Class 6 Social Science Chapter 6: The Beginnings of Indian Civilisation

Where the story picks up

The last chapter left human groups just settling down. They had begun to farm, to raise buildings, to draw metal out of rock and to carry goods from place to place. None of that yet made a city. What it did was gather enough people in one spot, with enough food to spare, for something larger to become possible. That larger thing is what historians call a civilisation.

What the word civilisation means

The word marks a stage, not a place. A society is called a civilisation once it has grown too complex to run on habit. There are too many mouths to feed by luck. There are too many crafts to keep track of, and too much coming and going to leave unrecorded. Historians test for this with a list of seven features. A society showing all seven has crossed the line.

Somebody has to be in charge

The first feature is government and administration. Once thousands of people live side by side, questions pile up. Where do the wells go? Who clears the drains? How is the grain stored? What happens when two families quarrel over a wall? None of that arranges itself. A village can manage by agreement among a few elders. A city cannot.

Living in cities

The second is urbanism: cities appearing, and being run. This is more than a crowd of houses. It means streets laid out before the houses go up, a supply of clean water reaching people, and dirty water carried away again. Drainage matters most of all, because a settlement that cannot remove its waste soon sickens and empties.

Many crafts, many hands

Third comes a range of crafts. Somebody must fetch the stone and the metal ore; somebody must turn them into beads, bangles, pots, chisels and ploughs. Both halves count, the getting of the raw material and the making of the finished thing. Work like this fills a whole day, which means the craftsman eats from other people's fields.

Trade, near and far

Fourth is trade, of two sorts. Internal trade moves goods between the lanes of one city, or between a city and the villages around it. External trade reaches distant regions and even other lands. The second kind tells us more, because it means the society has something worth wanting and can carry it a long way.

Writing things down

Fifth, some form of writing. Its first use is dull and vital: keeping records. How much grain came in, whose bale this is, what is still owed. Memory cannot hold a city's accounts. Once marks can be made and read again later, they also carry messages, names and ideas beyond the reach of a spoken word.

Ideas people wanted to keep

Sixth are cultural ideas, meaning what a society thought about life and the world. These reach us through art, through the shapes of its buildings, through literature, through stories passed by mouth for generations, and through customs still practised today. A figurine or a doorway is evidence of thought, not only of skill.

Farming that feeds a city

Seventh, and underneath all the rest, a productive agriculture. The fields must yield more than the farmers themselves eat, because that surplus is what feeds the administrator, the bead-driller, the trader and the record-keeper. Take the surplus away and every one of them goes back to farming. This is why many historians call it the most fundamental feature of the seven.

All seven, or none

The features do not stand in a row; they hold each other up. Writing serves administration. Administration organises the water that lets a city exist at all. Crafts supply what trade carries. Trade brings in the copper the craftsman needs. Which is why a society rarely picks them up one at a time. They tend to arrive together, or not at all.

Civilisation did not begin everywhere at once

Look around the world today and all seven features seem ordinary. They were not always. Civilisation started at different moments in different regions. In Mesopotamia, the land of modern Iraq and Syria, it began roughly 6,000 years ago. Ancient Egypt followed a few centuries later. Humanity would not stand where it does without what those societies worked out.

Our own story begins in the northwest

For the Subcontinent, the place to look is the northwest. There, from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, stood the oldest civilisation of India and one of the oldest anywhere in the world. Its settlements spread well beyond the valley of the Indus itself, which is why the older name Indus Valley civilisation has been set aside. This is called the First Urbanisation of India.

One civilisation, four names

You will meet it under several names, and all of them mean the same thing. Harappan comes from Harappa, the first of its cities to be dug up, which is also why its people are called Harappans. Indus names one river. Indus-Sarasvatī and Sindhu-Sarasvatī name two, because its settlements crowded along both of them.

Scenario:

A class is asked what makes a society a civilisation. The first answers name single inventions: writing, the wheel, metal. Their teacher asks whether a group with writing and nothing else would qualify. The class decides it would not. They build a list of features instead and find that several appear together: cities, government and administration, trade, crafts, and a system of writing. Meera asks why one invention is not enough. The class works it out. A large busy society cannot run by agreement alone, so the features arrive together because each one is needed to support the rest.

