Tag: Before 1 CE

Found: A missing State

Usually archaeologists find artifcats like terracota idols, amphorae or the first labelled portaiture of Emperor Asoka. They also find old temples, forts, boats, and sometimes even skeletons. But it is only once in a blue moon that they find an entire state and this is what happened in China.
The existence of this 3000 year old state, Peng, was never recorded in any historical documents, but only in some inscriptions in bronzeware excavated from two Western Zhou Dynasty tombs

Li Boqian, director of the archaeological research center of the prestigious Beijing University, said at an archaeological forum recently in Beijing that the discovery of the Western Zhou graves in Hengshui is the most important archaeological discovery since the excavation of the graves of the Marquis of Jin, another state of the Western Zhou Dynasty, in Quwo County of Shanxi Province.
The newly found ancient state will help archaeologists and historians better understand the history of the Western Zhou Dynasty and its jurisdiction, Li said.
More than 80 tombs have been excavated at the site in Hengshui, with the tombs of Pengbo and his wife the largest ones. The couple were buried side by side with lots of funeral objects such as bronze ware, carriages and jade, said Song Jianzhong, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of Shanxi Province.
One of the most important findings in the graves is the remains of a pall covering the coffins. The remains of the pall, already blended with earth after several thousand years, are still a vivid red color. Phoenix patterns can be seen on the pall, said Song.[3,000-year-old ancient state found in Shanxi]

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Stegodons in India

The stegodon was a elephant like animal that lived in Asia about 5.3 million to 1.8 million years before present. These animals were about 13 feet high, 26 feet long and had 10 feet long tusks. Stegodons were earlier considered to the ancestor of elephants and mammoths, but now they are considered to be the sister group of the mammoth and the Indian and African elephant. Recently archaeologists from the ASI (where else?) found some tools in Jharkhand’s East Singhbhum which resemble the stegodon.

The deep elephant-shapped furrows stunningly resembled ‘stegodon’, the first of the true elephants that had probably roamed in this part of the world during the ‘pleistocene’ period, the official said. Chauhan said the length of the ‘elongated’ truck is very long and the about four-inch imprint point to a primitive species. “This unusual figure of an elephant on the stone at Basadera takes one back to a primitive period,” he said.
“The technique ‘block-on-anvil’ and ‘block-on-block’ adopted to shape and size the tools found by us and their striking similarity with the tools discovered in the river valley indicate the age of human habitation which could be older than the one discovered near Jamshola by the anthropologists from Kolkata,” he said. The discoveries should be enough pointer to the perception that East Singhbhum might have seen transformation of primitive men, he said. [Vital clues about primitive human beings]

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Adichanallur skeletons spill beans

In 2004, there was a spectacular archaeological discovery in Adichanallur, near Tirunelveli when 2800 years old human skeletons were found in urns. These urns also contained writing resembing early Tamil Brahmi. Later a three-tier burrial system was discovered in which earlier generations were burried in urns at 10 ft depth and recent ones above them. Soon the habitational site of the people who were burried was also discovered.
Analyzing the habitational site, it was understood that people lived in a fortified town and it had a separate potters quarters. There was also evidence of industrial activity and archaeologists think that it was a crowded busy town. The analysis of these skeletons have revealed some new facts.

  1. These people were tall, contradicting an earlier hypothesis that pre-historic Indians were short
  2. People consumed refined food, though there is no description of what constitutes refined food
  3. They had Southern Mongoloid features indicating sea trade between east coast of India and south east Asia in 800 B.C.

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What Aryan Invasion – II

“The perennial concept of people, language and agriculture arriving in India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny,”

The proponents of the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory believe that Central Asian people bought agriculture to India. Also since we Indians descended from them, there should be some evidence for this in our genetic makeup.
May such theories are being put to rest now. Newly surfaced evidence shows that agriculture developed in Middle Ganga Valley much before Europe. Research by Oppenheimer, Michael Petraglia and Hannah James show that Europeans are descendents of people from India. Two recent genetic studies done in India dispute the European parenthood theory.

A study by scientists at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Calcutta has revealed that most present-day Indians are the descendants of early humans who began to arrive in India about 60,000 years ago. It suggests that modern Indians do not owe much genetic makeup to central Asians who arrived much later.

The findings do lend support to the migration of people from central Asia into India.

