Harrapan

Introduction

Although they did use some writing with pictographic symbols at Mohenjo-daro, they were not extensive nor alphabetic nor have they been deciphered yet, and the Indo-European Sanskrit which did develop in India is probably quite different. Nevertheless the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan did borrow many ideas from Mesopotamia and is considered the third civilization to develop. Two seals of the Mohenjo-daro type were discovered at Elam and Mesopotamia, and a cuneiform inscription was unearthed at Mohenjo-daro.

The pastoral villages that spread out east of Elam through Iran and Baluchistan prepared the way for the cities that were to develop around the Indus River, particularly at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. By about 3000 BC they were building mud-brick houses; burials in the houses included funereal objects; and pottery had fine designs and the potters' marks. After 2500 BC farmers moved out into the alluvial plain of the Indus River valley and achieved full-sized villages using copper and bronze pins, knives, and axes; figurines of women and cattle indicate probable religious attitudes.

The urban phase began about 2300 BC and lasted for about six hundred years with elaborate cities like Mohenjo-daro (called locally Mound of the Dead), which was excavated in the 1920s. This city and others not yet excavated had about 40,000 inhabitants congregated in well built houses with private showers and toilets that drained into municipal sewer lines. Suffering from occasional flooding by the Indus, Mohenjo-daro was rebuilt seven times. The largest structures were the elevated granary and the great bath or swimming pool which was 12 by 7 meters. Around the pool were dressing rooms and private baths.

The people of the Harappan culture did not seem to be very warlike, although they hunted wild game and domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats. Wheat and barley were the main food supplemented by peas, sesame, and other vegetables and fruits, beef, mutton, pork, eggs, fish, and milk. Compared to other ancient civilizations, the houses were of nearly equal size, indicating a more egalitarian social structure. The potter's wheel and carts were used; children played with miniature toy carts. Cotton, perhaps first used here, and wool were made into clothing. A bronze figurine was found of an expressive dancing girl with her hand on her hip, naked except for jewelry. The numerous figurines of the Mother Goddess indicate a likely source for what later became the Shakti worship of the feminine power in India. A male god in a yoga posture, depicted with three faces and two horns, has been identified with Shiva, another important figure in later Indian religion. Phallic lingams, also associated with Shiva, have been found. A civilization that endured dangerous flooding for six hundred years very likely had a strong religion to help hold people together.

With no written histories the decline of this civilization is subject to much speculation. The traditional theory is that the Aryans invaded from the northwest. Although this is likely, the decline of Harappan culture was quite gradual and indicates problems beyond foreign conquest. One theory is deforestation, because of all the wood needed for the kilns to make the bricks used to keep out the flood waters that gradually brought about salinization of the soil, as it had to Sumer over centuries, so that the Harappan culture had greatly declined by 1900 BC.

However, a more comprehensive explanation comes from an analysis of the consequences of the extensive herds of cattle that indicate overgrazing and a general degradation of the ecosystem, including salinization of water supplies. This led farmers to move on to greener pastures, leaving behind abandoned villages and depopulated cities. Even though fodder was probably grown to feed the cattle, this would not have been enough; and the overgrazing by the bullocks and milk cows could have caused the surrounding land to deteriorate. By 1500 BC the Harappan civilization had faded away into a culture that was spreading throughout India with new ideas from the west.

The traditional theory, well documented by the ancient hymns of the Vedas, is that a people calling themselves Aryans conquered the native peoples of India and destroyed their forts. Because of language similarities these Aryans are associated particularly with the Iranians and even further back with the origins of the Indo-European language group. The general consensus seems to be that this culture must have begun somewhere in the Russian steppes and Central Asia about 2500 BC, though some have put their origin in Lithuania because of similarity to that language. The branch of these speakers, who came to India under the name Aryans, which means "noble ones," is the Indo-Iranian group. In fact "Iran" derives from the Persian cognate of the word for Aryan. Other branches spread into Greece and western Asia as Hittites, Kassites, and Mitanni. A rock inscription found at Boghaz Koi dated about 1400 BC, commemorating a treaty between the Mitanni and Hittites, invokes the Aryan gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra, and the twins Nasatya (Asvins).

