Tag: Indus Valley Civilization

The sign board at Dholavira

While various techniques are being applied to decipher the Indus script, there is an even more fundamental debate on if the Indus people were literate or not. The average length of a seal is five symbols; the longest single-sided inscription has seventeen signs.

One probable use of Indus seals was in economic activity; the seals found in Lothal had impressions of a coarse cloth on their reverse and sometimes several seals were used to mark the goods. Thus the seals meant something to the sender and receiver though we are not quite sure what. But did those seals have meaning only to the trading community? The sign board at Dholavira says no.

This signboard — accidently discovered and painstakingly excavated — is large. The board is 3m long and each of the ten signs is “35 cm to 37 cm tall and 25 cm to 27 cm broad.” The width of the board to the specific length was intentional: it fit the northern gate of the citadel. The signs were made of baked gypsum so that it could be seen from the distance.

Since this board was placed in a public place, big enough to be seen by people in the middle and lower town, it is sure that it had some meaning. According to R. S. Bisht, who discovered the board in 1991, “The inscription could stand for the name of the city, the king or the ruling family,”

He also adds

Bisht opined that the Harappans were a literate people. The commanding height at which the 10-sign board had been erected showed that it was meant to be read by all people.

Besides, seals with Indus signs were found everywhere in the city – in the citadel, middle town, lower town, annexe, and so on. It meant a large majority of the people knew how to read and write. The Indus script had been found on pottery as well. Even children wrote on potsherds.

Bisht said: “The argument that literacy was confined to a few people is not correct. You find inscriptions on pottery, bangles and even copper tools. This is not graffiti, which is child’s play. The finest things were available even to the lowest sections of society. The same seals, beads and pottery were found everywhere in the castle, bailey, the middle town and the lower town of the settlement at Dholavira, as if the entire population had wealth. [Inscriptions on stone and wood]

See Also: Stone inscription with Indus signs

Stone inscription with Indus signs


(Indus Signs from a earlier find in Dholavira)

An inscription on stone, with three big Indus signs and possibly a fourth, has been found on the Harappan site of Dholavira in Gujarat.
The discovery is significant because this is the first time that the Indus script has been found engraved on a natural stone in the Indus Valley. The Indus script has so far been found on seals made of steatite, terracotta tablets, ceramics and so on. Dholavira also enjoys the distinction of yielding a spectacularly large Indus script with 10 big signs on wood. This inscription was three-metre long. [Stone inscription with Indus signs found in Gujarat]

Dholavira, located on the island of Khadir in the Rann of Kutch, is among the top five Harappan cities in terms of size. Previously an inscription with ten large size signs of Indus script was found here. This sign board was hung on a wooden plank in front of a large stadium.
It is usually mentioned that if the Indus script indeed did represent something, it must have been for the elite. The sign board at Dholavira refuted that claim. It has also been mentioned quite often that the Harappans never wrote anything on stone. This discovery refutes that claim too.
This new find — the stone with three or four inscriptions — is not really a new find. It was discovered in 1999 and was even mentioned in the 2007 ASI report. Finally in 2010, someone decided to take a look which makes you wonder how many such Indus script pieces must be lying in the basement of various Government institutions.

The Harappan Empire

Among the ancient civilizations, the Harappan was much larger in size than the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations; it was too large to be administered from just Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. While the sites along the Indus-Saraswati were urban, a new paper suggests that these towns were surrounded by various supply centers which were non-urban and even hunter-gather in some cases.

In addition, many of the outlying settlements were involved in processing and the production of manufactured goods. Dholavira thrived on its industrial exports of agate and shell artefacts. From Kumaun, a large number of copper mines and copper-working implements have been reported from the Pithoragarh region , where there were also huge deposits of sedimentary talc. The Jodhpura people lived close to copper mines and did the dirty work of smelting for the Harappans . In Kashmir, the hoard of carnelian beads of Harappan vintage at Burzahom shows that they had trade contacts. In the far north-west Bactrian region, Shortguai served as a processing centre for lapis lazuli. In Gujurat, sites like Kanmer yielded a large amount of bead-making material indicating their industrial importance. The agate quarries are located just about 20km from Kanmer. The coastal sites of Sutkagen Dor, Khera Kot, Balakot, Allahdino, Dholavira, Kuntasi, etc. probably helped procure and process shell material for beads and bangles.[Redefining the Harappan hinterland]

UCLA 9A: The Dark Skinned Dasas

In the lecture on Vedas, as part of the  Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of India course at UCLA, the instructor makes few points about the Vedic period which again shows that mostly outdated information or incomplete information is still being taught (Lecture of 10/2/2009). 

