Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  Based on Possehl (1999).

  After spending a day sleeping off jet-lag in a seedy hotel in Karachi we flew north to the city of Multan, itself the shrine of a famous Islamic saint. There we found an English-speaking taxi-driver who was willing to drive us first north to Harappa, then south to Mohenjodaro, and finally to drop us off in Karachi-a total journey of about 1000 kilometres.

  Mohenjodaro

  I’ll pick up a bit of the story from my 1992 notebook, skipping over Harappa since, honestly, Mohenjodaro can stand for both places. At the point where the entry begins we’ve been on the road for most of the day and are just entering the province of Sind:

  Monday 16 November 1992

  Cross from Punjab into Sind quite late – 9.30 or 10 p.m. Checkpoints fairly thorough. Atmosphere of increased security in Sind. Finally arrive in Sukkur, crossing the Sukkur Barrage, around 10.50 p.m. and check into hotel in some dusty suburb around 11.50 p.m.

  Hotel receptionist, who also cooks us dinner around midnight, inquires what time we will be leaving in the morning. I ask why he wants to know. He says because there is a big security problem in Sind – dacoits (bandits). Recently one Japanese and one Taiwanese traveller were kidnapped on the road with a total ransom required of six million rupees – their families paid half; Pakistan government paid half. Foreigners very much in demand by kidnappers as all are believed to be enormously rich.

  It turns out we must have an escort to drive between Sukkur and Hyderabad via Mohenjodaro. Mohenjodaro itself, in Larkana district, is ‘very dangerous’ apparently.

  It also turns out that a police guard will be required at the hotel all night, because we are there, to prevent us from being snatched from the room!

  Leave hotel at 9 a.m. next morning accompanied by four armed police escorts in the back of a Toyota pick-up. They have an array of weapons – one G3, one AK47 and two much older carbines.

  We follow and discover that we are part of a well-coordinated escort operation that will see us ‘passed’, like the baton in a relay race, from police vehicle to police vehicle – a total of fourteen in all between Sukkur and Hyderabad. Often the escort cars drive very fast, headlights flashing, sirens sounding, pushing through traffic with us behind. In general we are treated like VIPs and the police coordination is impressive with the next vehicle already pulling out ahead of us as the previous vehicle pulls in at the end of its jurisdiction. They’re all in touch with each other by radio and the whole province of Sind, it seems, is under martial law, controlled by the army, with the police subordinate to the army.

  We arrive at Mohenjodaro around 11.30 complete with our police escort – at this point four guards in a lorry with two up front. En route we have broken down once and spent an hour at the side of the road with the four armed policemen standing in a cordon around us, presumably to prevent us from being snatched by the twenty or so Sindhi villagers who milled curiously and unthreateningly around us in their little Sindhi hats.

  At any rate, we go straight into the site, still closely followed and guarded by our armed escorts, who politely refuse to leave us alone, even for a second, advising that there would be a real risk of our being snatched if they did. We therefore progress through the dusty ruins with an entourage of armed men. It all feels slightly surreal and peculiar.

  Because the Harappan culture only very rarely decorated the bricks used in the construction of its massive buildings, Sir Mortimer Wheeler [The Indus Civilization, 3rd edition, 1968] describes the vast remnants of Mohenjodaro as ‘impressive quantitatively and significant sociologically’ but ‘aesthetically miles of monotony’.3 Surveying the very extensive brick ruins through the heat-haze of midday, I found little to disagree with in Wheeler’s words. There is a certain monotony and sameness about the acres of red brick under the red dust that lies everywhere. At the same time, paradoxically, this strange place manages to be overwhelming: dense, solid, truly impenetrable.

  We approach the main area of ruins up some steep steps and around the western edge of the eroded Buddhist stupa built here 2000 years ago [long after the Indus-Sarasvati civilization had ceased to exist]. From here there is a view down in a westerly direction over the structure that the archaeologists call the ‘Great Bath’ and Mohenjodaro’s geometry of neat orderly streets organized into a strict north-south/east-west grid with rows of brick houses and covered drains. Beyond the Bath, again towards the west, what’s left of the ‘Granary’. And beyond that the old course of the Indus.

  City plan of Mohenjodaro. Based on Possehl (1999).

  The Great Bath – presumed to have been for ritual bathing and purification – looks exactly like a medium-sized rectangular swimming pool and measures 11.89 metres in length (north to south) and 7.01 metres wide (east to west), the depth being 2.44 metres.4 The close-jointed brickwork and the use of bitumen damp-courses and gypsum mortar to waterproof it all bespeak a high culture with much experience of architecture – experience that could not have evolved overnight … Particularly impressive is the drainage system, whereby water was released from the Great Bath, passing through a deep channel covered by a high brick corbel vault.

  Moving on from the Great Bath area we then walked half a mile or so to the east of the stupa to the ‘DK’ residential area of probably wealthy or noble families. It’s called DK after its unfortunately named excavator, a certain D. K. Dikshitar, who worked here in the 1920s.

