Harappan Civilisation: Sites and Discovery

1.1 Who first saw the ruins of Harappa?

Charles Masson saw them in 1829 and drew many of the brick structures. He wrongly believed they were the remains of a city left by Alexander about 2,000 years earlier. It was in fact Harappa.

1.2 What did Alexander Cunningham make of Harappa?

Cunningham, the first head of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), visited in 1853 and took it for a lost Buddhist site. He too missed its meaning.

An Englishman also gave Cunningham a Harappan seal. Cunningham noted it, but he could not fit it into the time-frame he knew. He published a sketch of it in his 1875 report.

2.1 Why did Cunningham not see what he had found?

Because his method looked for written proof, and Harappa had none that he could read. He used inscriptions and the travel accounts of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to find early sites. Harappa was not on their route.

He also thought, like many others, that Indian history began with the first cities of the Ganga valley. A seal from a far older civilisation had no place in that picture.

2.2 What else led scholars astray?

Early scholars compared the ruins with other known lands. They concluded that Harappa was a colony of the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, or perhaps an Egyptian outpost. That belief was a mistake, and the digs of the 1920s ended it.

2.3 What happened to the site meanwhile?

Brick robbers wrecked it. Harappa was the first site found, yet it was badly destroyed. In 1875 Cunningham noted that the bricks taken from it could have paved about 100 miles of railway track.

• Why it matters: much evidence was lost before any expert dug there.
• Example: a pile of bricks that once formed walls became railway ballast.
• Misconception: Harappa was not found in good shape and left untouched.

3.1 Who began the real excavations?

Daya Ram Sahni began digging at Harappa in 1921. Excavations at Mohenjodaro began in 1922. Sahni worked with M S Vats, and Marshall sent D R Bhandarkar and Rakhaldas Banerji to Mohenjodaro.

Mohenjodaro was a mound that people then thought was Buddhist. A Buddhist stupa and monastery from the Kushana period crowned it.

3.2 What did the seals show?

They showed one culture at two distant sites. Sahni found seals at Harappa in layers much older than the Early Historic levels. Banerji found similar seals at Mohenjodaro.

Early Historic means roughly the sixth century BCE (before the Common Era) to the fourth century CE. Seals older than that were a shock.

3.3 When was the discovery announced?

John Marshall, Director-General of the ASI, announced it in 1924. He had visited Harappa and judged it an ancient civilisation that nobody had known about.

Similar seals turned up at Mesopotamian sites. So the world learned of a new civilisation that was contemporary with Mesopotamia.

4.1 How did Marshall dig?

Marshall dug in regular horizontal units, measured the same way across the whole mound. He ignored the stratigraphy of the site. Stratigraphy means the order of the soil layers, oldest at the bottom.

He was also the first professional archaeologist to work in India. He wanted to see everyday life, not only spectacular finds.

4.2 What went wrong with that method?

Finds from different layers were grouped together. So valuable information about where each object came from was lost for good.

Our own picture: imagine mixing the pages of several books and then reading them as one. You can no longer tell which page came from which book. That is what flat digging does to an old mound.

5.1 What did R.E.M. Wheeler change?

He made digging follow the layers. Wheeler took over as Director-General of the ASI in 1944. He saw that a mound must be dug by its stratigraphy, not mechanically along uniform horizontal lines.

He also brought army-style precision to the work.

5.2 What did he find at Harappa?

His trench at the fortification walls, called Cut XXX, gave very early pre-Harappan pottery for the first time at Harappa. His work also set up the stratigraphy for Harappa and the base for later dating of the civilisation.

5.3 Was there a massacre at Mohenjodaro?

Probably not. In the 1960s George Dales questioned the idea. He showed that the skeletons did not belong to one period. A couple seemed to show a slaughter, but most bones came from burials of other times.

• Why it matters: one wrong reading of the bones had shaped a whole theory.
• Example: bones from different centuries lying in one place looked like one battle.
• Misconception: skeletons in one spot do not prove they died together.

6.1 How many sites are known?

More than 1,000 cities and towns are counted across the land. Nearly two-thirds of the settlements lie in the Saraswati basin. Five are named major cities.

6.2 Which five cities are the major ones?

They are Rakhigarhi, Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Dholavira and Ganweriwala. The rest are regional centres, farming villages, ports and craft sites.

Lapis lazuli is a blue stone that was highly valued. Carnelian is a red-orange stone used for beads.

7.1 Why did Indian archaeologists search for new sites?

Because Partition put the major known sites in Pakistan. The frontiers of the civilisation have little to do with present-day borders. The loss spurred Indian archaeologists to locate sites in India.

7.2 Which sites did they find?

Survey and digs in Kutch, Punjab and Haryana added many sites. Kalibangan, Lothal, Rakhi Garhi and, most recently, Dholavira were discovered, explored and excavated. Digs also followed at Ropar and at Rangpur, where S R Rao worked in 1953-56.

7.3 Where else were sites dug before Partition?

In Sind. N G Majumdar discovered 69 Harappan sites there and dug at Chanhudaro in 1930. F A Khan dug at Kot Diji in 1935.

8.1 What do examiners test here?

They test precise site facts. Distractors are real names, so you must know which site is which. Three traps repeat.

• Real site, wrong culture. Sohgaura is a real site, but it is not among the Harappan sites on the textbook map.
• Right state, wrong detail. The question tests the local detail, not just the state.
• Real names as distractors. Wrong options are other real ancient sites.

8.2 What have exams asked, newest first?

NDA & NA is the National Defence Academy and Naval Academy exam. CDS is the Combined Defence Services exam. UPSC CSP is the Union Public Service Commission Civil Services Preliminary exam. CAPF is the Central Armed Police Forces exam. Each label links to that paper.