When he talks about the Vedic gods — Agni, Varuna, Indra, Ushas — he notes that they are connected to the elements. This, he explains, is not surprising since the Aryans were pastoralists concerned about the whims of nature. Though it looks convincing, the shallowness of this observation can be understood only by reading better books on that period.

The Aryans did not just have a childlike wonder towards the natural forces; they also had a philosophy behind it. The Rg Vedic gods did not just keep order in the physical universe. They also kept moral order[1]. In the Mantras, there are expressions like ‘guardians of rta’ and ‘practicers of rta’. For example Varuna is not just the god of sky and heavenly light, but also the one who fixed the laws of the physical universe which cannot be violated. It is said that no sin escapes his attention[2].

The instructor mentions another point in his confusing Aryan invasion narrative: He says that the Rg Veda notes that

  1. the incoming people attacked forts and citadels
  2. subdued snub-nosed and dark skinned people known as the Dasas.

An analysis of this statement shows there is a Grand Canyon wide gap between what we know now and what the instructor is teaching.

The theory of the forts and citadels comes from the British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. When he saw thirty seven skeletons in Mohejo-daro, Indra stood accused for he was purandara or the ‘fort destroyer’. Later Western archaeologists themselves noted that there was not a single bit of evidence to suggest an armed invasion of Harappa; none of the skeletons were in the area of the citadels. Also to add more nails to this coffin, it was found that the skeletons were from a period after the abandonment of the city and only one skeleton had a lesion caused by a weapon[3].

This nasal debate was started by Max Müller in 1854 based on a solitary reference to the word anasah.He thought this word meant noseless or snub nosed. In 1891, in the eyes of British ethnographer Herbert Hope Risley, this solitary reference became frequent references. By 1967 some Western scholars thought that the word probably meant faceless instead of noseless. Nevertheless they decided to go with Max Müller[3].

A proper response was given by Sri Aurobindo. He noted that the word anasah does not mean noseless. Even if it did mean noseless, he said it could not be a reference to the Dravidian nose which was as good as any Aryan nose. Another possibility is that the noseless description could refer to the tribal people. In fact there is an equivalent word in the language of the Bhil tribe. But the word in Bhil tribe means unethical not noseless[3].

Indian scholars meanwhile read anasah as an-asa meaning devoid of fair speech.This makes sense because the words Arya, Dasa and Dasyu appear mostly with reference to hymns about Indra. The Aryans worshipped Indra while the Dasas or Dasyus were without rites, of different rites, non-sacrificers, without prayers, without Brahmin priests, and without Indra. This word appears in a passage where Dasyus are also described as having defective organs of speech; maybe they were referring to the Dasyus as uncivilized or uncultured[3]. 

Thus you see two groups of people who disagreed on rituals, but there is nothing to suggest a racial divide. Since the UCLA instructor is a proponent of the Aryan Invasion Theory, there is one version of which suggests that the Dasas were Indo-Europeans who arrived earlier than the Vedic people.

What about the dark skin? This comes from two words — krishna and asikini — which mean black. These words are used to refer to black clouds, black demons, the power of darkness and a demon named Krishna.

According to one Western scholar the krishna is a symbolic expression for darkness. According to Prof. Michael Witzel, for Vedic poets black meant evil and not skin color. In 1999 Hock reexamined all these passages and concluded that this skin color was just a mechanism to justify European imperialism; Ambedkar had made that conclusion much earlier.

For more than a century Indian scholars have challenged this racial interpretation. For more than half a century Western scholars have agreed with this. Still in 2009, Max Müller’s 19th century racial interpretation is being taught. 

References:

  1. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).
  2. M. Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass Pub, 2000).
  3. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate(Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). 

UCLA 9A: Brahui, Vedic Women

In the lectures as part of the  Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of India course at UCLA, the instructor makes few points about the Vedic period  which has to be fact checked.

But before critiquing the lectures let us visit one point where there was a balance. In Baluchistan, there is a region where a language called Brahui is spoken: This language is Dravidian. The fact that an island of Dravidian speakers remains in the midst of Indo-European speakers has been cited as evidence of Indo-Aryans displacing Dravidians — the original Harappans — during their invasion/migration to India.

To his credit, the instructor mentions that there is another theory about the origins of Brahui. It turns out that Brahui was not present in the region during the arrival of Aryans, but arrived later, probably after the Islamic invasion of India.

Then there is the case of Brahui, a Dravidian language still spoken in parts of Baluchistan, which has often been brandished as the ultimate proof of a Dravidian presence in the Indus region. But in the 1920s, French linguist Jules Bloch demonstrated, through an analysis of the Brahui vocabulary, that the language reached Baluchistan recently, perhaps at the time of the Islamic invasions and probably from central India. This thesis was more recently endorsed by Murray Emeneau, and still more recently by H. H. Hock. Finally, the linguist and mathematician Josef Elfenbein confirmed it using a different approach.