“Although we did find genetic signatures from central Asian populations in Indian communities, there are not enough (signatures) to prove large-scale mixture with local populations,” research team leader Vijendra Kashyap told The Telegraph.

“The perennial concept of people, language and agriculture arriving in India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny,” Kashyap and his colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Estonian Biocentre said in their research paper.[Aryan impact myth crumbles]

A separate study by Partha Mazumder at ISI Calcutta also proves that genetic signatures of Indian men are older than 10,000 years and this predates the arrival of Europeans in India.

The First Farmer: From India?

The findings indicate that people residing in this area too started farming 10,000 years back

Recent discoveries in archaeology are pushing back the dates of many civilizations. The discovery of murals and writing in a Mayan site in San Bartolo in the lowlands of northeastern Guatemala pushed the dates for Mayan art and writing to 250 – 100 B.C. Now a single grain of rice is showing that developed civilization may have existed in India about 7000 years back, much before the Harappan civilization.
The Archaeological Survey of India had started excavating many sites across the country looking for evidence of cultures that pre-dated the Indus Valley Civilization and the main sites are Virana (Haryana) and Lahudadev (UP)

“This would mean that there were pockets were urbanisation would have started before the well-developed urban civilisation of the Harappans,” said Mani.
But now we have studied a variety of rice that was obtained from the Lahura-Deva site, which revealed that there were regular farming and cultivation activities going on in 6th century BC,” he said.
Mani also said that revelation of developed cultures should not be misunderstood as a separate civilisation.
“We have also received pieces of pottery and other evidence from sites like Lahura-Deva and they have created a lot of curiosity as they can themselves become a tool to trace the evolution of Harappan civilisation,” he added. [Grain of rice points to pre-Harappan culture]

The discoveries in Lahuradeva site also indicate that Middle Ganga Valley would have been the home of the first farmer. Previously it was believed that agriculture began in West Asia in a region known as the Fertile Crescent with the domestication of barley and wheat. Later a new Fertile Crescent was discovered in China where rice cultivation began much before agriculture in West Asia. In the Indian subcontinent wheat and barley cultivation began in Kachi Plain in Baluchistan(Pakistan) in the seventh millennium B.C.
Now recent excavations show that people in this region took to farming and domestication of animals much earlier.

Lahuradeva has now provided the answer. The archaeologists here have found remains of carbonised material containing grains of cultivated rice along with wild grass. There are several layers of ancient civilization buried under the mound â?? as the archaeologists found out when they dug deeper..
The findings indicate that people residing in this area too started farming 10,000 years back. Talking to Hindustan Times, director State Archaeological Department Rakesh Tiwari said the habitation deposits had been divided into a five-fold tentative culture sequence, including Early Farming Phase, Copper Age, Early Iron Age, NBPW and Early Centuries BC/ AD.
The cultural remains of Early Farming Phase, including potsherds, charred and un-charred bones, scattered small pieces of charcoal, small burnt chunks of clay, a small piece of stone and tortoise shell, were found here. Ceramic industries of the period consisted of hand made red ware, black and red ware, he said. [The â??first farmerâ?? belonged to (UP) India, says ASI]

What Aryan Invasion?

Steatite statue of a high priest
or official; circa 3000 B.C.,
found at Mohenjo-Daro

Stephen Oppenheimer concluded by genetic studies that people moved into India from Africa initially and rest of the world population were descendents of this group. University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James came to the similar conclusion by analyzing fossils, artifacts, and genetic data. So if there was a migration, it was from India to Europe and not the other way. Does this prove that there was no Aryan Invasion/Migration?
While the above migrations happened about 85,000 years back, the theory of Aryan Invasion/Migration talks about what happened around 4000 years back. This is what Dr. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, who has been excavating in the Indus city of Harappa has to say

The transition from one culture to the next was gradual as seen at Harappa, and there is no evidence for invasions by outside communities such as the so-called Indo-Aryans.
Although some scattered skeletons were discovered in the later levels, they do not represent warfare or raiding, and there is no evidence that the site came to a violent end. [Decline and Transformation]

Now the BBC has updated their page on the history of Hinduism to reflect this. So why are some people still holding onto the invasion theory? A good answer comes from Suhag A Shukla, who was the legal counsel for the Hindu American Foundation in the recent California textbook controversy.

