THE Harappan Civilisation, considered to be one of the oldest and the most developed one in the Bronze Age, was a centre for art, culture and architecture. For those who want to seek knowledge, it has a lot to offer.

While the Harappan civilisation may not provide answers to all our modern-day problems, studying its formation, rise and fall can certainly furnish some useful lessons for us.

The ruins at Harappa were dis-covered in the early 19th century by James Lewis, better known as Charles Masson, but the site was excavated by Sir Alexander Cunningham some 50 years later.

After the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro was discovered in the 1920s, archaeological excavations started in a systematic manner at several sites, including Harappa which revealed clear evidence of planned communal living in cities dating back 2500BC.

Sir John Marshall described the new-found civilisations thus: “Never for a moment it was imagined that 5,000 years ago, before even the Aryans were heard of, the Punjab and Sindh, if not other parts of the subcontinent as well, were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilisation of their own, closely akin but in some respects superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt.”

It is now established that a group of people from Africa reached parts of Asia and made South Asia a centre of modern human cluster.

Around 7,000BC, some people from the Zagros mountains, in modern-day Iran, reached Balochistan and introduced agriculture and livestock.

The population grew over time and spread to other parts, eventually laying the foundation of the Harappan Civilisation.

Growing internally and trading with nearby and faraway lands helped the people prosper materially as well as intellectually, as is reflected in their sense of town planning and architecture.

And, indeed, trading must have happened because of surplus production and value addition.

Quite interestingly, no central places of worship have been found on the site. The culture was largely urban with well-planned streets and impressive drainage and sewerage, underlining effective governance in an era that we today consider primitive.

The Harappan Civilisation is believed to have been at its peak around 3,000BC. This, however, did not last long and it ended mysteriously.

One theory says it was destroyed by the invading Aryans from the steppes of Central Asia who had better military prowess. The other theory says Harappa may have been destroyed by natural disasters, such as severe floods or drought.

In an age when we are facing natural disasters because of climate change, and economic hardships because of negative balance of trade, there is so much to learn from the rise and fall of the Harappan Civilisation.

In his book Early Indians, Tony Joseph has written that though science today has “given us much clear understanding of human prehistory around the world, these findings are often not palatable to political ideologies that derive their strength from some form of ethnic or religious identity and like to believe that their nations are pure rather than mixed”. The reason for this brand of politics is best explained by Eric Hobsbawm, a British scholar, who said: “Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”

Dr Khataumal
Mithi

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2023