According to the French Indo-Europeanist Bernard Sergent, “the conclusion is radical … Brahui reached Baluchistan late, and can therefore no longer provide proof or even a clue of the Dravidian-speaking character of the people who lived along the Indus.”Clearly, the Brahui trump card has failed, although a number of our Indian scholars remain unaware of the above linguistic studies.[A DRAVIDO-HARAPPAN CONNECTION? THE ISSUE OF METHODOLOGY]

Unfortunately you don’t see many examples of balanced coverage in this lecture series. Getting into the Vedic text, he talks about the purusha sukta or hymn of man and attributes this to the origin of the caste system. He also tells one questioner that Hindus were perfectly capable of coming up with exploitative systems like anyone else in the world and there is no need to get defensive about it. Few minutes later he talks about Manusmriti and states that women and shudras were not allowed to listen to the Vedas; molten lead was to be poured into their ears.

So in less than 20 minutes he jumps about 1500 years, the same way he jumps to Ayodhya of 1992 while talking about the epic Ramayana. By this time travel he successfully avoids talking about the role of women in the Vedic period. It is a neat trick.

To understand the role of women in Vedic society, we need to go back to a Vedic ceremony which Frits Staal, Michael Wood and me attended (in various years) called the Athirathram. This Vedic ceremony, which is about 3000 years old, is still performed in Kerala. It is probably the oldest surviving ritual of mankind. 

The ceremony is conducted on behalf of a male yajamanan, but he cannot conduct it without his wife beside him. This means that the woman hears all the Vedic chanting and no one pours molten lead into her ears. It is not surprising since some of the Vedic hymns were written by women themselves; there were women sages, they took part in chariot races, they attended social gatherings. A woman could remarry if her husband died or disappeared; the Vedic seer Ghosha remained a spinster in her father’s house[1]. There is even mention in later texts of women learning the Vedas[2].

This of course does not imply that all women were allowed to attend the Vedic sacrifice; only certain women qualified. The number of hymns by women are just a few; the number of goddesses are also few. The society was clearly patriarchal.

Why is it so hard to mention all these?

References:

  1. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009). 
  2. A.L. Basham, The wonder that was India;: A survey of the culture of the Indian sub-continent before the coming of the Muslims, 21st ed. (Evergreen, 1977).

UCLA 9A: The Gangetic Plain

If you listen to Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of India, a course taught at UCLA and which has Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India as mandatory reading, you will get a good introduction to the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory. Unlike Matthew Herbst or Tara Carter of the MMW courses at UCSD, the UCLA instructor teaches in a very confusing manner and hence it is hard to figure out if he is touting the Aryan Invasion Theory or the Aryan Migration Theory or if he knows the difference between the two. In one part he mentions Aryans arriving on their horses in 2000 B.C.E and subduing the snub-nosed Dasas and later mentions the migration of Aryans.
This is at a time when even Marxist historians have written off the AIT. According to Romila Thapar:

There is virtually no evidence of the invasion and the conquest of northwestern India by a dominant culture coming from across the border. Most sites register a gradual change of archaeological cultures. Where there is evidence of destruction and burning it could as easily have been a local activity and is not indicative of a large-scale invasion. The borderlands of the northwest were in communication with Iran and Central Asia even before the Harappa culture with evidence of the passage of goods and ideas across the region. This situation continued into later times and if seen in this light when the intermittent arrival of groups of Indo-European speakers in the northwest, perhaps as pastoralists or farmers or itinerant traders, would pose little problem. It is equally possible that in some cases local languages became Indo-Europeanized through contact.[From Aryan Invasions to Aryan Migrations]

