The Harappans

Kamal Lodaya, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

The Harappan civilization is the earliest urban one found in South Asia.  It consists of many "cities", which today would be called small towns.  The city of Harappa is near Lahore in west Punjab.  (In 1947, the land of the five rivers, Punj-ab, was divided into west Punjab which went to Pakistan, and east Punjab which remained with India.) 
The city of Mohenjodaro is in Sindh in Pakistan, close to the river Sindhu (Indus) of which the five Punjab rivers are tributaries.
The city of Dholavira is in the Rann (desert) of Kachchh in north Gujarat. The city and port of Lothal are on the Sabarmati river near Ahmedabad in central Gujarat. These are only the biggest Harappan sites, there are many more smaller ones. The Harappan civilization spanned well over a thousand kilometres and was almost half the size of the great empires of Ashoka and Akbar.
All the cities show a high degree of town planning with a drainage network, expertise in the use of brick and mortar, facilities for grain storage and for water storage for bathing. Weapons and artefacts are made of copper and bronze, no iron is used. Terracotta is put to many diverse uses, including the making of the world's earliest cube-shaped dice.  The cemeteries show signs of burial as well as cremation.
One of the markers of the Harappans is the use of small postage stamp-sized seals, which are decorated with pictures and a writing using a strange script: the Indus script. We do not know how to read this script, but since such seals are found in Sumer (Iraq), Oman and Iran, we know that the Harappans traded with these other cultures.
The pictures on the seals show human figures and trees, but also many animals: tigers, elephants, rhino, buffalo, deer, crocodiles. There are also domestic animals: oxen, dogs, camels, goats, sheep, pigs and chicken.
Archaeological dating techniques show that the civilization flourished four millenia ago, from around 2500 BCE to 1500 BCE. This is one of the earliest urban civilizations in the world. Who were these Harappans and where did they disappear to after 1500 BCE? Are we, in fact, their descendants?
The Aryans
We cannot read the Indus script. The earliest literature we have is the four {Vedas}, among which the oldest is the {Rigveda}. It contains ten {mandalas} (circles) of {sutras} (hymns). Of these, mandalas II to VIII are found to be the oldest.
The Rigveda describes a pastoral and agricultural civilization, which sang hymns in Sanskrit and whose priests performed sacrifices to many gods, especially {Agni} (fire), {Indra} (rain) and {Varuna} (sea). It describes the {Saptasindhava} (seven rivers): the Sindhu and six of its tributaries. (The sixth tributary in the Punjab is a small one, which is now wholly inside Pakistan.)
Other rivers mentioned in the Rigveda are the {Sarayu} (Hari-rud), {Saraswati} (Helmand) and {Kubha} (Kabul) in Afghanistan, the {Shvetya} or {Suvastu} (Swat), {Gomati} (Gomal) and {Krumu} (Kurram) in the northwest of Pakistan, the {Saraswati} (Sarsuti) and {Drishadvati} (Chautang) in Haryana, the {Yamuna} and the {Ganga}.  So the people who wrote the Rigveda lived in this region, from Afghanistan to Haryana.
The Rigveda has {no} mention of bricks or mortar, baths, trade, statues, seals, writing or scribes. Copper appears in it but not iron, although iron is mentioned in the later Vedas. The animals we find are cows, deer, boar, foxes, jackals, lions, wolves and {horses}.
The horse is definitely the favourite animal of the Rigveda. There is a horse sacrifice to the gods in which a horse is killed but not eaten, which also suggests that horses were very dear to the people who wrote it, who call themselves Aryans. 
Cattle are seen as a source of wealth and there are many stories about cattle theft. The American historian Wendy Doniger points out similarities in the Rigveda to the cowboy culture of the Americas, which came many centuries later.
Dating the verses of the Rigveda is tricky, because they were narrated orally and written down only many centuries later. Iron became widely used in north India around 1000 BCE, so the Rigveda is dated to before that. The earliest archaeological dating of remains of horses in South Asia is in the Swat region of Pakistan, between 1800 and 1400 BCE.  So the Rigvedic writers should have lived in India between 1800 and 1000 BCE. Now we see that the Harappan civilization was on its way out when the Rigvedas were being written. Since both overlapped in the Punjab, did these two communities know each other? Could it be that they were 
the same people?