  DK would have been an imposing residential suburb. Many of its buildings had two, sometimes even three, storeys and some walls still stand up to four metres high. Evidence that wooden beams, long since rotted away, once supported floorboards and ceilings. Also evidence of municipal street-lighting (lanterns in wall-sockets – one such lantern in museum) and municipal refuse collection – with public rubbish-bin enclosures. Even more impressive is the obvious concern with sanitation evidenced by the miles of covered drains and by the fact that many of the houses had private toilets, somewhat of the modern Western type, which vented down carefully made angled brick slipways into the sewers or into refuse pots that stood outside in the street under the vents and that are thought to have been cleared away at regular intervals by municipal sewage squads. Inside the main sewage drains themselves, spaced at regular intervals and again regularly cleaned out, were rectangular sump-pits that trapped solid waste while allowing liquid waste to flow away.

  These people, in short, knew a great deal about urban life and urban architecture. And that knowledge, I’m sure, was already old and evolved, handed down, a legacy, when they first began to build Mohenjodaro …

  Science

  At its peak in the mid-third millennium BC the total inhabited area of Mohenjodaro exceeded 250 hectares and it is possible that its population may have risen as high as 150,000.5 By then it was part of a vast network of other cities, towns and villages within the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, the majority of them built out of baked mud bricks produced from moulds with standard proportions. One size of brick (measuring 7 × 14 × 28 centimetres) was used in house construction, and a different size (10 × 20 × 40 centimetres) was used in the building of city walls. But both sizes of brick have identical proportions: thickness=1, width = 2 × 1, length = 4 × 1.6

  Like Mohenjodaro, some of the other Indus-Sarasvati settlements (though by no means all) were laid out according to a strict grid with the major thoroughfares and buildings accurately aligned to the cardinal directions – north-south and east-west. This suggests a high degree of planning and deliberation – after all, in most cultures settlements grow up haphazardly, a bit at a time, but apparently that didn’t happen here: in the case of many Indus-Sarasvati sites the template was set out right at the beginning. Moreover, the precision of the alignments of major structures leaves little doubt that the planners employed the services of astronomers in their architectural teams. Several scholars have reasonably deduced that astronomy may have been a highly regarded science in the Indus-Sarasvati cities and was perhaps linked to whatever religion was practised t
here.7

  It has also been noted that weights and measures found at Mohenjodaro, Harappa and many other widely separated Indus-Sarasvati sites are not only extremely accurate and consistent but demonstrate a high level of mathematical development. The weights appear to have been designed according to a binary scale: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., up to 12,800 units (with one unit being equivalent to 0.85 grams).8 Measures, on the other hand, made use of a decimal system: ‘In Mohenjodaro a scale was found that is divided into precise units of 0.264 inches. The “foot” measured 13.2 inches (equalling 50 × 0.264).’9 Likewise in the Indus-Sarasvati port of Lothal, S. R. Rao excavated a scale with tiny divisions of just over 1.7 mm:

  Ten such divisions … (are equal to … 17.78 mm. The width of the wall of Lothal dock is 1.78 metres, which is a multiple of the smallest division of the Lothal scale marked in decimal ratio. The length of the east-west wall of the dock is 20 times its width. Obviously the Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement …10

  In Rao’s opinion the material remains of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization-whether in terms of the alignments of its city blocks, the design and civil engineering of its efficient public sewerage systems, or the use of standardized weights and measures in precise mathematical relationships – provide ample proof of ‘the scientific approach of the Harappans’.11 In some cases this approach was so scientific that ‘even today’, as Jonathan Kennoyer admits,

  many aspects of Indus technology are not fully understood as scholars attempt to replicate stoneware ceramics from ordinary terracotta clay and to reproduce bronze that was as hard as steel.12

  ‘Almost everything that was ever written about this civilization before five years ago is wrong …’

  It is inconceivable that a civilization as developed and well organized as the one that boomed 4500 years ago along the banks of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers in northern India and Pakistan could have simply appeared from nowhere, fully formed, with all its principal accomplishments already in place. Common sense suggests that there must have been a very long developmental phase – somewhere – before such a civilization could have reached maturity. Yet for most of the twentieth century the archaeological record refused to reveal evidence of a sufficiently long period of development anywhere in the subcontinent.

  The result was a vacuum in which European scholars felt free to conclude that the Indus Valley civilization might, in its origins, have been alien to India. Many seem to have been attracted to this convenient explanation of the advanced state of Indus-Sarasvati culture. For example, as S. P. Gupta points out, not only did Sir Mortimer Wheeler teach that Mohenjodaro and Harappa had been destroyed by invading Aryans; also he never quite brought himself to accept that cities as advanced as these could originally have been the creation of India herself and argued that at least ‘the “idea” of “city” as a way of life’ must have come to India ‘from Mesopotamia’.13 He even tells us, Gupta notes with annoyance,

  that at least some Mesopotamian masons must have been working in Mohenjodaro directing the method of construction involved in brick masonry. All this simply means that at the operational level not only the ‘idea’ but also the ‘men’ came from Mesopotamia to India to give the latter her first cities.14

  When Wheeler died in 1976 his theory of the Mesopotamian origin of the Indus Valley civilization died with him. But the reason it did so had less to do with his passing than with the start of excavations in 1974 by the French archaeologist Jean-François Jarrige at a previously unexplored site named Mehrgarh overlooking the western edge of the Indus valley from the rugged Bolan pass.