The ancient writings of the Persian Avesta and the Hindu Vedas share many gods and beliefs. Eventually they must have split, causing later authors to demonize the divinities of their adversaries. In early Hindu writings the asuras were respected gods, but later they became the demons most hated, while Ahura Mazda became the chief god of the Zoroastrians. (Persian often uses an h where Sanskrit uses an s, such as haoma for soma.) On the other hand the Hindu term for divinities, devas, was used by Zoroastrians to describe the devils from which even our English word is derived. Some scholars have concluded that the ancient Hindus did not want to admit that they came from Iran, and therefore the origin of the Aryans is never mentioned in the ancient texts, although they frankly boast of their conquest over the indigenous Dasas or Dasyus in India.

The word Veda means knowledge, and the Vedas are considered the most sacred scripture of Hinduism referred to as sruti, meaning what was heard by or revealed to the rishis or seers (Gad was the seer of king David). The most holy hymns and mantras put together into four collections called the Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva Vedas are difficult to date, because they were passed on orally for about a thousand years before they were written down. More recent categories of Vedas include the Brahmanas or manuals for ritual and prayer, the Aranyakas or forest texts for religious hermits, and the Upanishads or mystical discourses.

Harappan Religion was not Hinduism

Not a single Hindu idol/deity/temple has been excavated at Indus sites. Plus evidence shows that Harappans ate beef and buried their dead. This is what the renowned historian John Keays states on the religion of Harappans:

"The religion of Harappans is unknown. No site has certainly been identified as a temple and most suppositions about sacrificial fires, cult objects and deities rest on doubtful retrospective references from Hindu practices of many centuries later. Such inferences may be as futile as, say, looking to Islamic astronomy for an explanation of the orientation of the pyramids. In short, these theories are all fanciful and do not bear scrutiny.

"Depicted on some Harappan seals, is that of a big-nosed gentleman wearing a horned head-dress who sits in the lotus position, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals. He cannot be the early manifestation of Lord Shiva as Pashupati, `Lord of the Beasts.' Myth, as has been noted, is subject to frequent revision. The chances of a deity remaining closely associated with the specific powers - in this case, fertility, asceticism, and familiarity with the animal kingdom - for all of two thousand years must raise serious doubts, especially since, during the interval, there is little evidence for the currency of this myth. Rudra, a Vedic deity later identified with Shiva, is indeed referred to as Pasupati because of his association with the cattle, but asceticism and meditation were not Rudra's specialties nor is he usually credited with an empathy for animals other than kine. More plausibly, it has been suggested that the Harappan figure's heavily horned headgear bespeaks a bull cult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.

"Similar doubts surround the female terracotta figurines which are often described as mother goddesses. Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometime miniskirted, they are usually of crude workmanship and grotesque mien. Only a dusty-eyed archaeologist could describe them as `pleasing little things.' The bat-ears, on closer inspection, appear to be elaborate head dresses or hairstyles. If, as the prominent and clumsily applied breasts suggest, they were fertility symbols, why bother with millinery? Or indeed miniskirts?"

Millinery refers to hats and other articles sold by a milliner to women, or the profession or business of designing, making, or selling hats, dresses, and hat trim to women. Women would ask a milliner to remake their old clothing into new clothing. A milliner is a hatter who designs, makes, sells or trims hats and dresses. Customers would visit a millinery shop to look at and to buy clothes (children's clothing, shirts, undergarments and caps, for example) Millinery, if taken in a more general sense, also means any accoutrements that are functionally unnecessary, such as a garnish on a dish, or the extra cuff-buttons on a man's dress jacket.

