Fantastic Metropolis

In 1921, British archaeologist Sir John Marshall (1876–1958) excavated Harappa, another city in the Indus civilization 640 kilometers (400 miles) northeast of Mohenjodaro, along the Indus River, leading to the rediscovery of Mohenjodaro the following year, in 1922. With these finds came the realization that a fabulous civilization had once flourished in India, extended further back in time than had been previously supposed. Settlements had emerged around the Indus in c. 4000 BC, with a fully fledged civilization developing in c. 2700–2600 BC.

—Austen Atkinson, Lost Civilizations

The ancient Indic civilization, commonly though misleadingly referred to as the Indus civilization, is now widely thought to have reached maturity during the period from 2700 BC to 1900 BC, generally called the Harappan Age. In 1931, Sir John Marshall had proposed the period from 3100 BC to 2750 BC as the golden age of Harappa. Thirty years later this date was modified by Sir Mortimer Wheeler to 2500 BC to 1500 BC. Other scholars have fixed the beginnings to 2800 BC and the terminal date to 1800 BC. More and more the consensus moves towards 1900 BC as the date for the conclusion of the flowering of the great cities. However, their beginnings are still shrouded in darkness.

—Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization

The Indus Civilization is a mystery to us: we cannot even decipher their written language. It began to unfold at some time six thousand years before now, and almost two thousand years before Christ was born it began unraveling utterly, ultimately to be lost until nearly two thousand years after the carpenter from Nazareth was beheld. Theories as to what happened to destabilize their sophisticated culture are as common as dirt, ranging from J. G. Negi’s proposal that the course of the Indus itself shifted as rainfall dropped and in so doing left Harappa and Mohenjodaro uninhabitable (including the disappearance of the Saraswati River entire, which left many satellite cities incapable of supporting themselves, perhaps putting pressure on the two larger outposts) while other theories mention earthquakes and warfare as possible causes. But these are at best plausible guesses. What is known is that, at its height, the Indus Civilization had at least 1500 settlements in an area that was over 680,000 square kilometers, and that the urban centers were for their time metropolis, with Harappa being thought to have held 40,000 people at its peak, while Mohenjodaro may have been even larger with nearly 100,000 citizens. Both cities were designed around a grid plan, showing architectural skill and planning, including water projects that would have been at home in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Roman aqueducts.

We don’t know much about the Indus Civilization in great part due to a scarcity of written information: we don’t have enough of their language to help us look for similarities in order to decipher its meaning. We don’t know what the purpose of the complicated diversion of the Indus’s waters was. We don’t know if these cities were ruled by kings or priests or oligarchs, we don’t even know who or what they worshipped. They seem to have been primarily peaceful, with their weapons expertly crafted in copper, for they had no access to tin for bronze. These weapons have been thought to have been originally intended for hunting, although made both elegantly and well. There are signs of a brisk trade with regions as far away as Egypt, and seals from Mohenjodaro have been found in the ancient city of Ur, in the heart of Mesopotamia. It’s been speculated that they had a pantheon of gods, including a mother goddess figure, various sacred animals, perhaps even a hero cult of some kind based around a horned figure linked to fig trees and a cult of physical prowess similar in vague outlines to that of Bilgames/Gilgamesh, but this is at best wild conjecture based on statuary and relief carvings unaccompanied by the meanings of their inscriptions. (I should mention that the trefoil was very common on Harappan art to the point where it appeared as far away as Egypt on trade goods.) What we know is this: a great civilization rose and fell over the course of two thousand years in the Indus Valley, its people dispersed or dead, and the grand city of Mohenjodaro fallen into the hands of squatters that could not, did not maintain it. As for Harappa, there was no gradual decline, no squatters: the people of the city vanished, seemingly in the very middle of its great glory, as though they had been removed suddenly or fled.