  What Jarrige and his team have unearthed since then is the archaeological equivalent of the Holy Grail – an intact sequence of occupation layers at Mehrgarh extending uninterrupted from approximately 6800 BC, 4000 years before the urban boom at Harappa and Mohenjodaro, until the decline of these cities in the second millennium BC.15 The excavations are still actively underway and the pace of analysis at Mehrgarh, and other nearby sites such as Nausharo that are equally ancient, has quickened since the mid-1990s with results that have a dramatic bearing on the origins of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. Indeed, these results are so dramatic that when we spoke with Gregory Possehl by telephone in October 2000 he had this to say: ‘You want to know something? I’m teaching a class and I told them that almost everything that was ever written about this civilization before five years ago is wrong.’16

  In chapter 8 we will return to the mystery of Mehrgarh, but in 1992, when Santha and I visited Harappa and Mohenjodaro, I was ignorant of the place and knew nothing of its extraordinary implications.

  From the Himalayas to the sea

  After leaving Pakistan on 19 November 1992 we travelled first to Nepal, where the bookshops in the narrow streets of Kathmandu’s cosmopolitan Thamel market are stocked with interesting and unusual reference works on ancient Indian religious thought – including many of the hard-to-find primary texts. At Pilgrims Bookshop I was able to buy the entire unabridged six-volume set of Ralph Griffith’s 1881 translations of the Rig Veda, the Atharva Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Sama Veda. But, because at that point I had no reason to disagree with the 1200–800 BC time-span that scholars assigned to the Vedas, I again and again postponed studying these huge, daunting books over the next several years and gave my attention instead to texts from Sumer and Old Kingdom Egypt, which I supposed to be much more ancient.

  I was about to learn in due course that a new generation of scholars both from within and beyond India are beginning to be convinced that the opposite may be true and that the Vedic hymns could be, by a margin of several thousand years, the most ancient surviving scriptures on earth. In 1992, however, this was just another one of the many possibilities about India’s mysterious past that I was ignorant of.

  From Nepal we flew on to northern and eastern India – Delhi, Khajuraho, Puri, Konarak – and then south to Tamil Nadu:

  Sunday 6 December 1992

  Arrive Madras around 10 a.m. – with a migraine. Dr Ramni Pulimood, who worked with my father in the 50s at the Christian Medical College, has sent a taxi to pick us up. We motor the 150 kms to Vellore, passing the spot where Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. There is a small memorial to him which we visit.

  I’m in a coma with my migraine for most of the journey, but rouse myself when we are about 50 kms outside Vellore. Is the countryside familiar? I don’t know really. Don’t seem to recognize anything. Then we cross a bridge over a very wide dried-out river bed – and I’m sure I remember that from my dreams of childhood, just as I’m sure I remember a dried-out river bed suddenly filled to overflowing with the roiling, rearing waters of a flash flood. And I remember, too, palm trees bent double in the monsoons, the warm splash of fat drops of rain on my bare back, red spider-mites teeming across the earth, and the smell of distant thunder.

  We reach Vellore – a medium-sized, dirty, bustling south Indian town full of garish modern signs and vegetarian restaurants. I still remember very little, even when we pull up for a moment right outside the CMC Hospital.

  Then we drive through the town and out again towards the CMC compound. I do seem to remember an old school that we pass. Finally I see to my left College Hill rising greenly to a rocky summit and, far away to my right, Toad Hill – so named after the toad-shaped boulder that squats on its peak. I do remember both of these landmarks quite vividly, and remember climbing them as a child with my dad and our dog Trixie, but the college buildings into which we now pull ring no immediate bells. I realize later that this is so because they now stand to either side of a busy main road. In the 50s there was no road like this.

  We go to ‘the big bungalow’ and meet Ramni Pulimood, who accommodates us there as previously agreed. Inside, I remember the ancient green cloth blinds which were also standard fitments in the Men’s Hostel where we lived and in which I once found a trapped bat.

  Half an hour later Ramni and her son drive us out to the Protestant cemetery, where
we hope to find my sister Susan’s grave. Santha brings flowers, but despite pacing up and down in the peaceful late-afternoon sun we find nothing. We ask the caretakers to check the records, but they too fail to find the grave.

  1. On the waterfront, Alexandria. The author (right) and Ashraf Bechai (second right) discussing locations of underwater sites with fishermen.

  2. Megalithic blocks of Sidi Gaber, Alexandria – a site unrecognized by orthodox archaeologists.

  3. Megalithic blocks of Sidi Gaber, Alexandria.

  4. The ‘Great Bath’, Mohenjodaro.

  5. Brick foundations, Mohenjodaro.

  6. Street with intact drainage, Mohenjodaro.

  7. Exposed well-shaft, Mohenjodaro.

  8. The fairytale city of Dwarka.

  9. Sadhu reading the Vedas, Dwarka.

  10. The Dwarkadish temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna, Dwarka.

  11. Vedic school, south India.