Analysis:

Civilisation is not a single invention but a set of features that depend on one another. That is why no one item on the list is sufficient by itself.

Activity:

List five features of a civilisation. For each, write one thing that would fail if it were missing.

Title:

Find the seven features in your own town

What You Notice:

Six of the seven turn up in minutes, and agriculture is usually the awkward one, because it happens somewhere you cannot see from your street. That is exactly the point of the seventh feature: the fields that feed a town are out of sight, yet nothing in the town works without them.

Safety:

Stay with an adult, keep to footpaths, and do not lean over or reach into any open drain.

Mesopotamia is not a country you can find on a modern map. The name belongs to a region that today lies mostly in Iraq and Syria.

The Harappans are named after a single site. Harappa, in the Punjab of present-day Pakistan, was the first city of the civilisation to be excavated, in the 1920s.

Every one of the seven features is so ordinary in the world today that it takes an effort to remember that each one had to be invented somewhere.

The seven features of a civilisation — GUCTWIF: Govern, Urban, Craft, Trade, Write, Ideas, Food — Seven awkward letters, but they run in a useful order. Food sits last in the phrase and first in importance, because without a surplus of it nobody is free to do the other six.

Which came first in the world — Mesopotamia, then Egypt, then us — Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago, Egypt a few centuries behind it, and the Indus-Sarasvatī cities from about 2600 BCE. Three starts, three different dates.

Two river systems, one region

The story begins in the northwest of the Subcontinent. Two river systems watered it. The first was the Indus, also called the Sindhu, with its five main tributaries. It ran through the plains of Punjab and Sindh. The second was the Sarasvatī, a little further east. Punjab today is divided between India and Pakistan, and Sindh lies in Pakistan.

Why the plains suited farming

Rivers do two things for the land beside them. They water it, and they enrich the soil around them. The plains of Punjab and Sindh got both. That made them fertile, and fertile land favours agriculture. Farming in turn means settled villages rather than wandering groups. So the rivers decided where people stayed.

What a tributary is

A tributary empties into a bigger river, or into a lake. It does not reach the sea on its own. The Ganga has the Yamuna for a tributary. The Indus had five main ones across the Punjab plains. Several important cities grew along those rivers rather than along the Indus itself.

The river that is no longer there

A few millenniums ago another river ran a little east of the Indus. This was the Sarasvatī. It came down from the foothills of the Himalayas. Its course crossed Haryana and Punjab, and reached into parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Today it does not flow all year. It has become seasonal, filling only during the rains.

Ghaggar and Hakra

The Sarasvatī has newer names. In India the riverbed is called the Ghaggar. In Pakistan the same bed is called the Hakra. Books often join the two and write Ghaggar-Hakra River. All three names point to one river. Knowing this saves confusion when you meet the names on different maps.

The Sarasvatī in the Rig Veda

The Sarasvatī is first named in the Rig Veda, an ancient collection of prayers. There it is honoured in two ways at once. It is a goddess, and it is a river running from the mountain down to the sea. Later texts tell a different story. In them the river dries up and finally disappears altogether.

From village to town to city

The change was gradual, and it went in two steps. Villages across this whole region grew into towns. Then trade and other exchanges increased, and the towns grew further into cities. That second step happened around 2600 BCE. Nothing about it was sudden, but by the end the region had planned cities where it had once had farmsteads.

The first two cities found

Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were the earliest pair of its cities to be picked out. Both now lie in Pakistan. Their identification goes back to the 1920s, over a century ago. Because Harappa was dug up first, the whole civilisation took its name, and its people became the Harappans.

Why the name Indus Valley stuck

After those two cities, several more sites turned up. All of them were in the plains of the Indus. So the civilisation was first called the Indus Valley civilisation, and the name seemed fair enough at the time. Later discoveries stretched far beyond that valley, and the word Valley became misleading. It has since been dropped.

The cities found later

Other major cities came to light afterwards. Dholavira lies in Gujarat, Rakhigarhi in Haryana, and Ganweriwala in the Cholistan desert of Pakistan. Beside these are hundreds of smaller sites. Lothal in Gujarat is one of them. Some of these have been excavated and some have not, and new discoveries are still being made.

