The Harappan (Indus Valley) Civilisation

Prerequisites: Prehistory and the Indus Valley — overview · Stone Age and Chalcolithic Cultures

The Hook: A City That Banked Its Rain

The Core Concept

Discovery and naming

• 1921 — Daya Ram Sahni excavated Harappa on the Ravi (now in Punjab, Pakistan).
• 1922 — R.D. Banerji excavated Mohenjo-daro on the Indus (Larkana district, Sindh, Pakistan).
• 1924 — Sir John Marshall, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, announced the discovery of a new civilisation.

By archaeological convention a culture is named after its first excavated site — hence “Harappan”. Because many sites lie outside the Indus basin (along the Ghaggar-Hakra, in Gujarat, in the Ganga-Yamuna doab), “Harappan” is more precise than “Indus Valley”.

It was a Bronze Age civilisation: copper and bronze were used, iron was unknown.

Phases (approximate dates; scholars differ)

graph LR
    A[Neolithic Mehrgarh] --> B[Early Harappan regional cultures]
    B --> C[Mature Harappan cities]
    C --> D[Late Harappan de-urbanisation]
    D --> E[Chalcolithic villages and Vedic age]

Extent — the four corners

Major sites — what was found where

Town planning

• Two-part layout at most cities: a raised citadel (usually on the west) holding large public structures, and a larger lower town of houses. Dholavira is the exception with three divisions; Chanhudaro had no citadel.
• Streets in a broadly grid-like pattern, crossing roughly at right angles.
• Baked bricks of standard proportions — length, breadth and thickness in the ratio 4:2:1 — used across sites hundreds of kilometres apart.
• Drainage: house drains emptied into covered street drains with inspection holes — no other Bronze Age civilisation had so complete a system.
• Wells in many houses at Mohenjo-daro; houses opened onto side lanes rather than main streets.
• The Great Bath (Mohenjo-daro): a brick tank about 12 m by 7 m, made watertight with fine bricks, gypsum mortar and a layer of bitumen; steps at both ends. Most scholars see a ritual purpose.

Economy and trade

• Agriculture: wheat and barley were the main crops; also peas, sesame and mustard. Rice husk is reported from Lothal and Rangpur (Gujarat). The Harappans were among the earliest cotton growers — the Greeks later called cotton sindon.
• Animals: cattle (including the humped bull), sheep, goat, buffalo, dog. The elephant and rhinoceros were known. The horse is doubtful — no clear horse image appears on seals.
• Crafts: bead-making (carnelian, steatite, faience), shell-working, copper and bronze casting, pottery (red with black painted designs).
• Weights and measures: cubical chert weights following a binary series (1, 2, 4, 8, 16…) for smaller units and decimal multiples for larger ones; a graduated scale of shell or ivory has been found at Lothal and Mohenjo-daro.
• Trade: Mesopotamian texts mention Meluhha, which most scholars identify with the Harappan region, along with Dilmun (generally identified with Bahrain) and Magan (generally identified with Oman). Harappan seals and beads have been found in Mesopotamia. Raw materials were drawn from afar — lapis lazuli from Badakhshan (hence the outpost at Shortughai), copper from the Khetri belt of Rajasthan and from Oman.

Seals and the script

• Seals were mostly square and made of steatite; the one-horned “unicorn” is the most common motif, followed by animals such as the humped bull, elephant, tiger and rhinoceros.
• The script is undeciphered. It had around 400 signs (estimates vary), was generally written from right to left, and most inscriptions are very short. This is why the Harappan period is classed as protohistory — writing existed but cannot be read.

Religion and burial

• Terracotta female figurines, widely read as a Mother Goddess cult.
• The “Pashupati” seal from Mohenjo-daro: a figure seated in a yogic posture, surrounded by an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo, with two deer below. John Marshall called it a “proto-Shiva” — an interpretation still debated.
• Worship of trees (the pipal motif), animals and stone symbols; fire altars at Kalibangan and Lothal.
• No temple has been identified with certainty. Burials were mostly extended inhumations with pots and ornaments; Lothal has joint burials.

Art

• Bronze “dancing girl” (Mohenjo-daro) — made by the lost-wax (cire perdue) method, still used by bronze-casters today.
• Steatite “priest-king” bust (Mohenjo-daro) with a trefoil-patterned shawl.
• Red sandstone male torso (Harappa).
• Terracotta toys, including carts with solid wheels — a form close to the bullock cart still seen in rural India.

Polity

No palace, royal tomb or inscription naming a ruler has been found. The striking uniformity of bricks, weights and city plans suggests some form of central or shared authority, but whether it was a state, a group of city-states or a merchant-priestly elite remains an open question.

Decline (c. 1900 BCE onwards)

The current scholarly view: no single cause — a combination of climatic and river-system changes, with economic strain, led to gradual de-urbanisation rather than sudden collapse.

Memory Anchors

Sites and rivers: “Harappa Rests on the Ravi; Mohenjo Is on the Indus; Kalibangan Guards the Ghaggar; Lothal Bathes in the Bhogava; Ropar Sits on the Sutlej.”

Discoverers: “21 — Sahni, 22 — Banerji”: Harappa 1921 (Daya Ram Sahni), Mohenjo-daro 1922 (R.D. Banerji).

Harappan vs Vedic — the comparison UPSC loves

For Prelims

For Mains

• Dimensions: urban planning and civic sanitation; water management; standardisation as evidence of authority; long-distance trade; art and technology; continuity into later Indian culture; climate and collapse.
• Keywords: citadel and lower town, standardised bricks (4:2:1), covered drainage, lost-wax casting, Meluhha, de-urbanisation, protohistory.
• Value-addition: Dholavira’s reservoirs as an early model of rainwater harvesting in an arid zone; continuities such as the bullock cart, the pipal motif, bangles, fire altars and the lost-wax craft.

Common Traps

In the News

• July 2021 — Dholavira inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (India’s 40th).
• February 2020 — the Union Budget 2020-21 announced the development of five archaeological sites as “iconic sites”, including Rakhigarhi and Dholavira.
• September 2019 — a genome sequenced from a Rakhigarhi burial (published in the journal Cell) showed no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists.

Practice

Prelims

Mains

Quick Revision

Key Takeaways

Related Topics

• Stone Age and Chalcolithic Cultures
• Prehistory and the Indus Valley — quick revision
• Prehistory and the Indus Valley — practice questions
• Vedic and Later Vedic Age
• Indian Art and Architecture