The spread of civilisations: the Indus Valley

The date of the petroglyphs in Eddekal have been given as far back as 6,000 BCE, and  links have been found, through imagery, to the Harrapan civilisation in the North which flourished between 3,000 and 1500 BCE. By 3,000 BCE the nomadic populations of the North had settled into a more agricultural way of life and trade links have been discovered between the South and the civilisations which were flourishing in the Indus Valley, in modern day Pakistan. In 1974, on an ancient trade route between Iran and India, a settlement was discovered which threw the time-line of the

development of civilisation into disarray. Mehrgah was a sophisticated settlement which dated back to about 7,000 BCE and which bore no discernible links to the civilisations which had grown up in the plains of the Middle East and which were usually credited with the beginnings of settled civilisation. Agriculture was well developed, there were craftsmen making statuettes as well as pottery and bricks, metal workers and also those in the business of healing the sick. By the time it was abandoned in about 2,600 BCE other, greater societies were beginning to emerge.
The city of Harappa was first described in the West by a British Army deserter, Charles Masson in 1828. He saw the remains of brick walls, the pattern of a city. The site suffered the ravages of railway building, and in the 1850s some objects which had been dug up during the building works were sent to General  Alexander Cunningham, head of the new Archaeological Survey. Cunningham was fascinated to see a new form of writing on some seals, a language which has still not been decoded. The society which produced these artefacts was not investigated for nearly a hundred years, in the 1920s. When it was, its sophistication was astonishing.

Dancing girl, Harrapa.
National Museum, New Delhi
 http://www.nationalmuseumindia.gov.in/

There is evidence of bath houses, domestic latrines and wells, and articles which show a high level of craftsmanship including seals of a complicated design and bearing the mysterious writing. The city of Mahendro-Daro in the same area exhibits similar layout and structure, indicating that the society was widespread. Its growth and continued prosperity was a result of trade, the links for which spread far and wide, to Central Asia, Oman and Messopotamia. The culture probably spread by boat along a lost river, the Saraswati, which possibly exited in the Ran of Kutch. There is little evidence of a ruler, or ruling class, although there is an organisation demonstrated in the grid arrangement of streets, regulations governing trade and, intriguingly, fire altars built along the lines of those seen in the South.
The major, and most controversial link with the civilisations in the North is that of language. Linguistic divisions are not ethnic divisions, although similarities amongst groups inevitably emerge. The speakers of the Dravidian language in the South of India are often seen as an ethnic group, with racial characteristics which link them to other Dravidian speakers in Pakistan and elsewhere. The existence of Balui Dravidian speakers In the North makes for a strong argument that the language was one common across all of India, perhaps originating from the Caucasus, but more likely being endemic to India. The divisions of today, country and continent, obscure the vision when the development of societies are compared. There have been theories that the Dravidian speakers, who were spread right across India, were conquered and eradicated by the Aryan invaders from central Asia. This is now generally accepted as untrue; the decline of the Harrapan

Remains of Harrapa

civilisation and rise of the migrant Aryans was probably because of a period of climatic instability. There is a myth in the ancient Mittani civilisation in Anatolia of a distant civilisation which was destroyed by Agni, the god of fire. Whatever happened, there is no evidence of widespread destruction in the remains of Harrapan and Mohendra-Daro, but rather of a slow decline. The Dravidian language persists in present day Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada. Genetic studies have shown that the population of South India has close links to the Mediterranean area, but that one tribe in Kerala, the Kadar, are related only to themselves. The Cheras described Dravidian beliefs and rituals which are still practiced by these tribes today.

It is evident that there was an active population here in very early times and there are indications of where they came from. The Human Genome Project, in its aim to map the ancestry of all human beings, has found some interesting results here. The tribal communities of Kerala originated in Africa, and have few links to other, later populations. One tribe, because of their tradition of intermarriage which has persisted over thousands of years, bear no relationship to any group, other than themselves. Small tribal groups are scattered throughout Wayanad, Pallakkad and the high ranges, preserving language and traditions which go back millennia.

Their religion and culture was well-developed and widespread. In around 1500 BCE an oral tradition of mantras and recitation grew up and resulted in the composition of the Rig Vedas. These are about a thousand hymns in praise of and in supplication to the gods, battle hymns and other, narrative sections. The Vedas have been found in places as far from India as Kurdistan. Originally they were mantras based on sounds and the meaning of sound, but as time went on they grew into a lasting mythology. They describe a bronze-using society, which dates them to before 1200 BCE when the use of iron arrived in India. The Vedas persisted in oral tradition until they were written down, in about 1400 CE. There were undoubtedly changes once they were committed to writing, but the traditions were strong, and the Vedas are still those recognisable as the oldest, recorded ritual.
The language of the later, written Vedas was Sanskrit, and again, similarities between Sanskrit and Western languages were seen to support the invasion theory. Remains of chariots and horses, unknown in India until the Aryans arrived, can be found in the Indus Valley, but how they got there over the high mountains of the Hindu Kush has never been established. However it happened, through invasion or acculturalisation through trade, the dominant culture of the Indus Valley civilisation, and its language, changed before the migration Eastwards.