The crowded Sarasvatī basin

Look at where the later finds sit and something stands out. The Sarasvatī basin holds two of the major cities, Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala. It also holds several smaller sites, such as Farmana in Haryana and Kalibangan in Rajasthan. Add the towns of Bhirrana and Banawali, both in Haryana, and the density of sites in that one basin is striking.

Why the map matters

A map of the main settlements shows more than dots. It shows mountain ranges forming natural boundaries around the region. It shows settlement following water, not roads. Above all it shows sites along two river systems, not one. That single fact is why the names Indus-Sarasvatī and Sindhu-Sarasvatī are now preferred.

Cities and modern states

It is worth fixing five pairs in your memory. Dholavira is in Gujarat and Rakhigarhi in Haryana. Kalibangan is in Rajasthan. Harappa is in the Punjab of present-day Pakistan, and Mohenjo-daro is in Sindh. Three of the five lie in India today and two in Pakistan, and none of that mattered when they were built.

Scenario:

Two students are given the same blank map of the northwest. Meera marks Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, joins them with the line of the Indus, and writes Indus Valley civilisation across the top. Arjun marks the same two cities, then adds Rakhigarhi in Haryana, Kalibangan in Rajasthan and Ganweriwala in the Cholistan desert. He draws a second, broken line running south-east of the Indus and labels it Sarasvati. Across the top he writes Indus-Sarasvati civilisation. Their teacher says both maps are accurate as far as they go, but only one of the titles can still be used in a textbook today.

Analysis:

Meera's map is not wrong about anything she has drawn. It is the map the first archaeologists could have drawn in the 1920s, when only the Indus plains had yielded sites. Her title matches her evidence. Arjun's map carries later evidence, and that evidence breaks her title. Once two major cities are known in a second river basin, a name built on one valley no longer covers the ground. This is how naming in history works: the name follows the evidence, and when the evidence widens, the name has to change or be dropped.

Activity:

Take a blank outline of northwest India and Pakistan. Mark the five cities of the map exercise, then shade the two river basins in two colours and count how many of your dots fall in each.

The Sarasvatī is not only a lost river. It is worshipped in the Rig Veda both as a goddess and as a river running from the mountains to the sea.

New Harappan sites are still being found. Hundreds of small ones are known, and excavation continues in India and Pakistan today.

Mountain ranges form natural boundaries around this region. On a map of the sites, the brown ranges mark where settlement stops.

Cities and their modern states — Dholavira-Gujarat, Rakhigarhi-Haryana, Kalibangan-Rajasthan — Three pairs worth learning by heart. Add Harappa in Punjab and Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, both across the border in Pakistan, and you have the five in the map exercise.

Two names for one lost river — Ghaggar in India, Hakra in Pakistan — The same seasonal riverbed keeps different names on either side of the border. Put together, they give the hyphenated name Ghaggar-Hakra that you will meet in books.

Cities built to a plan

The larger Harappan cities were not allowed to grow as they pleased. They were built according to precise plans. That is an unusual thing to be able to say about a city so old. It means somebody decided the shape of the place before the houses went up, and that somebody had the authority to hold builders to it.

Wide streets, and their direction

The streets were wide. They were also often oriented to the cardinal directions, which means they ran roughly north to south and east to west. A street laid that way is not an accident. Getting it right needs a method of finding direction, and a plan agreed in advance by everyone building along it.

Walls around the city

Most cities seem to have been surrounded by fortifications. A fortification is a massive wall built round a settlement, generally to protect it. Building one takes an enormous amount of labour and brick. That tells us two things: the city had something worth defending, and it could organise very large numbers of workers.

Upper town and lower town

Inside the walls, most cities had two distinct parts. Archaeologists call them the upper town and the lower town. The local elite probably lived in the upper town, meaning the rulers, officials and administrators. The common people lived in the lower town. The division is one of the clearest signs that these cities were governed.

Dholavira, the exception

Dholavira, in Gujarat, does not fit the usual pattern. It had three distinct zones rather than two. Its buildings are unusual in another way as well. In most Harappan cities the walls were of brick, but at Dholavira most buildings were founded on stone. Local materials shaped local practice.