But this post is not about AIT or AMT or OIT. It is about the developments in the Gangetic plain.  According to the instructor, incoming Aryans hit the Harappans like a cue ball on a pool table dispersing Harappans to places like South India and the Gangetic plain. According to him, it is around this time we see civilized living in the Gangetic plain.
Our understanding of that region has changed a lot in the last decade. Archaeology at Jhusi, near the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna, has revealed evidence of a Neolithic settlement dating to the 7th-6th millennium B.C.E[2]. This is the time frame associated with the Mehrgarh culture in Baluchistan, considered to be the predecessor of the Harappan civilization.
The people of Jhusi, who lived in grassy land with occasional trees, bamboo groves and lakes,  had pottery, arrowheads, and semi-precious stone beads.  They built houses with bamboo walls smeared with mud plaster[1].  The people of Jhusi had domesticated plants and animals and they spent their time farming, herding and foraging[2].
We now know what the people of Jhusi cultivated: they had rice, barley, bread-wheat, dwarf-wheat, lentil, green-gram, grass-pea, field-pea, horse-gram, sesame, linseed, anwala among other crops.  Among these rice and sesame were summer crops; the rest, winter. The important point is that rice was cultivated in India as far back as the 7-6th millenia B.C.E[2].
Another surprising find is grape cultivation. Susruta and Charaka knew about grapes, but they never mentioned the cultivation; the mention of grape cultivation comes after the Muslim invasion. Even though the Sanchi stupas depict the grape-vine, it was attributed to Hellenistic influence. But now we know that grape was cultivated in Jhusi since the Neolithic times[2].
What is more fascinating is that there was cultural contact between the people of North-West region of the Indian subcontinent and Jhusi: There is evidence of rice in Kunal, Haryana dating to 3000 – 2500 B.C.E and Swat in 2970 – 2920 B.C.E. and various winter crops from moving from Baluchistan  into Jhusi. All this is before the migration of Harappans to the Gangetic plain. Also with this find, we see a cultural continuity in Jhusi which starts in the Mesolithic period, continues through the Neolithic and Chalcolithic age to modern times[2].
When will this information make it to UCLA’s History of India course?
References & Notes:

  1. Lallanji Gopal et al., History of agriculture in India, up to c. 1200 A.D. (Concept Publishing Company, 2008). 
  2. J. Anil K. Pokharia, JN Pal and Alka Srivastava, Plant macro-remains from Neolithic Jhusi in Ganga Plain: evidence for grain-based agricultureCURRENT SCIENCE 97, no. 4 (2009): 564-572.
  3. Image via Wikipedia

UCLA 9A: Notes on Indus Valley Lectures

The first few lectures of Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of India, a course taught at UCLA and which has Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India as mandatory reading, talks about the Harappan Civilization. 

In Lecture 2, the instructor mentions a list of animals that were domesticated in the Indus region and adds that the horse bones were never found before 2000 B.C.E; carbon dating found horses of much later date. This for him suggests that Aryans came with their horses, from the steppes, after 2000 B.C.E and subdued the natives.

The story about horses is not that simple. As we have seen, horse bones definitely were present in Harappa, possibly before 2000 B.C.E. What the instructor conveniently left out was the fact that there were not a whole lot of horse bones even after the alleged Aryan arrival. The symbolism of asva is left out too as well as the fact that there was no massive migration from the steppes since 7000 years back.

The instructor then talks about Sarasvati, in the context of Harappan civilization and dismisses it as the work of Hindu nationalists. He  mentions that this theory is not believed by any serious scholar of Indian history and goes on to add that the irony for Hindu nationalists is that the beginnings of their civilization is outside India.

He is right about the fact the Hindu nationalists mostly believe that Ghaggar-Hakra is Sarasvati. The whole truth is that, it is not just Hindu nationalists who believe that. The following text is from a response given in the Rajya Sabha just two weeks back, by a minister belonging to the Congress Party.

The major (western most) channel of river Sarasvati remained more or less constant and unchanged and is considered to be the actual Rig Vedic Sarasvati river. The description and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the River Sarasvati described in the Vedic literature. From the prominence and width of the palaeo channels on the satellite data, supported with data from archaeological finds, age and quality of ground water, sediment type, etc., it is confirmed that river Sarasvati had its major course through present day river Ghaggar and further passing through parts of Jaisalmer and adjoining region in Pakistan and finally discharging into the Rann of Kachchh. A major palaeo channel of the river passes through Jaisalmer district while a considerable part of the river drained further, inside Pakistan. [Detection of underground water]

Also, early this year, just few miles away from UCLA, there was a conference titled International Conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley Civilization: A Reappraisal. Those who attended were Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (University of Wisconsin), Jim G. Shaffer (Case Western Reserve University), Carl C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (Harvard University), Edwin Bryant (Rutgers University), Maurizio Tosi (University of Bologna, Italy) and Nicholas Kazanas (Omilos Meleton Cultural Institute, Athens). Are they Hindu nationalists?

Also in attendance were professors of Indian origin like Subash Kak (Oklahoma State), Ashoka Aklujkar (University of British Columbia), who have been living abroad for decades. How do we know these professors are still guided by the politics of the homeland and not pure research.

In fact what is wrong in studying Sarasvati-Sindhu?

