Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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CHAPTER IV
INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION AND ITS
UNDECIPHERED SCRIPT
GENERAL SKETCH
TWENTY-FIVE years of excavation, exploration and study have added two thousand years to the history of India, an achievement which may be considered one of the most remarkable in archæology. The old assumption that the IndoAryans, about the middle of the second millenium B.C., entered a land of primitive savagery, and created all the civilization of any importance in India, has, in consequence, proved totally wrong.
Complete cities of the third millennium Bc. have been unearthed; regular and well-planned streets running from east to west and (from north to south, a magnificent drainage and water-system, a great public bath for ritual purposes?) with a swimming pool, an enormous warehouse, bear evidence to a careful system of town-planning. Spacious and well-equipped private houses built of baked bricks and supplied with wells, one or more bathrooms and other excellent sanitary arrangements; sculpture in the round in alabaster and marble, large numbers of clay and faience figurines, stone, copper and bronze tools, elaborately carved stone or ivory seals with mysterious inscriptions (see below), stamp seals or seal amulets of faience with animal figures in relief (generally a bull, a Thinoceros, or an elephant), finely wrought gold, silver and copper-gelt jewellery, etched carnelian beads, faience bangles and other personal ornaments, and all the other objects which were found associated with this culture, bear witness to a very high degree of civilization.
There are many other evidences of a flourishing economy based on agriculture (wheat, barley, the date palm), and on cattle-rearing and domestication of animals. The buffalo, ox, sheep, pig, dog, elephant, and camel are known, but not the cat and the horse. Commercial relations were carried on by land and sea; spinning and weaving and manufacture of cotton were practised.
EXPLORATION, EXCAVATION AND STUDIES
The prehistoric cultures of N.W. India may be divided (according to Stuart Piggott, 1946), into the urban civilization of the Harappa Culture, and the various peasant cultures (excavated mainly since 1931). All of them are still an enigma not only to the lay publie but also to the majority of the scholars concerned, because of insufficient excavation, the scarcity of analytical studies, and inadequate publication. Future excavations and studies should throw a flood of new light on the whole prehistoric civilization of India.
As yet, however, the Harappa Culture stands unparalleled, and it is with this civilization that we are concerned here. The excavated sites are few; the two great cities of Harappa (Punjab) and Mohenjo-daro (Sind), 450 odd miles away, to the south, and some smaller towns (e.g. Chanhu-daro, south of Mohenjo-daro) and villages in southern Sind. The mounds of Harappa were the first to be recognised by modern science, having been noted by Masson about 1820, and studied by Cunningham in 1853, while some seals were published in 1875 Recently, excavations were begun in Jarsuary, 1921, by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, and very important excavations from 1926 to 1934 were conducted by Madhu Sarup Vats.