Buildings for everyone's use

Not every large building was a home. Some seem to have been meant for collective purposes. Warehouses are one example: places where goods waiting to be transported were stored. A warehouse implies more than storage. It implies goods arriving, goods leaving, and somebody keeping track of which is which.

Houses big and small, built alike

Individual houses lined the streets and the smaller lanes. They came in various sizes, as houses always do. What is striking is something else. The quality of construction was the same for small houses and big ones. All these buildings were generally made of bricks. A poorer family had less room, but not a worse-built home.

The Great Bath

The most famous structure of all is the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro. It is a small tank, but an elaborate one. Around it stood small rooms, and one of those rooms contained a well. In one corner of the tank was a drain. That drain let the water be emptied from time to time and the tank refilled with fresh water.

Built to hold water

A tank is only useful if the water stays in it. The Harappans took care over this. The bricks were laid out carefully, and over them was applied a waterproofing material: natural bitumen, which is a form of tar. Without that layer the water would have seeped away through the brickwork within days.

What was it for?

The purpose of some Harappan structures is still debated, and the Great Bath is the best example. Archaeologists have proposed three possibilities. It might have been a public bath. It might have been a bath reserved for the royal family. Or it might have been a tank used for religious rituals.

Why one answer is ruled out

The public bath is now ruled out, and the reason is a detail from elsewhere in the city. Most houses at Mohenjo-daro had individual bathrooms. People who can bathe at home do not need a small shared tank. The other two possibilities remain open, because there is no inscription, no text and no traveller's account to settle the matter.

Drains below the streets

The Harappans gave much importance to water management and cleanliness. Houses often had separate areas for bathing. These were connected to a larger network of drains. Those drains generally ran below the streets, out of the way, and carried the waste water off. Covered drainage on that scale is the sign of a city being run, not merely lived in.

Where the water came from

Supply differed from place to place. At Mohenjo-daro people drew water from hundreds of wells made of bricks. Elsewhere it came from ponds, from nearby streams, or from reservoirs made by people. Dholavira lies in the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, which is dry country, and its answer was the most ambitious of all.

The reservoirs of Dholavira

At Dholavira at least six large reservoirs were built. Some were made with stones and some were cut into the rock itself. The largest measures 33 metres in length. Most of them were connected through underground drains, so water could be harvested and distributed efficiently. Reservoirs also need cleaning from time to time, which means somebody was responsible for maintaining them.

Scenario:

A class studies a plan of a Harappan city and notices the streets meet at right angles and run along the cardinal directions. Arjun says that is a coincidence. Their teacher asks how many streets would have to line up before coincidence became unlikely. The class counts them on the plan and finds the pattern holds across the whole city. Then they ask what lining streets up with the directions requires. Somebody had to find north before building began, and had to hold the line across a large site. The class concludes the grid is evidence of planning, because accident does not survive at that scale.

Analysis:

One straight street means nothing and a whole city of them means a decision. Orienting to the cardinal directions needs north found before the first wall.

Activity:

Find north where you live using the Sun or a compass. Check whether your street follows it, and write what you find.

Title:

Measure a Dholavira reservoir

What You Notice:

On paper 33 metres is only a number. Walked out on the ground it is a long way, and the reservoir was one of at least six. Most people find the last step the interesting one: you cannot get near an answer without assuming something about how the work was organised, which is exactly the problem archaeologists face.

Safety:

Keep clear of traffic and of any open drain or pit while measuring, and let an adult hold the far end of the tape.

The largest reservoir at Dholavira measures 33 metres in length. That is longer than most school corridors you could walk down.

At Dholavira most reservoirs were connected by underground drains, so water could be harvested and moved about efficiently.

For the Great Bath there is no inscription, no text and no traveller's account. Everything proposed about it rests on the structure itself.

The two towns — Upper for the few, lower for the many — The upper town is thought to have housed the elite, and the lower town the common people. Dholavira breaks the pattern with three zones rather than two.

Why the public bath is ruled out — Own bathroom, no need to share — Most houses at Mohenjo-daro had individual bathrooms. A city where everybody can bathe at home does not need one small tank as a public bath.