The Harappan seals depicting the sitting man/deity wearing horned headdress bears no resemblance with Hinduism's Shiva. Similar to this horned Harappan man/deity is the horned Celtic Cernunnos that was worshipped in parts of ancient Europe: With Hindu hegemonic claims would ancient Europeans also be considered Hindu since the Celtic Cerrunos looks very similar to the horned Harappan deity? By the way, it is the cow that's worshipped in Hinduism whereas bull has a minor role. Bull was much more sacred in ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures similar to the popular Harappan bull.

This is further supported by Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The Bull Cult was a prehistoric religious practice that originated in the eastern Aegean Sea and extended from the Indus Valley of Pakistan to the Danube River in eastern Europe .... The Bull Cult continued into historic times and was particularly important in the Indus Valley and on the Grecian island of Crete. In both places the bull's 'horns of consecration' were an important religious symbol."

On the non-Hindu beliefs/customs of Harappans, Richard K. Hines states:

"Similar to the cultures of ancient Middle East, it appears that the Indus religion recognized some type of life after death. Unlike Hindus who practice cremation, Indus people carefully buried their dead in wooded coffins with their heads facing north and the feet pointing south. Included in the graves were pottery jars containing food and weapons for use in the afterlife."

And on beef as a common aspect of Harappan diet, Dr. Kamal Lodaya states:

"Meat was an important part of Harappan diet which included beef, mutton, fowl, fish, and other animals."

Village Communities (6000-3000 BC)

Using the raw dating by potsherds on a large number of Tells in the Near East it is possible to get a global distribution of village communities. It appears that the character changes significantly, first gradually starting 6000 BC, but specially to the end of the 4th millennium. Early isolated settlements are mainly found in the valleys of smaller rivers in the Zagros mountains and in the smaller plains of valleys. New settlements are more like village communities, closer to each other and on locations where rivers stream into large valleys and where water streams may be easier to control. The dryer climate (starting from 3500 BC) makes it plausible that irrigation starts playing a role in the agricultural methods.

Because of larger control over the harvest and animal husbandry, smaller and more intensively used agricultural fields cause an increased food production. These can supply the larger communities. The proximity of villages makes communication and interaction easier. It stimulates the cultural and economic exchange on the one hand, but enlarges the possibility of conflicts on the other hand. Making rules and agreements to avoid and solve conflicts is seen as an important factor in the process of civilization and considered as more important than the administrative necessity for cooperation in the irrigation works. The latter process is well known from later times.

Habitation of the great plains in the extreme south of Mesopotamia occurs in later times. The irrigation of these plains as we know it from later Babylonian texts --with its long supply channels and its eternal lack of sufficient water-- indeed requires an extensive administration system, but they belong to a later development.

Neolithic Cities exceptional

The above described development of village communities in large parts of the Near East seem to have been the rule, There are, however, a few remarkable exceptions: the Neolithic cities dated in the 6th and 5th millennium BCE, like Jericho (in the Jordan valley) and Catal Höyük in Turkey, which show the great diversity of forms of inhabitation. Because of the long time span between the building of these cities and the bloom of the city-states around 3000 BCE, it is not assumed that the Neolithic cities stood model for the later development of cities.

The Stone Age, pulls together all known evidence from the Natufian culture (ca. 12500-8000 B.C.) The Natufian culture existed in the Mediterranean region of the Levant. It was a Mesolithic culture, but unusual in that it established permanent settlements even before the introduction of agriculture. The Natufians are likely to have been the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. There is also evidence that the Natufians themselves had already begun deliberate cultivation of cereals, and were certainly making use of wild grasses. The Natufians chose central places to stay so that the wild cereals could be harvested in all three zones[clarify]. However, due to climate changes resulting in drier conditions, the Natufians were forced to stay in areas with permanent water.