Scholars may disagree about the identity of Sarasvati with a specific modern river, about the exact course the river followed, about whether the name “Sarasvati” is borrowed from a region to the northwest of pre-partition India, about the number of sites actually close to the accepted course, about the number of sites in the north and the south of the course, about whether the river had its origin in the Himalayas, about whether the river was glacier-fed, about how closely or exactly the newly discovered sites are related to the Indus-Harappa sites, and so on. However, no scholar worth the appellation has, as far as I can determine, taken the position that the new sites cannot at all be related to the Indus-Harappa sites or are beyond the area associable with Sarasvati. If, in this state of research, some scholars wish to study the Sindhu-Sarasvati area together, what is so objectionable about it? Why should the inclusion of Sarasvati be an anathema?[Response to S. Farmer]

We have seen this pattern before: accuse anyone who holds a different point of view of being a Hindu nationalist. Hopefully, UCLA students of Indian History, will go beyond Nehru and  Doniger and read more balanced books like Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004) or Klaus K. Klostermaier’s A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. (State University of New York Press, 2007) to understand India.

Secrets of M458

Various Y chromosome haplogroups correlate with continental boundaries, except for one – R1a. The R1a is spread over a huge area from South Asia to Central East Europe to South Siberia. It also covers a large number of language groups like Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Finno-Ugric, Dravidian and Turkic. This combination means only one thing: the R1a can give us clues about the Indo-European homeland. But the R1a is not helpful in finding the Indo-European homeland because we still don’t know where it originated. Some say it originated in North India; others, Eastern Europe near Ukraine[2].
Since R1a is spread over a vast region, it often associated with one version of AMT: the Kurgan hypothesis. According to the theory which argues for the homeland in the Caucasus, Indo-Europeans mounted their horses and imposed their culture in Old Europe. These violent people changed history in the fifth and fourth millennium BCE and eventually arrived in India[1].
This theory had its own share of criticism. For example, just because the horse was domesticated in steppes does not mean that they fought on horsebacks; there is no linguistic evidence for it. Also when linguists compared the flora, fauna and technology of Kurgan culture with the reconstructions in PIE, there were discrepancies. Does the reconstructed word for horse mean a domesticated horse or a wild one? We don’t know[1].
Now a new R1a marker named the M458 has been found which has been helpful, not in finding the origins of the Indo-European homeland, but where it could not have come from. The M458 originated between 10, 000 to 7000 years back in Eastern Europe and is related to a number of Central and East European farming cultures. This marker, which is from the Kurgan area, does not extend eastward beyond the Ural Mountains and southward beyond Turkey[2].
Since the origin and spread of this marker coincides with the transformation of foragers to farmers, could those Neolithic farmers have spread from Eastern Europe to India like in the Anatolian hypothesis? An alternative to the Kurgan hypothesis, the Anatolian hypothesis states that Indo-Europeans were not aggressive people, but sedentery agriculturalists who spread along with the spread of farming techniques. Here the date is not the fourth of fifth millennium BCE, but the seventh[1].
The new paper says that there is no trace of the M458 marker, which peaks among Finno-Ugric and Slavic speakers, in India. This means that male genes did not flow from East Europe to India since 7000 – 5000 years back or that Indo-Europeans did not come from the following locations in Europe or these[2].

References:

  1. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
  2. Peter A Underhill et al., “Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a,” Eur J Hum Genet (November 4, 2009), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2009.194.

The Indus Colony in Mesopotamia – Part 2

(Ziggurat at Ur)

