India from 1800-500BC: Part One

“Indra, bring wealth that gives delight, the victor's ever-conquering wealth,
Most excellent, to be our aid;
By means of which we may repel our foes in battle hand to hand,
By thee assisted with the car.
Aided by thee, the thunder-armed, Indra, may we lift up the bolt,
And conquer all our foes in fight.
With thee, O India, for ally with missile-darting heroes, may
We conquer our embattled foes.
Mighty is Indra, yea supreme; greatness be his, the Thunderer:
Wide as the heaven extends his power”
Rigveda 1. 8

Page from the Atharvaveda

The Indus Valley Civilization went into a decline and gradually disappeared around 1800BC. The reasons for this are unclear as there are no sources or clear indications from archaeology but climate change has been put forward as a possible cause, in this case operating by affecting the water supply. The cities of the Indus were complex entities and if their agricultural surpluses were damaged the fragile social order may have gradually developed into simpler more durable forms that were better able to survive as small village communities. These communities would leave little traces to the spade of the archaeologist.

The next phase of Indian history shows a different face. Here there are texts, but they are difficult to use as explicit history, as they were only committed to writing a millennium or two after their composition. The tribes that occupied northern India left their sacred hymns and ritual texts. The holy nature of these verses and the oral tradition meant that they were not put to writing even after writing had been long established but they are good sources nonetheless. Linguistic analysis has shown that they preserve very ancient forms of the Sanskrit language; forms that are datable using linguistic analysis to at least the mid-2nd millennia BC. Whatever the language of the Indus Valley Civilization may have been, it is unquestionable that these hymns are composed in Sanskrit, an Indo-European language. It is not necessary to postulate an invasion per se, or even a population shift, but a cultural diffusion of language and social norms between the Iranian Plateau/Central Asia and northern India is very likely. These ancient hymns are known as the Vedas.

There are four groups of them: The Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. The Rigveda is the oldest, but the others are by any standards extremely ancient. They tell of the ritual practices and world views of the priests of these tribes. Social organisation involved a king (raja) who ruled with the assistance of warriors and priests. Conflicts were not uncommon with other tribes and tribal divisions and social groupings were by no means fixed. The warriors had horses and chariots and fought with iron weapons. There was a pantheon of gods, with Indra as one of the chief gods. Other gods were very significant as well: Soma (god of water/the sacred drink of the priests), Agni (god of fire/messenger), Varuna (heaven), Yama (god of justice/death). While other gods may have been integral to the Vedic society, these are the ones that are often mentioned in the hymns of sacrifice, which are the main sources for the period. The Vedic Period is generally referred to as being between 1500-500BC although these dates are porous. Also, the people mentioned in the Vedas also include the peoples of what is currently Afghanistan so the mountains separating the regions do not appear to have hindered communication. However, the Vedas do not appear to have referred explicitly to any areas in the southern regions of India.

Lord of the clans, giver of bliss, fiend-slayer, mighty o'er the foe,
May Indra, Soma-drinker, go before us, Bull, who brings us peace.
Indra, subdue our enemies, lay low the men who fight with us:
Down into nether darkness send the man who shows us enmity:
Strike down the fiend, strike down the foes, break thou asunder Vritra's jaws.
O Indra, Vritra-slayer, quell the wrath of the assailing foe.
Turn thou the foeman's thought away, his dart who fain would conquer us:
Grant us thy great protection; keep his deadly weapon far away.
Atharvaveda, Hymn 21

Grey Painted Ware: A pottery type typical of the period

It should be noted that the term Vedic is sometimes used in conjunction with mathematics and medicine. The Vedas do not explicitly deal with either of these subjects directly and these names are generally the result of later writers projecting their ideas back to the time of the Vedas. While Indian mathematics made demonstrable leaps forward in the period of the Mahajanapadas and into the Mauryan era these ideas should not be assumed to have been present in the Vedas.

Tribal groupings are difficult to discern as some of the peoples named in the Vedas may not actually be the names of people groups but merely descriptive titles given to “types” of peoples. A good example of this phenomena is in Wales. The word “Welsh” was not originally the name of a people group but was merely the Saxon word for “foreigner” or “stranger”. The Angles and Saxons used these terms to distinguish themselves from the other peoples of the land. In the same manner, tribe names in the Vedas may simply be convenient blanket descriptions of other tribes or peoples without necessarily referring to a specific tribe.

A votive offering of a model chariot from the Oxus river c.500BC
Similar chariots were used in India around this period.

The early composers of the Vedas may have been semi-nomadic but from 1000 BC onwards there is increasing complexity in the tribes. Some of the hymns in the seventh book of the Rigveda mention a battle called the Battle of the Ten Kings, fought between the Purus and the Trtsu or Bharata peoples. The hymns are the only recollection of the battle but the description implies that the tribes were forming large confederations, that they had significant fortresses (presumably implying that they were mainly settled at that point) and that the lesser tribes and kingdoms were being amalgamated into larger entitities.