Evidence for the storage of the grain can also be seen at some sites. The Natufians hunted gazelles as well as harvesting wild grasses.[1] The culture is a successor of Kebaran culture. and the Chalcolithic (4000-3250 B.C.). Archaeological finds from more than a hundred excavations constitute a great variety of skeletal remains, artifacts, and depictions. Many of the objects were noise producers or "Schmuck"-idiophones such as rattles, clackers, and scrapers that could have accompanied dance and song. One of the earliest is a female pelvic bone embedded with fox teeth that must have functioned as an ornament and an idiophone, as did pierced dentalia shells. More acoustic properties can be suggested for many of the carefully crafted pierced bone or stone finds, some of them in pairs, which suggests a "Gegenschlag-idiophone" function. The latter do, in fact, exhibit thicker and thinner points which enhance their resonance (the effect was tested in 1987). Bull-roarers of wood are also found associated with cult objects as early as 10,000 B.C. and continue in ancient Israel/Palestine (and Egypt) into later times; they may have been shamanistic tools.

The Natufians settled in the woodland belt where oak and pistachio were prevailing species. The underbrush of this open woodland was grass with high frequencies of grain. The high mountains of Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, the steppe areas of the Negev desert in Israel and Sinai, and the Syro-Arabian desert in the east put up only small Natufian living areas due to both their lower carrying capacity and the company of other groups of foragers who denuded this large region.

The houses of the Natufian are semi-subterranean, often with a dry-stone foundation. The superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbricks have been found that became common in the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, abbreviated PPN A. The round houses have a diameter between 3 and 6 meters, they contain a central round or subrectangular fireplace. In Ain Mallaha traces of postholes have been identified. These could have been used for rituals by the leader of the group. Villages can cover over 1,000 square meters. Smaller settlements have been interpreted as less permanent abodes (camps). Traces of rebuilding in almost all excavated settlements seem to point to a frequent relocation. This then indicates a temporary abandonment of the settlement. Settlements have been estimated to house 100-150, but there are three categories: small, median, and large, ranging from 15 m sq. to 1,000 m sq. of people. There are almost no indications of storage facilities.

With the advent of the Chalcolithic period (ca. 4000 B.C.), evidence for artifacts and music is greatly enriched by finds of well-crafted objects and individual art works that are both natural and abstract. Bone, ivory, wood, terracotta, and copper objects point the way to an "acoustical-organological revolution" of the fourth millennium. A painted terracotta, seated female image (probably a fertility figure) holds a container on her head and under her left arm an object which looks like an hour-glass drum like the darabukka, having parallels in neighboring cultures.

Indus Valley - Source: Discover Magazine

"No golden tombs, no fancy ziggurats. Four thousand years ago city builders in the Indus Valley made deals, not war, and created a stable, peaceful, and prosperous culture."

The railway linking Lahore to Multan in Pakistan is 4,600 years old. In truth, the rails were laid down in the middle of the nineteenth century, but to build the railway bed, British engineers smashed bricks from crumbling buildings and rubble heaps in a town called Harappa, halfway between the two cities. Back in 1856, Alexander Cunningham, director of the newly formed Archeological Survey of British India, thought the brick ruins were all related to nearby seventh-century Buddhist temples. Local legend told a different story: the brick mounds were the remnants of an ancient city, destroyed when its king committed incest with his niece. Neither Cunningham nor the locals were entirely correct. In small, desultary excavations a few years later, Cunningham found no temples or traces of kings, incestuous or otherwise. Instead he reported the recovery of some pottery, carved shell, and a badly damaged seal depicting a one-horned animal, bearing an inscription in an unfamiliar writing.