Read Part 1
Even though direct trade declined, a large number of foreigners stayed back, adopted local customs, and played an important role in Sumerian economy. These foreigners stayed in a village — a Meluhhan village — from 2062 B.C.E; we have documents from this period. This village was located in an area called Lagash in southwestern Mesopotamia which had cities like Girsu, Nina, and a port city and area called Guabba which had the temple of Nin-mar[5]. The Meluhhan village in Guabba and was associated with this temple.
Guabba was probably a harbor town under the jurisdiction of the Girsu/Lagas but by the time of Ur III, it was not near the sea,  but could only be reached by inland waterways.A large number of granaries existed in Guabba where the temple was located. The granaries had to deliver barley and the Meluhhan village granary was one of them[10][11].
Thanks to the meticulous record keeping by the Sumerians we get a good picture of what these Meluhhans did. In 2062 B.C.E, a scribe of the builders received barley from the Meluhhan village. In 2057 B.C.E, there is account of grain delivery, the details of which is mentioned against a tablet of one Ur-Lama, son of Meluhha; the inventory of barley deposits in 2047 B.C.E mentions the quantity from the Meluhhan village. By 2046 B.C.E, there is a debt note:Ur-Lama, son of Meluhha has to recompense some wool. In 2045 B.C.E, the list of grain rations mentions the son of Meluhha, who was the serf of the Nanse temple from the delta[10][11].
During the Akkadian times, the Meluhhans were considered as foreigners, but by Ur III period they became part of society – paying tax and distributing grain — like other Sumerian villages. Compared to other towns and villages, the amount of grain delivered by the Meluhhan village was quite high. Between 1981-1973 BC, Ur was ruled by Amar-Sin and between 1972-1964 BC by his brother Shu-Sin. During the sixth year of the former and eighth year of the latter, barley was delivered only by the Meluhhan granary. Maybe the Meluhhan granaries were bigger or there was a third millennium jaziya[11].
Besides the granary, few people of Guabba — 4272 women and 1800 children — worked in the weaving sector. The Indus region was famous for cotton since 4000 B.C.E: one of the earliest evidence for exports from the subcontinent is Baluchistan cotton which was found in Jordan. So probably the residents of Guabba were skilled weavers from the Indus region[11].
Besides weavers, the village also had shepherds; the Ur III texts also mention a Meluhhan goat. The temple of Ninmar had two gardens out of which one was Meluhhan. This was probably a garden planted with fruit trees from Meluhha and provided fruits for the goddess. Also by the Ur III period, the Meluhhans had adopted Sumerian names. It seems the overseer of the Nanshe temple was a Meluhhan and there was a Meluhhan worker in the temple. Thus instead of following their religious traditions, the Meluhhans adopted the Sumerian ones[11].
Even though we have a better idea of the Meluhhans in Mesopotamia, these texts don’t help us in identifying Meluhha; We don’t know how far it was from Ur. Also no where in the texts the Meluhhans are mentioned in being in touch with their homeland. There is a mention of a Meluhhan skipper, but he was involved in domestic trade.
The Language Turner

(Cuneiform letter to King of Lagash)

Few years back, Gregory L. Possehl, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, was reading Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, when he discovered a reference to a personal seal of a Meluhhan translator — Shu-ilishu — who lived in Mesopotamia. Possehl tracked down a photograph of the seal as well as got a fresh impression from the original seal (pic). The seal was dated from Late Akkadian (2200 – 2113 B.C.E) to Ur III (2113–2004 B.C.E)[3].
Think about this: Around 4000 years back, there was a man in Mesopotamia who could speak Meluhhan as well as Sumerian or Akkadian. He could read those Indus tablets. This is not surprising since the Meluhhan merchants would have handled the imports from Meluhha and exported Mesopotamian goods to their homeland. Since the translator worked with Meluhhans and Mesopotamians, he would need to speak multiple languages.
This suggests that there is probably a bi-lingual tablet somewhere in the region where Shu-ilishu lived. If such a tablet is found, it could be the Rosetta stone which would solve a 134 year old mystery forever. We will know if the Indus people were literate or illiterate, spoke some variant of Indo-Aryan or proto-Dravidian or Klingon. This find could end the dispute over the indentity of the Harappans.
While no bi-lingual seal has been found so far, various Indus seals have been found in Mesopotamia. G.R. Hunter, who in 1934 concluded that Brahmi was derived from Indus script, observed that square Indus seals could be in Indus language while the circular ones, though in Indus script, could be encoding a non-Indus language. He has a reason for suggesting this: there is one particular circular Mesopotamian seal which has five Indus signs in a sequence not seen before; a square seal found in Kish was similar to the Indus ones[10].
That has not helped in decipherment. The number of Indus seals found in Mesopotamia are not too many. About thirty seals have been found of which only ten can be dated with certanity. With trade relations lasting centuries this is a disappointing count. So our hope of finding a bi-lingual tablet depends on finding a Sumerian cuneiform tablet.
Another clue could come from the translations of Ur III texts. Mesopotamians were prolific writers: We know what Sargon of Akkad wrote; we can read the seal of Queen Puabi; there are numerous texts which describe in detail how much tax was paid, debt was kept and who broke whose tooth. Due to this meticulous record keeping we can reconstruct the history of people from the Indian subcontinent in Mesopotamia during the period when Khufu was building the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The news about the Meluhhan village came in a paper published in 1977 based on ten Ur III texts from Lagash/Girsu[10]. Last year there was another update based on the translations of 44 texts which has 48 references to Meluhha. The text which connects the Meluhhan village with Guabba is located in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and was first published in 1912; no one noticed the connection till recently. Hopefully with revived interest in this topic, scholars will keep an eye for such clues which will help us solve this puzzle.
Notes:

  1. The place Ur is important in the Abrahamic religions since it is  the birth place of Abraham. According to tradition Abraham lived from 1812 B.C.E to 1637 B.C.E. Since there is evidence for the granary delivering grain between 1981-1973 B.C.E and also between 1972-1964 B.C.E, it is possible that Meluhhans were around during Abraham’s time as well. That is if Abraham is a real historical character. According to Bible’s Buried Secrets — a historical analysis of the Hebrew Bible — the Babylonians exiled the Caananites in 586 B.C.E. It was while living in Babylon, near Ur, that a scribe, named “P” created the Abraham story to enforce the concept of the covenant.
  2. Many thanks to Hari and Ranjith P for their help in this research.
  3. Images from Wikipedia.