Why settlements sat beside rivers

The Harappans placed many of their settlements along the banks of rivers, large or small. The reason is practical, and it has two parts. Water was close at hand. Beyond that, rivers enrich the soil around them, which matters for farming. A site by a river therefore solved two problems at once, and so the map of settlements follows the water.

What they grew

Their fields carried more than one kind of crop. They grew cereals: barley, wheat, some millets, and sometimes rice. Beside these they grew pulses, the group that includes beans, peas and lentils. They also grew a variety of vegetables. A diet built on cereals and pulses together is a well-balanced one, and it is what an Indian kitchen still rests on.

Cotton, a first for Eurasia

One crop deserves its own mention. The Harappans were the first people in Eurasia to grow cotton. They did not merely grow it, either. They wove it into cloth. That is a long chain of skills: raising the plant, separating the fibre, spinning it into thread, and working the thread on a loom.

Tools that outlasted them

The Harappans made their own farming tools. Among them was the plough, and a small clay model of one was found at Banawali in Haryana. The striking thing is what happened next. Some of these tools are of a kind still used by farmers today. A design that good needs no replacing, even after four thousand years.

Villages fed the cities

This intense agricultural activity was not managed from the cities. It was managed by hundreds of small rural sites, which is to say villages. Their produce then had to travel. Then as now, a city could survive only if enough food from the rural areas reached it every single day. Miss a few days and a city is in trouble.

Animals and fish

Farming was not their only source of food. The Harappans domesticated a number of animals for meat. They also fished, both in the rivers and in the sea. We know this from the evidence in the ground: large numbers of animal bones and fish bones turn up during excavations. Bones are unglamorous finds, and very informative ones.

What the pots revealed

Clay pots can be examined scientifically, and Harappan pots have been. Some results were expected, such as traces of dairy products. Others were surprises. The pots also held remains of turmeric, ginger and banana. Put the findings together and one conclusion follows plainly: the Harappan diet was quite diverse.

Trade near and far

The Harappans were engaged in active trade. Some of it stayed inside their own civilisation, between cities that were near neighbours or a long way apart. But they also traded with other civilisations and cultures, both within India and outside it. Trade on that scale is not occasional. It is a regular part of how the society worked.

What they sent out

We know a fair amount about their exports. They sent out ornaments, timber and some objects of daily use. Gold and cotton probably went too, and possibly some food items. The most favoured ornaments were beads of carnelian, a reddish semiprecious stone found mostly in Gujarat. Beads of it have been excavated as far away as Susa, in present-day Iran.

Skilled hands behind the goods

These exports were not simple products. Drilling a carnelian bead so that a string can pass through it takes a special technique, and the Harappan craftspeople developed one. They decorated the beads in various ways too. They also worked conch shells into beautiful bangles. Shell is a hard material, so this needed sophisticated methods as well.

What came in

What the Harappans took in exchange is less clear. Copper was probably among it, because the metal was not common in their own region. Copper mattered because of what could be done with it. It is a soft metal on its own. Add tin to it and the result is bronze, which is harder.

Bronze, and what it was for

The Harappans mastered the working of copper, and then of bronze. Bronze served for tools, where hardness is the whole point. It served for pots and pans. It also served for some figurines, which is a different kind of use altogether. One metal, and three sorts of object: the practical, the domestic and the decorative.

Routes by land, river and sea

Goods travelled three ways. Land routes served the shorter journeys, rivers carried traffic further, and the sea reached the most distant destinations. That sea trade is the first intensive maritime activity in India. Quite a few Harappan settlements stood in the coastal regions of Gujarat and Sindh, and a Harappan ivory comb has been found on the coast of Oman.

The dockyard at Lothal

Lothal, in Gujarat, was a small settlement with a surprisingly huge basin. End to end it runs rather longer than two football grounds laid together. Nobody digs a basin that size for a village pond. It must have been a dockyard, which is a structure for receiving and sending off boats so that goods can travel further.

The seals

Trade on this scale needs traders to identify their goods, and each other. That seems to be the chief purpose of the thousands of small seals excavated from many settlements. They are generally of steatite, a soft stone hardened by heating, and measure only a few centimetres. Most carry an animal figure with a few signs above it.