That seal was a mark of one of the world's great ancient civilizations, but mid-nineteenth-century archaeologists like Cunningham knew nothing about it. The Vedas, the oldest texts of south Asia, dating from some 3,500 years ago, made no mention of it, nor did the Bible. No pyramids or burial mounds marked the area as the site of an ancient power. Yet, 4,600 years ago, at the same time as the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, great cities arose along the flood plains of he ancient Indus and Saraswati rivers in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. The people of the Indus Valley didn't build towering monuments, bury their riches along with their dead, or fight legendary and bloody battles. They didn't have a mighty army or a divine emperor. Yet they were a highly organized and stupendously successful civilization. They built some of the world's first planned cities, created one of the world's first written languages, and thrived in an area twice the size of Egypt and Mesopotamia for 700 years.

Superior plumbing and uniform housing, no matter how well designed, don't fire the imagination like ziggurats and gold-laden tombs. "But there's more to society than big temples and golden burials," argues Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, an archeologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Those are the worst things that ancient societies did, because they led to their collapse. When you take gold and put it in ground, it's bad for the economy. When you waste money on huge monuments instead of shipping, it's bad for the economy. The Indus Valley started out with a very different basis and made South Asia the center of economic interactions in the ancient world."

Kenoyer has been excavating at Harappa for the past 12 years. His work, and that of his colleagues, is changing the image of Harappa from a stark, state-run city into a vibrant, diverse metropolis, teeming with artisans and well-traveled merchants.

"What we're finding at Harappa, for the first time," says Kenoyer, "is how the first cities started." Mesopotamian texts suggest that cities sprang up around deities and their temples, and once archeologists found these temples, they didn't look much further. "People assumed this is how cities evolved, but we don't know that for a fact," says Kenoyer. At Harappa, a temple of the glitzy Mesopotamian variety has yet to be found. Kenoyer's archeological evidence suggests that the city got its start as a farming village around 3300 B.C. Situated near the Ravi River, one of several tributaries of the ancient Indus River system of Pakistan and northwestern India, Harappa lay on a fertile flood plain. Good land and a reliable food supply allowed the village to thrive, but the key to urbanization was its location at the crossroads of several major trading routes.

Traders from the highlands of Baluchistan and northern Afghanistan to the west brought in copper, tin and lapis lazuli; clam and conch shells were brought from the southwestern seacoast, timber from the Himalayas, semiprecious stones from Gujrat, silver and gold from Central Asia. The influx of goods allowed Harappans to become traders and artisans as well as farmers. And specialists from across the land arrived to set up shop in the new metropolis.

Unlike the haphazard arrangement of Mesopotamian cities, Indus Valley settlements all followed the same basic plan. Streets and houses were laid out on a north-south, east-west grid, and houses and walls were built of standard-size bricks. Even early agricultural settlements were constructed on a grid. "People had a ritual conception of the universe, of universal order," says Kenoyer. "The Indus cities and earlier villages reflect that." This organization, he believes, could have helped the growing city avoid conflicts, giving newcomers their own space rather than leaving them to elbow their way into established territories.

Part of that ritual conception included a devotion to sanitation. Nearly every Harappan home had a bathing platform and a latrine, says Kenoyer, and some Indus Valley cities reached heights of 40 feet in part because of concern about hygiene. Cities often grow upon their foundations over time, but in the Indus Valley, homes were also periodically elevated to avoid the risk of runoff from a neighbor's sewage. "It's keeping up with the Joneses' bathroom," he quips, "that made these cities rise so high so quickly." Each neighborhood had its own well, and elaborate covered drainage systems carried dirty water outside the city. By contrast, city dwellers in Mesopotamian cities tended to draw water from the river or irrigation canals and they had no drains.

Eventually, between 1900 and 1700 B.C., the extensive trading networks and productive farms supporting this cultural integration collapsed, says Kenoyer, and distinct local cultures emerged. "They stopped writing," he says. "They stopped using the weight system for taxation. And the unicorn motif disappeared." Speculation as to the reasons for the disintegration has ranged from warfare to weather. Early archeologists believed that Indo-Aryan invaders from the north swept through and conquered the peaceful Harappans, but that theory has since been disputed. Most of the major cities dont show evidence of warfare, though some smaller settlements appear to have been abandoned. There is evidence that the Indus river shifter, flooding many settlements and disrupting agriculture. It is likely that when these smaller settlements were abandoned, trade routes were affected. In the Ganges river valley to the east, on the outskirts of the Indus Valley sphere of influence, the newly settled Indo-Aryans, with their own customs, grew to prominence while cities like Harappa faded.