References:

  1. Iraq’s ancient past at University of Pennysylvania
  2. The Middle Asian Interaction Sphere by Gregory L. Possehl
  3. Shu-ilishu’s Cylinder Seal by Gregory L. Possehl
  4. Dionisius A. Agius, Classic ships of Islam(BRILL, 2008).
  5. Charles Keith Maisels, The emergence of civilization (Taylor & Francis, 1990).
  6. Hammurabi (King of Babylonia.), (University of Chicago Press, 1904).
  7. Asko Parpola, The Horse and the Language of the Indus Civilization,in The Aryan Debate edited by Thomas R. Trautmann (Oxford University Press, USA), 234-236.
  8. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
  9. Michael Roaf, The Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts on File, 1990).
  10. Simo Parpola, Asko Parpola, and Robert H. Brunswig, “The Meluḫḫa Village: Evidence of Acculturation of Harappan Traders in Late Third Millennium Mesopotamia?,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20, no. 2 (May 1977): 129-165.
  11. P.S Vermaak, “Guabba, the Meluhhan village in Mesopotamia,” Journal for Semitics 17, no. 2 (2008): 553 – 570.

The Indus Colony in Mesopotamia – Part 1

(Mesopotamia in 2300 B.C.E)

After World War 1, the British Museum and the Penn Museum decided to excavate in Iraq. Since Iraq was under the British mandate, the sites were easily accessible; the only issue was to find the best place to dig. The approval had to come from Britain’s colonial office headed by one Winston Churchill and  Assistant Secretary and Advisor on Arab Affairs, T.E.Lawrence. For the excavation, they picked  Charles Leonard Woolley as the director; Lawrence had worked with Woolley during an excavation in Carchemish, Syria before he ran through Arabia like an Energizer bunny who had drowned a few Red Bulls. One of Woolley’s assistants during the third season of excavations was Max Mallowan, who met his future wife in Mesopotamia –  Agatha Christie[1].
The expedition started work in 1922 and one of their major discoveries was the Royal Cemetery of Ur which belonged to the First Dynasty. Sir Leonard Woolley excavated more than a thousand graves dating between 2600 – 2400 B.C.E out of which seventeen were royal tombs and in one he  found a forty year old, five foot tall woman who was given an elaborate burial. We know this woman as Queen Puabi from one of the three cylinder seals found on her body. She was accompanied in her death by handmaidens and warriors, who were put to death, not by poisoning, but by driving a pike into their heads.
An interesting item from Queen Puabi’s tomb was a cloak of beads, made from carnelian beads (pic), which comes from the Indus region[2]. Thus a queen who lived in Southern Iraq, 4500 years back, was able to obtain beads from the Indus Valley region through the trading hubs of the ancient world.
But there are questions:

  • Who bought these beads to Ur?
  • What do we know about these traders? Were they Harappans or middle men from Bahrain/Qatar/Iran?
  • Can these traders help us in deciphering the Indus script?

Off to Mesopotamia
To put the Indus influence in Mesopotamia in context, we first need to understand the difference between Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Puabi, Sargon, Gudea, and Guabba. A good starting point is 2900 B.C.E when there were many city-states ruled by individual kings who were wealthy enough to import luxury goods and powerful  enough to give offers to their employees which they could not refuse (remember the pike).
Then at some point, the region became divided into Sumer and Akkad, which were not political entities, but collections of city-states speaking two different languages. Out of these two, Sumerian is unrelated to any other language while Akkadian is the ancestor of languages like Assyrian and is related to Hebrew and Arabic. The Akkadians and Sumerians remained in close contact, borrowing words from each other. The Akkadians also adopted the Sumerian script: Sometimes with short inscriptions it is hard to tell if the language is Akkadian or Sumerian. In 2270 B.C.E Sargon combined the region to create the Akkadian Empire[9].
Sargon’s birth story is an interesting one, especially to Indians. His mother, a priestess, conceived him in secret with an unknown father. She then set him adrift in a basket sealed with bitumen in the Euphrates. The river then took him to Akki the gardener who bought him up as his own son. Sounds familiar?

