linguists and historians to
understand the people of Harappa. He would sometimes wonder
if the people of the Indus Valley could be straitjacketed
into Aryans or Dravidians. When he succumbed to cancer at
64, Dales was justifiably proud of his contribution.
But a New York Times obituary noted the American
archaeologist had a feeling of failure in his last days Mortimer
Wheeler's second question still had no answers.
A student's tribute
Wheeler's student B B Lal pursued the case with a zeal that
would have made his guru proud. But Lal's tribute to his guru
hasn't taken the form of affirmation. "If the Aryans pushed the
Harappans all the way to South India, how come there are no
Harappan sites in South India?" Lal wrote in 1967. Lal has
made a case for Aryans being native to India, often indicating
they might have authored the Indus civilization.
Lal, who retired as the director of the Archaeological
Survey of India in 1972, often refers to the Indus site of
Dholavira to substantiate his position. "The word pur occurs
frequently in the Rig Veda and conveys the sense of a fortified
town. Sometimes it is stated to have had even a hundred walls,
the word hundred evidently standing for a large number--as
found, for example, at Dholavira," he wrote in 1997.
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B B Lal believes the authors
of the Indus Valley
civilization were Aryans |
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Dholavira
About 4,000 years ago, a huge
billboard looked down on a
stone metropolis. The city now
called Dholavira sat on an
island in a salt marsh in what is
today Gujarat. Three walls
enclosed it, and its gates opened
onto broad plazas, busy workshops
and spacious stadiums.
Archaeologists believe the
nine-foot (2.7m) wide wooden
sign, remnants of which were
found in the early 1990s, may
have hung on a central tower,
where its 15-inch (0.4m) white
gypsum letters would have proclaimed to literate citizens and
visitors. What did it say? The picture blurs here. R S Bisht, who
led the excavations in the 1990s, said it's futile to draw on languages
of the Dravidian family to read the billboard. Dholavira
was planned according to Rig Veda's trimeshthin system. This
system divides a city into three areas upper, middle and lower.
Asko Parpola, scholar of Vedic Sanskrit in Finland, sees no
reason in going back to the Vedas to read the board. He has
spent four decades to understand the tongue of the Indus
Valley people. "There are many language families in South Asia, the biggest being Indo-European and Dravidian. The
Dravidian family has loaned words to the Indo-European
family," he said.
COURTESY ASI |
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B B Lal believes the authors
of the Indus Valley
civilization were Aryans |
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An Indian civil servant
Parpola has a supporter in a former Indian civil servant. In
1981, Iravatham Mahadevan took premature retirement from
the Indian Administrative Service to follow an old passion the
Indus Valley script. The first time he came across specimens of
the Indus script was by accident. He had taken a book out of
the library of the Central Secretariat in Delhi. "It was G R
Hunter's book on the Indus Valley seals. Hunter had gone to
Harappa and Mohenjo Daro when the excavations were on
and copied all the freshly excavated material. When I went
through Hunter, I realized that it was an interesting problem
in Indian epigraphy," he wrote.
In the late 1980s, battlelines in the
Indus Valley controversy became more
sharply drawn. There was a fraud
attempt to prove an Aryan association |
Mahadevan, like Heras before him, is also a scholar of several
Dravidian languages. "We can say the Indus language is
most likely to have been a form of Dravidian. The script is
written from right to left, like Arabic for example, unlike the
Sanskrit script, though there are the occasional cases of left to
right," he wrote in 1982. Mahadevan described in a paper in
1982 the jar symbol--first noted by Hunter as the most frequent
of all Indus signs--as a sacrificial vessel used in priestly
ritual by the Harappans. "In Vedic times," Mahadevan wrote,
"the jar symbolism was associated with the priestly class and
gave rise to the myth of the miraculous birth from a jar. This
could be an influence from Harappan times."
But Mahadevan is also alive to theories about Indus Valley
people being Aryans. "You could say from my reading the
Indus civilization is Aryan and the Dravidian hypothesis is
wrong. That would be wrong. Aryans used horses. We do not
have horses and wheeled chariot in the Indus civilization," he
wrote.