What the seals still will not tell us

Those signs belong to a writing system. That system has not been deciphered. The symbolic meaning of the animal figures on the seals is not understood either. So we are left with a strange situation: thousands of objects, clearly connected with trade, whose actual message nobody can read.

Scenario:

Lothal, in Gujarat, is a small settlement. Beside it lies a basin so large that it runs rather longer than two football grounds laid end to end. When the excavation was first reported, two explanations were offered. One suggested a reservoir for storing water, on the pattern of Dholavira's tanks further along the same coast. The other suggested something quite different: a dockyard, a structure built to receive and send off boats so goods could travel further. Nothing was written down at Lothal to settle the question. The evidence available is the basin, the size of the settlement, where the settlement stands, and the Harappan objects that turn up in distant lands.

Analysis:

The dockyard explanation is the one now accepted, and the reasoning runs through each piece of evidence. Size first: a basin longer than two football grounds is far beyond the water needs of a small settlement, and a reservoir is normally built to a community's scale. Position next: Lothal lies in the coastal region of Gujarat, and quite a few Harappan settlements stood on those coasts. Then the wider picture: Harappan goods travelled by sea to distant destinations, which is India's first intensive maritime activity. A structure for receiving and sending boats fits a coastal settlement engaged in that trade. The reservoir explanation fits only the basin, and not the rest.

Activity:

Find the length of a football ground, double it, and mark that distance out along a road or field with your teacher. Then write down three things you would expect to find beside a basin that long if it really were a dockyard.

On the coast of Oman an ivory comb of Harappan make, some 7 cm long, has come to light. Carnelian beads of the same origin were dug up far away at Susa, in what is now Iran.

The basin at Lothal is longer than two football grounds laid end to end, in a settlement that was otherwise small.

Some Harappan farming tools, including the plough, are of a kind still used by farmers today.

Copper into bronze — Copper is soft, add tin and it toughens — Copper alone bends too easily for heavy work. Tin mixed into it gives bronze, which holds an edge, so tools, vessels and figurines could be made of it.

Three ways the goods moved — Land, river, sea, in that order of distance — Short journeys went overland, longer ones followed the rivers, and the most distant destinations were reached by sea. That sea trade is the first intensive maritime activity in India.

What survives

Archaeologists have unearthed a great many objects made and used by Harappans. They are usually sorted into two broad groups. The first is objects of daily use, the ordinary equipment of living. The second is cultural and symbolic objects, which carry meaning rather than serve a task. Both groups matter, and the first is often the more informative.

Objects of daily use

The list is homely. A bronze mirror and a terracotta pot, both from Dholavira. A bronze chisel, also from Dholavira. Terracotta is simply baked clay, and it survives well in the ground. None of these would draw a crowd in a museum. Each tells us plainly how a Harappan household actually managed from day to day.

Weights, and what they imply

Among the finds from Dholavira are a few stone weights. A weight is a small thing with a large meaning. It shows that quantities were not guessed at but measured, and measured against an agreed standard. For a society trading over long distances, that is essential. A trader far from home must be able to prove how much he is selling.

Games, toys and a whistle

The Harappans played. A gamesboard about 25 centimetres long, engraved on stone, was found at Dholavira. A terracotta whistle about 4 centimetres long came from Karanpura in Rajasthan. They designed many games and toys, and these kept adults amused as well as children. It is a useful corrective to picturing an ancient city as a solemn place.

Figures we cannot name

The symbolic objects include a statuette often called the 'Priest King'. That name needs care. It was given by modern scholars, and it is not known whose figure this actually was. The object is real and the title is a guess. Keeping the two apart is part of studying history honestly.

The seals with meaning

Two seals stand out among the symbolic finds. One shows a swastika. The other depicts a deity with three faces, sitting on a platform above the ground, with powerful animals ranged around. That second one is known as the Pashupati Seal. Like the writing on the trading seals, what these images meant to the people who cut them is not understood.

