THE HARAPPA CULTURE AND THE ARYAN
The largest building so far excavated is one at Mohenjo Daro with a superficial area of 230 x 78 feet, which may have been a palace. At Harappa a great granary has been discovered to the north of the citadel; this was raised on a platform of some 150 x 200 feet in area to protect it from floods, and was divided into storage blocks of 50 x 20 feet each. It was doubtless used for storing the corn which was collected from the peasants as land tax, and we may assume that it had its counterpart at Mohenjo Daro. The main food crops were wheat, barley, peas, and sesamum, the latter still an important crop in India for its seeds, which provide edible oil. There is no clear evidence of the cultivation of rice, but the Harappa people grew and used cotton. It is not certain that irrigation was known, although this is possible. The main domestic animals known to modern India had already been tamedтАФhumped and humpless cattle, buffa┬м loes, goats, sheep, pigs, asses, dogs, and the domestic fowl. The elephant was well known, and may also have been tamed. The Harappa people may have known of the horse, since a few horseтАЩs teeth have been found in the lowest stratum of the Baluchistan site of Rana Ghundal, probably dating from several centuries earlier than the foundation of Harappa. This would indicate that horse-riding nomads found their way to N.-W. India in small numbers long before the Aryan invasion; but it is very doubtful whether the Harappa people possessed domestic horses themselves, and if they did they
must have been very rare animals. The bullock was probably the usual beast of burden.
On the basis of this thriving agricultural economy the Harappa people built their rather unimaginative but comfortable civilization. Their bourgeoisie had pleasant houses, and even their workmen, who may have been bondmen or slaves, had the comparative luxury of two-roomed brick-built cottages. Evidently a well organized com┬м merce made these things possible. The cities undoubtedly traded with the village cultures of Baluchistan, where outposts of the Harappa culture have been traced, but many of their metals and semi-precious stones came from much longer distances. From Saurashtra and the Deccan they obtained conch shell, which they used freely in decoration, and several types of stone. Silver, turquoise and lapis lazuli were imported from Persia and Afghanistan. Their copper came either from Rajasthan or from Persia, while jadeite was probably obtained from Tibet or Central Asia.
Whether by sea or land, the products of the Indus reached Mesopo┬м tamia, for a number of typical Indus seals and a few other objects from the Indus Valley have been found in Sumer at levels dating between about 2300 and 2000 b.c., and some authorities believe that the land of Melukka, reached by sea from Sumer, and referred to in Sumerian documents, was the Indus Valley. Evidence of Sumerian exports to India is very scant and uncertain, and we must assume that they were mainly precious metals and raw materials. The finding of Indus seals suggests that merchants from India actually resided in Mesopotamia; their chief merchandise was probably cotton, which has always been one of IndiaтАЩs staple exports, and which is known to have been used in later Babylonia. The recently excavated site at Lothal in Gujarat has revealed harbour works, and the Harappa people may have been more nautically inclined than was formerly supposed. No doubt from their port of Lothal they were in touch with places farther south, and it is possibly thus that certain distinctive features of the Harappan culture penetrated to South India.
It seems that every merchant or mercantile family had a seal, bearing an emblem, often of a religious character, and a name or brief inscription in the tantalizingly indecipherable script. The stand┬м ard Harappa seal was a square or oblong plaque, usually made of the soft stone called steatite, which was delicately engraved and hardened by heating (pi. IX). The Mesopotamian civilizations employed cylinder seals, which were rolled on clay tablets, leaving an impressed band bearing the device and inscription of the seal; one or two such seals have been found in Mohenjo Daro, but with devices of the Harappa type. Over 2,000 seals have been discovered in the Indus cities, and it would seem that every important citizen possessed one. Their primary purpose was probably to mark the ownership of property, but they doubtless also served as amulets, and were regularly carried on the persons of their owners. Generally they depict animals, such as the bull, buffalo, goat, tiger and elephant, or what appear to be scenes from religious legend. Their brief inscriptions, never of more than twenty symbols and usually of not more than ten, are the only significant examples of the Harappa script to have survived.
This script had some 270 characters, which were evidently picto- graphic in origin, but which had an ideographic or syllabic character. It may have been inspired by the earliest Sumerian script, which probably antedates it slightly, but it bears little resemblance to any of the scripts of the ancient Middle East, though attempts have been made to connect it with one or other of them. The most striking similarities are with the symbols used until comparatively recent times by the natives of Easter Island, in the eastern Pacific,3 but the distance in space and time between the two cultures is so great that there is scarcely any possibility of contact or influence. We do not know what writing media were used, though it has been suggested that a small pot found at the lesser site of Chanhu Daro is an inkwell. Certainly the Harappans did not inscribe their documents on clay tablets, or some of these would have been found in the remains of their cities.
They were not on the whole an artistic people. No doubt they had a literature, with religious epics similar to those of Sumer and Baby┬м lon, but these are forever lost to us. The inner walls of their houses were coated with mud plaster, but if any paintings were made on these walls all trace of them has vanished. The outer walls, facing the streets, were apparently of plain brick. Architecture was aus┬м terely utilitarian, a few examples of simple decorative brickwork being the only ornamentation so far discovered. No trace of monu┬м mental sculpture has been found anywhere in the remains, and if any of the larger buildings were temples they contained no large icons, unless these were made of wood or other perishable material.
But if the Harappa folk could not produce works of art on a large scale they excelled in those of small compass. Their most notable artistic achievement was perhaps in their seal engravings, especially those of animals, which they delineated with powerful realism and evident affection. The great urus bull with its many dewlaps, the rhinoceros with knobbly armoured hide, the tiger roaring fiercely, and the many other animals (pi. IX) are the work of craftsmen who studied their subjects and loved them.