Ancient India is a land of sacred truths and mysterious teachings. Today those who are in spiritual search go there. And few people realize that Hinduism and Buddhism, attracting with their mystical practices and hidden knowledge, are far from the deepest layers of Indian culture. Before all this, there was another civilization in the Indus Valley, the very first on our planet, and it took its secrets with it.
Any person who is interested in history sooner or later has a simple question: how did it all start? What people created the first society that can claim to be called a civilization, and not just a tribe or culture? The most common answers to this question are Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. This was true until recently. But a few years ago, scientists found out that the predecessors of the great and well-known civilizations of antiquity lived in the valley of the Indus River. It was here that the Harappan civilization existed, information about which has to be collected literally bit by bit.
Big cities
The fact that in the valley of the Indus River there was an ancient civilization that rivaled the level of development with the Egyptian and Sumerian, scientists learned in the 1920s. Near the town of Harappa, the ruins of a city that was about five thousand years old were excavated. By the name of this place, the entire civilization was nicknamed the Harappan (however, the name Indus is also used along with this).
It did not become a colossal sensation then - everyone already understood that people in India lived and built cities a long time ago. The new civilization was put in an honorable third place, after the recognized ancient ones - Egypt and Mesopotamia. It seemed quite logical and fit into the existing scientific theories.
Then, from 1922 to 1931, the city of Mohenjo-Daro was excavated, which gave archaeologists much more food for thought. It was striking in its size - about 40 thousand people lived on an area of 300 hectares, which is a lot for such an antiquity.
Mohenjo-Daro also belonged to the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, but the level of the infrastructure discovered in it did not at all correspond to the ideas of Europeans about how people of the Bronze Age lived. Nearly the first public toilets and a city sewage system were found here.
Promotional video:
It turns out that the achievements that were commonly attributed to the highly developed Romans already existed in India thousands of years before the founding of the Eternal City!
But Mohenjo-Daro was not the largest city of the Indian civilization. In 1963, archaeologists excavated the Rakhigarchi settlement, which was 50 hectares larger. The thickness of the cultural layer here was 22 meters (in Mohenjo-Daro - 17 meters)! Apparently, life in it was very comfortable - the sewage system, lined with bricks, connected to the houses, wide convenient roads, workshops, altars, granaries …
The finds poured in as if from a cornucopia. By the 2000s, more than a thousand ancient cities of various sizes have been identified in the Indus Valley! Some of them are located in the territory of modern India, and some are in Pakistan. At the same time, only 96 of them have been excavated and studied so far! So it is possible that the basic information about the Harappan civilization, as well as the most sensational finds, still rest in the ground.
However, the most important discovery seems to have already been made. In the spring of 2016, an international group of scientists published an article on the results of radiocarbon analysis of pottery and bones found during the excavations of the Birran site. The dates obtained "failed" by eight thousand years ago. Thus, Birrana overnight became the oldest settlement in the whole of Hindustan, and the Harappan civilization became the first on the planet.
Antique communism
Of course, all the results will be rechecked more than once, and the dates will be refined. Therefore, many scientists are in no hurry to revise the usual "hierarchy" of ancient civilizations. But still, the chronology of the Harappan civilization is developing something like this.
About nine thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the Indus Valley mastered agriculture. After some time, the first animals were tamed, laying the foundations of cattle breeding. Having solved the problem of food, they began to multiply and multiply, and also gradually move from stone tools to metal ones. The settlements grew, large houses and outbuildings appeared in them. By the 4th millennium BC, full-fledged cities had already emerged.
It is impossible to establish whether there was a single system of government, or whether each city was "its own state". However, the same measuring stones found in different settlements prove that in India at the very dawn of civilization there was a single system of measures and weights. And this indicates a fairly high level of development.
The Harappan civilization was not isolated from the surrounding world - the finds of carnelian, turquoise, and also beads made of lapis lazuli indicate that there was quite a lively trade with Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians were already beginning to rule. In the Sumerian texts, a certain country of Melukhha is constantly mentioned - many researchers believe that this is precisely the Indus Valley.
In the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, it flourished. It was then that huge cities such as Mohenjo-Daro or Rakhigarchi appeared. The favorable climate and monsoon rains allowed farmers not to worry about the creation of irrigation systems, which were so important for Egypt and Mesopotamia. The earth provided food in abundance and without it. We can say that from about 2600 to 1900 BC, the Indus Valley was practically a paradise on earth, where you could live without caring about anything. This is what the representatives of the Harappan civilization did.
Scientists have long noticed that household utensils and children's toys prevail among the finds. But the weapons are surprisingly few. Nor do the cities give the impression of fortified citadels designed to withstand severe sieges. It seems that the Indus Valley, unlike the neighboring territories, has reigned peace for centuries. The archaeological evidence does not report anything about internecine wars or conquests of the Harappans.
The layout of the excavated cities suggests that most people lived in approximately equal conditions, and these conditions were very good. Every resident of the city could use public baths (which, it turns out, were also not invented by the Romans at all); every house had a water supply and sewerage system. It was a civilization of carefree, peaceful farmers and skilled artisans.