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Iravatham Mahadevan has listed 500 signs of the Indus script. He believes it has a Dravidian lineage |
Enter the horse
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the controversy
over the Indus Valley civilization
acquired sharper political overtones. The
Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu nationalist
groups launched a campaign against a
16th century mosque in Uttar Pradesh's
Faizababd district. They wanted the
mosque to go it was the work of an invader,
the Mughal ruler Babur who destroyed a
temple at the birthplace of the Hindu god
Ram. The old controversies about who
were original inhabitants of the country
were raked up. Historians now no longer
subscribe to the Aryan Invasion theory, but
they hold Aryans migrated from outside.
Horses and chariots were needed to stretch the antiquity of
Aryans in India. On July 11, 1999, the United News of India
reported "historians N S Rajaram and Natwar Jha had deciphered
messages on more than 2,000 Harappan seals." After
months of media hype, Rajaram and Jha's The Deciphered
Indus Script made it to print in early 2000. They claimed the
Indus civilization was awash with horses, horse keepers, and
horse rustlers. To support his claims about horses, Rajaram
pointed to a blurry image of a "horse seal"--the first pictorial
evidence ever claimed of Harappan horses.
Rajaram took credit for most of the discoveries. An engineering
professor in the US in the 1980s, he re-invented himself
in the 1990s as a "revisionist historian". By the mid-1990s,
he could claim a following in India and in migrant circles in
the US. Websites run by Hindu nationalist groups presented
him as a "world-renowned expert on Vedic mathematics".
Mahadevan and Parpola followed the pre-press publicity
for Rajaram's and Jha's book with a mix of curiosity and scepticism.
After the book hit the market, their initial scepticism
turned to howls of disbelief--followed by
charges of fraud. They showed Rajaram
and Jha's methods were so flexible that
virtually any desired message could be
read into the texts.
Two American Indologists demonstrated
Rajaram and Jha's horse seal was a
fraud, created from a computer distortion
of a broken unicorn bull seal excavated
from Harappa.
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In 1997 two historians created
a fraud horse seal by a
computer distortion of a
broken unicorn bull seal
dug out in Harappa in 1946 |
Was it a script at all?
The two Indologists Michael
Witzel and Steve Farmer collaborated
in a paper in 2004. The
paper's title The collapse of the
Indus script thesis, the myth of a
literate Harappan civilization,
was a dead give-away. Witzel,
professor of Indology at
Harvard, and Farmer, an independent scholar,
were joined by University of Illinois linguist
Richard Sproat in arguing that it was futile to
decode the Indus script. The inscriptions did
not encode detailed messages because they
were too short--on average only five signs
long. "We do not find evidence of randomlooking
sign repetition expected in contemporary
phonetic scripts like the Egyptian hieroglyphs,"
Farmer, Witzel and Sproat wrote.
Parpola responded by showing that sign
repetitions do occur in the inscriptions.
Mahadevan had another counter "Seal-texts
tend to be short universally. The Indus script
appears to consist mostly of word-signs. Such
scripts have a lesser number of characters and
repetitions than a script where characters represent syllables--
Egyptian hieroglyphs for instance."
Mahadevan has collaborated with computer analysts at the
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai to
compile a list of 500 Indus epigraphs. The repository depicts
the number of times each sign occurs. The list was used recently
in a computer analysis by a team led by a University of
Washington computer scientist, Rajesh Rao.
The team compared the pattern of symbols in the Indus
artifacts to words in contemporary English, ancient Sanskrit
and old Tamil. They then repeated the calculations for samples
of symbols that are not spoken languages such as DNA
sequences from the human genome.
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Indus inscriptions a script or
mere pictorial signs? |
Linguists believe in some information systems a sequence
of symbols appears random, while in others, such as
pictograms that represent concepts, a strict hierarchy influences
the order in which symbols appear. Spoken languages
tend to fall somewhere between these extremes, incorporating
order as well as flexibility. The pattern of the Indus symbols
was akin to the spoken languages, Rao
explained.
Parpola believes only a tenth of
Mohenjo Daro has been excavated. "The
number of single occurrence signs would
surely be reduced with more digs," the
Finnish Indologist wrote in 2005.
Assuming excavations continue there is
real possibility of at least a partial decipherment
of the Indus script.
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