The Harappans and the Aryans are different
From the descriptions above, it seems that the two cultures are very different: the Harappans were an urban civilization, the Aryans were not. The Aryans loved the horse but it finds no place among the Harappan seals. Almost all historians believe today that the Harappans and Aryans were different people.
Could the Aryan people have always lived in the Punjab? Could Sanskrit have been the original language which spread from here to West Asia and Europe with the Aryans? Once again the horse comes in our way. It is known from biological studies that the horse is not indigenous to India, it comes from Central Asia. Could the Aryans have imported horses from there? We find similar love of the horse, expressed in Indo-European languages like Iranian and Greek, even as far back as 1400 BCE at a site in West Asia. This suggests that the Aryans were migrants who {moved} with their horses from Central Asia, to South Asia, Iran and West Asia.  That the horse is found earliest at Swat on the route here from Central Asia suggests that the Aryans came to India.
The relationship between the Harappans and Aryans
The great Indian freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak suggested in 1903 that the Aryans spread fom the North Pole to India, Europe and other countries. The Rigveda also mentions the Aryans' battles with other tribes who spoke languages different from them, whom they call the Panis, the Dasyus and the Dasas. These people are described as dark-skinned and snub-nosed, and having {pur} (forts) which were destroyed in battle. Their {grama} (villages) were looted by the Aryans when they won. 
Tilak suggested that originally it was the Dravidians who lived in north India and the Aryans invaded them and drove them to the south.
The Harappan civilization was excavated only in the 1920s, so today's version of Tilak's theory would be that the Harappans were Dravidians, and they were driven south by the invading Aryans around 1500 BCE.  But archaeologically there is no evidence that the Harappan cities were destroyed or looted.
The Aryans as traders
A more modern theory is that the Aryans migrated from Central Asia to India over several generations and settled here, just as centuries later the Moghuls did, and more centuries later the British did.
It seems that the strongest enemy the Harappans had was {climate}.  Space pictures clearly show that the Saraswati (Sarsuti) had dried up in Rajasthan by about 1900 BCE. By the time the Aryans came the Harappan cities were already gone and only some smaller settlements might have remained.
Today we know that the region is very dry and the Thar desert occupies a large area on the border of Rajasthan and Sindh. It might even be the case that the Harappans themselves contributed to this desertification by overuse of water. (For example, it was reported this year that the Indus-Ganga basin from Punjab to Bangladesh is where the most water is being drawn out of the soil anywhere in the world.)
When they came to India, the Aryans might have come as traders. Slowly they found that with their horses and chariots, they had an advantage in military strength over the population living in India. They could then have taken over the region of the Punjab. Whether this was from the Harappans still living there or from a tribal population which had taken over that region after the Harappans left we do not know. 
The writers of the later Vedas describe clearing the forests in the valley of the Ganga and its tributaries. From about 600 BCE, we find archaeological evidence that altars made of brick were being used for sacrifices in the Ganga valley. This suggests that by then the Aryans had learnt the use of bricks instead of the more makeshift altars they used earlier.
Studying history
By painstakingly studying old texts and matching them to archaeological evidence, historians can approach their subject in the manner of a scientist. Great care has to be taken because often an ancient language (like the archaic Sanskrit of the Rigveda) is different from the same language today (modern Sanskrit). For example, today offerings to the gods are no longer sacrifices of animals, but usually made of flowers.  Archaic Sanskrit does not have the word {pooja} which is used today for this purpose. It entered the language only after the interaction of Sanskrit with Tamil. (The root is the Tamil word {poo} for flower.) Offering flowers to the gods began when sacrifices turned nonviolent.  This was in response to the challenge that Hinduism faced from newer religions than the Vedic one, such as Buddhism and Jainism. But that is another story.