Letters or pictures?
The technical development of the Harappan civilization was quite impressive. They made smelting furnaces of an original design, from which items of copper, gold, lead and bronze came out. And these products were far from primitive. British archaeologist John Marshall, who discovered Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, described his impressions of the bronze statuette depicting a dancing girl: “When I first saw her, I found it hard to believe that she was prehistoric, she seemed to completely upset all the existing ideas about early art and culture. Modeling like this was unknown in the ancient world until the Hellenistic age of Greece, and so I thought that some mistake must have been made … Can we assume that Greek artists had people from the distant Indus culture in their teachers?"
Medicine was well developed. Including dentistry! Moreover, a study of skulls found in burials shows that the operation to drill teeth was clearly something commonplace. The Harappan civilization also achieved considerable success in shipbuilding, which made it possible to establish extensive contacts.
Surprisingly, with all this, the Indians may not have had a written language! Archaeologists have found many tablets and objects with some symbols engraved on them. The number of their types and types is in the hundreds. But all known inscriptions consist of only 4-5 characters. This makes it extremely difficult to decipher - there is no material for calculating the patterns. Even the great Yuri Knorozov, who in his time deciphered the Mayan writing, could not identify the Harappan writing system.
This allows some scientists to insist that all known icons are just symbolic drawings, pictograms. They did not manage to turn into full-fledged hieroglyphs, like the Egyptian ones.
Horned deity
Equally vague is the question of what the Indians believed in. Due to the lack of texts, scientists have to navigate by scattered drawings, the interpretation of which can be almost any.
John Marshall, relying on the materials of his excavations, believed that the most ancient civilization had a generalized cult of God-husband and Goddess-mother, as the incarnations of male and female principles. In addition, some plants and animals were deified.
One of the most interesting sources is the so-called Pashupati seal found at Mohenjo-Daro. It depicts a strange three-faced figure sitting in a lotus position. She has horns on her head (or a headdress with horns). John Marshall believed that this is a form of enslavement, which later came to be worshiped as one of the forms of Shiva - Pashupati or Rudra, the patron of pastoralism.
Many experts in Hinduism disagree with this. Historian John Key believes: “We have too little evidence to support this myth - Rudra, the Vedic deity, was actually associated with Shiva and is called Pashupati because of his association with cattle; but Rudra is unusual for asceticism and meditation, and he is associated with animals rather as sympathizing or empathizing with them. It would be more likely to assume that this is a headdress testifying to the cult of the bull."
Nevertheless, the mysterious figure evokes associations with some Hindu myths (for example, about Mahisha - a demon in the guise of a buffalo who almost defeated the gods and became the ruler of the Universe). Hinduism was clearly not born out of nowhere. He absorbed some myths of the Harappan civilization and used them as a basis for a new view of the world. Later, Buddhism, which emerged on the basis of Hinduism, absorbed some grains of this heritage. Probably, echoes of the oldest Indian religion can be found in all world religions that exist today. Only they already sound so weak that it is difficult to hear them.
Peaceful conquest
The Harappan civilization died out rapidly. The decline began around 1900 BC, and after two hundred years, most of the cities were already abandoned. Why this happened is the most important mystery. The obvious conclusion is that it's all about the invasion of a new people - the Indo-Aryans. Initially, the Dravids lived in Hindustan, who, obviously, created the Harappan civilization. But at the turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, newcomers from Central Asia began to move further and further south.
In addition, it was at the same time that the natural crisis fell. Due to the droughts, the rivers became shallow, and the marvelous climate, which for so many centuries allowed the Harappan farmers to worry about nothing, changed dramatically. The rains stopped as the direction of the monsoon winds changed. The fields are dry. There was not enough food. All that remained was either to adapt to new conditions, or to leave the inhabited cities in search of a better life.
It is impossible not to note one oddity - no traces of battles and battles between the Dravidians and Indo-Aryans have survived. It would be logical to assume that civilization weakened by climatic cataclysms will fall victim to energetic and less pampered conquerors. But the data of the excavations indicate that the cities were not taken by storm, and the bodies of the killed soldiers were not buried in hundreds in ditches. One gets the full impression that the inhabitants of the Indus Valley voluntarily ceded their homeland to the Indo-Aryans, which suddenly became so inhospitable. For some time, the peoples lived side by side (probably, then there was an active cultural exchange). And then the builders of the great cities went nowhere.
The paths of this migration can be traced back to the valley of another great river, the Ganges. There, small villages existed for some time. And then the Harappan civilization finally disappears, as if dissolving among the Indian rivers and forests that have been their home for so many centuries.
From now on, this land belonged to the Indo-Aryans, who began to build and create the India that we know. And the traces of the amazing Harappan civilization gradually disappeared from the eyes of people under the layers of a new culture, a new religion and new peoples. However, something still managed to reach us. You just need to be able to recognize and understand it.
Victor BANEV