(Copper head from Sargonic Period)

We don’t know how Sargon looked like, but we have a life size copper head of what is most likely his grand son, created using the Lost-Wax method. But it is in Sargon’s time that we hear about Meluhhans, identified as people from the Indus region, for the first time. He boasted about ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha docking in the quay of Akkad[4]. There is also a tablet dating to 2200 B.C.E which mentions an Akkadian who was the holder of Meluhhan ships: large boats that were transporting precious metals and gem stones[10].
There is also a text dating to this period which mentions that Lu-Sunzida, a man of Meluhha, paid 10 shekels of silver to Urur, son of Amar-luku as a payment for a broken tooth. This law seems to be an earlier version of the code of Hammurabi (1792 – 1750 B.C.E), which states that “if one knocks out the tooth of a freeman, he shall pay one-third mana of silver[6].”
When the name Lu-Sunzida is translated into Sumerian it means ‘man of just buffalo-cow’ which is meaningless; the Sumerians don’t have any cultural context for using the buffalo. But the people of India definitely had: the water buffalo is an important concept in Rg Veda (1.164: 41-42)

41 Forming the water-floods, the buffalo hath lowed, one-footed or two-footed or four-footed, she, Who hath become eight-footed or hath got nine feet, the thousand-syllabled in the sublimest heaven. 42 From her descend in streams the seas of water; thereby the world’s four regions have their being, Thence flows the imperishable flood and thence the universe hath life.[HYMN CLXIV. Vi]

This link between Lu-Sunzida and the earliest layers of Rg Veda was noted by Asko Parpola, who suggested that the name could have been a direct translation from Indus to Sumerian[10]. Does this mean that the Vedic people were contemporaries of the Akkadians violating the lakshmana rekha of 1500 B.C.E?
Not so fast. Listen to the explanation for this which is similar to the one which works around the problem of the discovery of real horse bones in Surkotada. According to this explanation, two Indo-Aryan groups — the Dasas and Panis — arrived around 2100 B.C.E from the steppes via Central Asia bringing horses with them. If the Indo-Aryans arrived earlier does this mean that the date of Rg Veda can be pushed to an earlier date than 1200 B.C.E? The theory says, the folks who came in 2100 B.C.E were not the composers of the Veda; they came in a second wave, a couple of centuries later[7][8]. So according to Parpola, the name Lu-Sunzida  could refer to the culture of those early arrivals — the Dasas, Vratyas, Mlecchas — who occupied the Indus region before the composers of Vedas. Thus Meluhha could be an adaptation of the Sanskrit word Mleccha[10].
Following the decline of the Akkadian dynasty founded by Sargon, city states like Lagash in the south gained independence and in 2144 B.C.E, Gudea became the town-king or governor. Direct sea trade, which had been active during Sargon’s time, 150 years back, between Meluhha and Mesopotamia was happening at this time too: Meluhhans came from their country to supply wood and raw materials for the construction of the main temple of Gudea’s capital as well as red stones and luxury goods.
Following the Akkadian period (2300 – 2150 B.C.E), there was a Sumerian renaissance resulting in the Third Dynasty of Ur, usually mentioned as Ur III Empire.  It was during the Ur III period that one of the most famous landmarks in Iraq — the Ziggurat of Ur — was built. The Sumerian King Ur-Nammu who built the ziggurat, which stood in the temple complex of the moon god Nanna, appointed his daughter as the high priestess. This was a practice started by Sargon and it continued till the 6th century B.C.E.
Various city states like Gudea’s Lagash ended with the emergence of Ur III state, but these political changes did not affect trade, which continued as usual with one difference.The direct trade by Meluhhans on Meluhhan ships reduced — there is a decline in Indus artifacts in Mesopotamia —-  instead goods were bought by the middlemen in Dilmun. One reason is that by the time of Ur III the de-urbanization of Harappa was happening. While trade from Harappa declined, trade from ports in Gujarat boomed via the middlemen bringing in various kinds of Meluhhan wood, some of which were used to make special thrones with ivory inlays.
In Part 2, we will look at what these Meluhhans did following the decline of direct trade.
Notes:

  1. This post is based mostly on two papers, [10] Simo Parpola, Asko Parpola, and Robert H. Brunswig, “The Meluḫḫa Village: Evidence of Acculturation of Harappan Traders in Late Third Millennium Mesopotamia?,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20, no. 2 (May 1977): 129-165 and [11] P.S Vermaak, “Guabba, the Meluhhan village in Mesopotamia,” Journal for Semitics 17, no. 2 (2008): 553 – 570.
  2. References will be published at the end of Part 2
  3. Images from Wikipedia