Ancient Bharat

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The Discovery

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It was in 1920s, when the large mounds of Harappa were exposed to the New World. The mounds had long been known as concealing the ruins of an old town. What was not understood was that these hidden ruins represented one of the most advanced and important cities of antiquity. This was the beginning of urbanism in the
subcontinent of Bharat.There is evidence of various communities living together within large cities, lifted high above the flood plain. Even though in 1826 Charles Masson visited this site located on the river Raavi, its true importance was not understood until 1921, when the Indian archeologist Daya Rama Sahani, put forward his view that this might belong to the pre-Mauryan era. As archeologists were to know Harappa was elder than any one might have guessed, preceding Chandragupta and the Mauryan Empire by not less than two-and-a half millennium.

A year after Daya Ram Sahani’s conjecture, R.D. Banerjee opened a trench in Mohenjo-Daro four hundred miles to the south, and what he saw compelled him to suggest that these ruins were related to the Harappa site. The other important thing that was known was that the experts working on the Mesopotamian antiquities pointed out connections with finds from that area which went back to the third or fourth millennium B.C. Mohenjo-Daro perhaps means `the hill of the dead’. The excavations started here in 1922 under Sir John Marshall and continued till 1931.

The Harappa site was in a poor state when the excavations began seriously. When the Lahore-Multan railway line was built engineers and the railway contractors had done havoc. They had mined the ancient bricks to lay the one hundred mile long roadbed. What invaluable evidence was destroyed in that plundering for progress will now never be known. Since the archeological discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, various other sites like, Kalibangan, Lothal, Surkotada were also discovered. The whole Harappan civilization appears to have covered the area of around 300,000 square miles, stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Godavari river in modern Karnatak in south.

Some scholars are of the view that the Harappa culture area far exceeds the area occupied by the Sumerian and the Egyptian civilizations together. It is also said that it is more than twice in size than the area claimed for the Maya civilization in the early Post-Christian Era. Today 1500 settlements of the Saraswati Civilization have been discovered, and they are spread out over 680,000 square kilometers of northwestern South Asia, which is twice the size of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. The unbelievable size of the civilization was not only because of the fertile soil of the northwestern India around the rivers but also because of the age of that civilization and the large population. Perhaps it can be traced much farther back than the two great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Rather it will be more perfect to say that these two cities were the final flowering of this civilization.

From these early times people decided how to organize their settlements, how to interact with each other, with other communities, how to resolve conflicts, what to do with surplus food and wealth and how to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next.

			Age of the Civilization The ancient Sindhu or the Harappan civilization is now widely thought to have reached maturity, during the period from 3100 B.C. to 2750 B.C. , generally called The Harappan Age. In 1931 Sir John. Marshall proposed the view that the
civilization belongs to the third millennium B.C. It is dated primarily with the context that the proto-historic cities of Mesopotamia in the latter half of the third millenium B.C. Thirty years after Sir John Marshall, Sir Mortimer Wheeler modified this period to 2500 B.C. to 1500 B.C. The other scholars have fixed the beginnings to 2800 B.C. and the terminal date to 1800 B.C. The Saraswati Civilization tradition refers to the total phenomenon of human adaptations, beginning with the domestication of plants and animals, that resulted in the integration of diverse communities throughout the Sindhu valley and adjacent regions. The Saraswati Civilization tradition can be divided into four different eras that are distinguished by the following characteristics. Early food producing era During this period people lived in scattered villages and nomadic camps. It was an economy based on food production.

Regionalization era This is a long period during which numerous crafts were invented, including ceramics, metallurgy, lapidary and seal making.Distinct artifact styles evolve in specific regions and different regions were connected by trade networks.

Integration era This is relatively short period of time which saw the integration of many different regional cultures, resulting in a pronounced homogeneity in material, culture over a large geographical area.

Localization era Comparable to the regionalisation era, this period sees the breakdown of the previously integrated culture into smaller localized groups. Local trade networks and artifacts styles show a continuity from previous period.