Temples

The Chalcolithic Period in the Levant is that period between the late fifth and late fourth millennia BCE (approximately 4300 - 3300 BCE), during which human material culture consolidated on the advances of the Neolithic Period, utilising new metal technologies, in order to find expression in a variety of inter-related cultures trhoughout the region. Variety and innovation seem to be the by-words for the period, so much so that Ami Mazar [1990: 59ff] has aptly sub-titled the Chalcolithic period as "Innovative Communities of the Fourth Millennium".

The term 'Chalcolithic' (pronounced kælkol, meaning "copper-stone") derives from the Greek ?????? chalcos ('copper') and ????? lithos ('stone') and was first coined in by to describe the period of development transitional from the use of stone tools to the use of metals. Outside of the "three age" system, positioned between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. As such, within the Levant the term designates that general period in which copper (Cu) - the first metal widely utilised by mankind - made its technological advent alongside the continuing extremely wide use of stone tools and implements.

é: house, household; temple; plot of land [E2 archaic frequency: 649; concatenates 4 signs].

rig5,7: n., list; temple ward, slave.

tùr; tur5: birth-hut; byre; sheepfold, pen; stable; a frequent metaphor for a temple, sanctuary (cf., tur) [TUR3 archaic frequency: 121; concatenates 3 sign variants].

enkum: temple treasurer; guardian deity of the foundations [ENKUM archaic frequency: 14].

ésañ[ÑÁ׊E]; esañx[É׊E; É.ŠE; É.SAÑ]: granary, storeroom (é, 'house, temple', + sañ, 'first, prime').

lagar: temple servant who pronounces invocations to the god [LAGAR archaic frequency: 51; concatenates 4 sign variants].

ninkum[NIN.PAB.SIG7.NUN.ME.UBARA]: temple treasurer; guardian deity of the foundations [NINKUM archaic frequency: 11].

šabra, šapra [PA.AL]: temple administrator; commissioner (šab, 'to gather up', + ru, 'to give') [ŠABRA archaic frequency: 1].

ùnug, unu6 [TEMEN.ÈŠ = TE.AB]: elevated shrine, temple; living room; sanctuary.

lúdub-alal-urudu: a temple servant ('to pour' + 'pipe' + 'copper').

é-šag4/šà: house interior; (temple) cella ('house, temple' + 'midst').

eš2,3-dam: epithet of a temple of the bride-goddess Inanna; brothel; tavern ('shrine' + 'spouse').

gi-gun4(-na), gi-gù-na: sacred building ('reeds' + 'decorated temple').

ká-mè: wings of a temple door ('gate' + 'battle').

kur-gal: great mountain - a metaphor for temples and for Sumer as a place where earth and sky meet ('mountain' + 'big').

lúníñ-áña: a temple servant ('things' + 'to measure, check').

lúníñ-ZUM-DIM4: a temple servant.

nu-gig: temple prostitute, hierodule ('not' + 'sick, painful').

pa-paþ: cella, inner sanctum of a temple (cf., Orel & Stolbova #1926, *pah- "close, lock").

sá-dug4/du11: a capacity measure, = 24 sìla in Presargonic Girsu and 40 sìla starting with Akkad period; regular "tithe" or "offering" important to the temple economy ('to equal in value' + 'to effect').

si-ga/ge: v., to pile or fill up (e.g., earth for a levee or temple foundation).

šár-ra-ab-du: a temple official (from Akkadian šarru, 'king', + abdu, 'slave').

še-ba: barley rations distributed by the administration of the temple, palace, etc. ('barley' + 'portion, rations').