There is no evidence of any invasion or any war. Honestly, the people who have held onto the Aryan invasion theory, probably based their entire careers on that particular theory and have expounded that through their research, they have a vested interest in not seeing it disappear.[‘I am not for rewriting Hinduism’]

India, populated before Europe

Journey of Mankind (The Bradshaw Foundation)

The Bradshaw Foundation and Professor Stephen Oppenheimer have a new theory on the migration of human beings from Africa over 160,000 years. Based on DNA analysis, the conclusion by Oppenheimer is that about 85,000 years ago, humans migrated from Africa to the mouth of the Red Sea. From there they reached India, traveling through Yemen, Oman, Iran and Pakistan.
74,000 years back, there was an eruption of Mt. Toba in Sumatra and the volcanic ash covered India and Pakistan and causing population crash. Following that incident, the Indian peninsula was re-populated. One of the statements by Stephen Oppenheimer is that all non-African people in the world are descended from this group which migrated to India and India was populated much before Europe, Americas and Australia.
While Oppenheimer’s study was based on DNA evidence, there is another archaeological study which confirms this theory. University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James by analyzing fossils, artifacts, and genetic data.
According to them, a human ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, arrived in India about 250,000 years ago from Africa. Modern humans arrived in India about 70,000 years ago and wiped out the Homo heidelbergensis.

The new theory posits that as much as 70,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans migrated east, arriving in India with technology comparable to that developed by Homo heidelbergensis.
“The tools were not so different,” Petraglia says. “The technology that the moderns had wasn’t of a great advantage over what [Homo heidelbergensis] were using.”
But modern humans outcompeted the natives, slowly but inexorably driving them to extinction, Petraglia says. “It’s just like the story in Western Europe, where [modern humans] drove Neandertals to extinction,” he says.
The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of the so-called Hobbits, whose fossilized bones were discovered recently on the Indonesian island of Flores. [Early Humans Settled India Before Europe, Study Suggests]

Like Oppenheimer’s research, Petraglia and James’ research too concludes that modern humans arrived in India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe. So next time someone tries to pull the Aryan Invasion/Migration/Tourist theory on you, ask them, in which direction the migration happened?
Related Links: Indian History Timeline

First Harappan burrial site in UP

“An ancient riddle will be solved and historical chronology will change.â??â??

Few months back we reported on a Harappan burrial site in Baghpat, in Uttar Pradesh. There was a mummified body wearing copper bracelets and the site had pottery and other artefacts dating back to the Indus Valley civilisation. Here is another report with some more details.

â??â??It is the first Harappan burial site to be found in Uttar Pradesh,â??â?? says Sharma. Previously Harappan cemetries have been unearthed at Kalibanga and Lothal. Says Upinder Singh, reader in the department of history at St Stephenâ??s College, Delhi: â??â??This is just the tip of the iceberg. Thereâ??s so much new evidence coming in that archaeologists may have to re-think on many counts.â??â??
The burial ground could shed new light on the funeral practices of the Harappans. â??â??It could also point to a larger habitation. Also the pots found here are all unpainted. These should be co-related to the pots found in other burial sites. That exercise is yet to be done,â??â?? says Singh.
At Sinauli, the skeletons lie with their arms crossed and feet close to each other, head facing north-west. The burial site has many layers. â??â??In archaelogical terms it means it was in constant use,â??â?? says Sharma. Evidences of the Harappan civilisation have earlier been found in UP in Saharanpur and Alamgirpur but Sinauliâ??s haul is much richer.
Sinauli has also marked another first. Says Sharma: â??â??There is a copper hoard culture that is presumed to be late Harappan or said to follow it. But no one is sure of its authorship. Now two antenna swords belonging to this culture have been found next to a corpse. This could mean that the copper hoard was a contemporary or belonged to the mature Harappan period. An ancient riddle will be solved and historical chronology will change.â??â??
â??â??What is also interesting is that the soil found here shows that this site was on the banks of the Yamuna. The river now flows 8 km away,â??â?? says Sharma. It will take a while to tie up all these threads blown astray by time. At present, a team from Kolkataâ??s Anthropological Survey of India is conducting DNA and other tests on the ancient bodies.[UP village offers a fresh clue to solve a Harappan puzzle]

600,000 year old skull

Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley have a book called In search of the cradle of civilization[2], which goes on to establish that the real cradle of civilization was India not Sumer. According to the findings of an Oxford University scholar Stephen Oppenheimer, India was the cradle for all non-African people. While Oppenheimer’s theory deals with human migration which happened about 85,000 years back, there is something exciting which could prove India’s connection with the homo erectus, homo sapiens, and evolution that happened 600,000 years ago.
In 1982 a skull, not belonging to a homo sapien was found in Narmada Valley. It was only recently that a CT scan was done.