The Dancing Girl

The best known Harappan figurine is a small bronze from Mohenjo-daro, called the 'Dancing Girl'. She stands only 10.8 centimetres high. What strikes most people first is her attitude, which seems confident and at ease. What rewards a second look is her arms. Her bangles cover an entire arm, from wrist to shoulder.

A practice that never went away

Those bangles are worth pausing over. Wearing them to cover a whole arm is a practice still visible today in parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Bangles worn in the same manner can be spotted elsewhere in this chapter too. Something in ordinary life has carried on for four thousand years without a break.

A story on a pot

One find from Lothal is a design painted on a pot. It appears to set out a story, and a familiar one. A thirsty crow hits on a way to reach water lying well down inside a pot. If the reading is right, a tale still told to children today was already being told then.

Around 1900 BCE, the cities empty

Around 1900 BCE this Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation began to fall apart, for all its achievements. The cities were abandoned one by one. Any inhabitants who stayed took up a rural way of living, suited to conditions that had altered. The earlier government or administration appears to have gone. Gradually the Harappans scattered over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small rural settlements.

Why they turned to villages

This retreat to the countryside was not a failure of nerve. Village life puts food and water within easier reach than town life does, because a village grows its own food. A city does not. Cities leaned on villages for food, and in places for water, exactly as they do now. When the supply falters, the city is the part that cannot hold.

The explanation that was dropped

Long ago it was thought that warfare or invasions had destroyed the cities. That explanation has been dropped, and for a clear reason: no trace of warfare or of an invasion has ever been found. Nothing suggests they kept an army, nor any weapon built for war. On what evidence we have, this was a relatively peaceful civilisation.

The two causes now agreed

Two factors are currently agreed upon. The first is a climatic change that affected much of the world before 1900 BCE, bringing reduced rainfall and a drier phase. That would have made agriculture more difficult, and could have cut the food supply to the cities. The second is the Sarasvatī drying up in its central basin.

When a river fails

The second factor had a sharp effect. Cities standing along the Sarasvatī's central basin, such as Kalibangan and Banawali, were abandoned suddenly. There could well have been other factors besides these two. What both remind us of is uncomfortable and current: how much any society depends on its climate and its environment for well-being.

An end, or a new beginning

The cities disappeared, and that is where many accounts stop. It is not the whole story. A great deal of Harappan culture and skill outlasted the cities. It carried over into the phase of Indian civilisation that followed, which later chapters take up. The cities ended. What they had worked out did not.

Scenario:

A class is shown Harappan finds and asked to sort them into everyday objects and symbolic ones. Pots, chisels and mirrors go in the first group easily. Then the stone weights cause a pause. Nita calls them ordinary. Their teacher asks what a weight is for, and the class answers that it measures. Measuring means somebody was checking an agreed amount, which means trade with rules rather than simple exchange. The weights stay in the everyday group and the class adds a note beside them. An ordinary object can be the strongest evidence, because a weight only makes sense where people had agreed what an amount was.

Analysis:

The weights look like the dullest find and carry the most information. They imply an agreed standard, and a standard implies rules that outlast any one trade.

Activity:

Find a measuring object in your home. Write what it would tell somebody about your society if they found only that.

Title:

What would a future archaeologist make of your room?

What You Notice:

The dull column usually wins. A cup, a comb or a ruler explains itself, while a photograph, a badge or a trophy means very little unless somebody explains it. That is the position archaeologists are in with the Harappans: the stone weights are legible and the Pashupati Seal is not.

The 'Dancing Girl' from Mohenjo-daro is a bronze figurine only 10.8 cm high, and her bangles cover an entire arm.

A pot from Lothal carries a design that appears to set out the tale of the thirsty crow. He hits on a way to reach water lying well down inside a pot.

A terracotta whistle from Karanpura in Rajasthan is about 4 cm long. The Harappans made games and toys for adults as well as children.

The two agreed causes of decline — Less rain, and a lost river — A drier climate from before 1900 BCE made agriculture harder everywhere. Then the Sarasvatī dried up in its central basin, which emptied the cities standing along it.

Why warfare was dropped — No army, no weapons, no trace — Invasion was once the favoured explanation. But nothing suggests they maintained an army or held weapons built for war, and no trace of fighting has been found.