Former GSI (Nagpur) director Arun Sonakia told TOI on Thursday that the scan report might reveal something extremely exciting. â??We need some time to interpret the results. However, what we can say now is that it can reveal something very exciting… It can prove that India was also a cradle of civilisation,â? Sonakia said. According to the modern theory of evolution, the evolutionary lines of apes and early humans diverged around seven million years ago.
Some two million years ago, Homo erectus expanded out of Africa into Europe and Asia. Over the next 1.5 million years the populations of these three continents followed different evolutionary courses and became distinct species. Europeâ??s became the Neanderthals, Asiaâ??s remained Homo erectus, but Africaâ??s evolved into Homo sapiens, from where it spread again to the rest of the world.
Sonakia said the skull was not of a Homo sapiens. Although a morphological study of the skull had been done soon after its discovery, there was no internal study. â??Any internal study needed a CTscan. There are some sedimentations inside the skull. Once we remove the skull, it will crumble,â? Sonakia said. The geologist added that a study of the skullâ??s lobe structure, as revealed by the scan, can show which faculty of man was more developed at the time. [India could have been cradle of civilisation]

Recreating an ancient trade route

According to Romila Thapar[3], the trade via the maritime route between the west coast of India and west Asia go back to the third millennium B.C. At that time the Egyptian civilization was in existence and Indus Valley was in its early stages. Once the trade route was established, there was continuous Indian presence in west Asia. This was the predecessor of the trade relations with Rome in the first millennium B.C and Africa in the first millennium A.D.
Georg Feuerstein et al[2] writes about cuneiform texts mentioning historical a historical place called Magan (or Makan) which according to some scholars could be Sudan or Ethiopia. But majority of the scholars think that Magan is present day Oman. Copper was found there as early as the fifth millennium B.C and and Omanis were wealthy from copper export. Copper attracted the merchants from the Indus valley and an inscription in Harappan script was found at Ras al-Junayz.
Now some researchers are traveling along that bronze age trade route, on a boat, similar to the one used by people four millennia back.

The 40-foot Magan, named after an ancient name for Oman, is made of reeds formed into bundles, lashed together with rope made from date palm fibers and covered with a woven mat coated with black bitumen or tar to make it waterproof. The vessel will be powered by a square-rigged sail made of tightly woven wool and maneuvered using two teak steering oars.
The plan is to leave Sur in Oman on Wednesday, taking advantage of the last of the southwest monsoon winds and favorable currents, and sail east 590 miles to the historic port of Mandvi in Gujarat, India, a journey that could take up to three weeks.[Bronze Age-style reed boat to sail from Oman to India]

This is going to be one hell of a trip since the boat is not covered and the sails have to be adjusted constantly. The crazy people who are doing this, all eight of them want to know how life was back then, how boats were built and ancient navigation techniques. To add authenticity, they have cargo similar to the ancient ones and the menu consists of a typical bronze age meal.

Even maneuvering aboard will be hard, since crew members will be walking on cargo piled up in the bottom. The cargo is meant to be representative of trade goods of the period: copper ingots for making the bronze that gave the age its name, blocks of fine black diorite stone for carving, turtle and marine shells, pearls, frankincense, carved soapstone vessels, dates and date products, fish oil and sharkskin – an ancient sandpaper.
The crew consists of Vosmer and the navigator, both Americans; a sailing master from Australia; two Omani seamen; two Italian graduate students; and an Indian archaeologist. They will have a Bronze Age diet of dates, honey, legumes, dried fish, bread and water, but there will also be some modern munchies.

But unlike the bronze age travellers, Magan will have a GPS, navigation lights, emergence beacon and life jackets, and also an Indian naval vessel will be following it.
Update (Sept 8, 2005): The boat sinks
Update 2(Sept 11, 2005): There is going to be another boat (via Secular-Right India)