Fools, in their folly fain to waste her waters, they parted inexhaustible Parusni.
Lord of the Earth, he with his might repressed them: still lay the herd and the affrighted herdsman.
As to their goal they sped to their destruction: they sought Parusni, the swift returned not.
Indra abandoned, to Sudas the manly, the swiftly flying foes, unmanly babblers.
They went like kine unherded from the pasture, each clinging to a friend as chance directed.
...
The King who scattered one-and-twenty people of both Vaikarna tribes through lust of glory-
As the skilled priest clips grass within the chamber, so hath the Hero Indra, wrought their downfall.
Thou, thunder-armed, overwhelmed in the waters famed ancient Kavasa and then the Druhyu.
Others here claiming friendship to their friendship, devoted unto thee, in thee were joyful.
Indra at once with conquering might demolished all their strong places and their seven castles.
The goods of Anu's son he gave to Trtsu. May we in sacrifice conquer scorned Puru.
Rigveda 7. 18

Translations of the Rigveda from the online translations of Ralph T.H. Griffith.

End of Part One. Click here for Part Two of this post.

Related Blogs:
Blog on the Indus Valley Civilisation

Indus Valley Civilisation

Map of the Indus Valley Civilisation

Indian history was a bit of an enigma to archaeologists for many years and, to a great extent, it remains so. Alexander’s invasion of north-west India in 326 BC was an early fixed date, but it was evident that Alexander had entered a land that already had an ancient culture. Scholars were aware that there were ancient religious texts called the Vedas, the oldest of which was dated to the centuries in or around 1200 BC, but these were religious texts that dealt only obliquely with historical events. The Vedas did not necessarily shed much light on what was happening in India when these texts were composed. Scholars worked on the assumption that India was a relatively late civilisation, one that was predated by Sumer and Egypt by thousands of years. Around the turn of the last century there were striking discoveries along the Indus River that proved this assumption completely wrong.

A site called Harappa, in what is present day Pakistan was excavated, showing the remains of a city. The locals believed it to be the city of a medieval king but once dated, it was discovered to be around five thousand years old. Other discoveries were made in the region and soon it became apparent that there had been an advanced civilisation in the area. There were a series of cities all along the river all built along a vaguely similar pattern.

Mohenjo-Daro: Note Possible public bath in foreground

The cities showed some signs of urban planning. Drainage was attended to and streets were laid out in an orderly fashion. There were walls but it was unclear if these were for defence or for flood control (or both), as nearly all the cities were built very near rivers. There were raised areas in the cities that were identified as citadels but it is impossible to properly describe their function. Early investigations noted the absence of monumental architecture. There were no gigantic pyramids or ziggurats to mark these cities, their skyline was comparatively quite boring. But if you were an inhabitant of one of these cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro, you might have been consoled about the lack of public temples by the fact that the cities appear to have public baths. Public baths might seem unhygienic to us now but they were light years in advance of bathing facilities available to the ancient Egyptians or Mesopotamians.

Statue from Mohenjo-Daro

They weren’t quite as egalitarian as once thought. All of the houses had access to public drainage but, well, some got neat cisterns and covered drains, others had open sewers. But they do not appear to have had kings in our sense of the word. No single dwelling in the cities was vastly larger than the others. Archaeologists speculate that the cities may have been controlled by trading elites.

They certainly were interested in trade. Once the artefacts of the Indus Valley Civilisation were recognised for what they were, they began turning up in archaeological digs in what is now Iraq. Clearly there were trade links between the two cultures but the Sumerians do not seem to have sold any of their artefacts in return. This is odd because the Sumerians lacked real commodities to trade. The strength of their civilisation lay in their ability to use irrigation to produce multiple harvests. This leads to the fascinating possibility that perhaps the Indus Valley traded luxury goods for grain, building ships to transport grain over thousands of miles of open sea to feed their population five thousand years ago. While the Indus Valley did not have irrigation complexes on the scale of Mesopotamia or Egypt they nevertheless were a major agricultural society so this idea is of course, highly speculative (and given the nature of boats in those times, rather unlikely). There are remains of what could be ports but their uses are debated.

Cylinder seals from Indus: Note the writing above the pictures

We have some of their artwork but it is impossible to understand much of their culture or history because their writing is currently undecipherable. Like many ancient cultures they signed their documents using cylinder seals that would be rolled in wet clay to leave a distinctive mark on a trade document. Most of the writing recovered from the Indus Valley has been on these seals and these terse statements in an unknown tongue and isolated script, have sadly proved undecipherable so the enigmatic builders of the cities must remain silent for now.

This unassuming, well organised civilisation existed for hundreds of years before going into decline around 1700 BC. Possibly the causes were invasion, cultural changes or climate change but the cities were gradually abandoned. To this day only a few of the many known sites have been excavated and less is known of this culture than of any major civilisation that existed around that period.

Indra: Accused?

Partly this is because of the difficulties in understanding their writing but mainly this is because of politics. Different political ideologies have, over the years, really messed up any attempt to properly understand things. Firstly the British archaeologists (remember at the time the cities were discovered all of the Indian subcontinent was under British rule) assumed that the cities had been built by Dravidians (peoples who spoke a type of language most commonly spoken in southern India) and that the ancestors of the current inhabitants of northern India had arrived as nomads from Iran and Afghanistan, worshipping Iranian gods and destroying the civilisation that stood in their path. When a prominent British archaeologist was asked what had destroyed these cities he famously stated, "Indra (an early Hindu god who may have been known as the destroyer of cities) stands accused." This belief in nomadic invaders from the north is known as the Aryan Invasion Theory.

Quite frankly there is very little evidence for any violent invasion. There is a strong suspicion that, by portraying Hindu culture as basically a foreign imposition, the British were trying to justify their own foreign rule. Be that as it may, some Hindu fundamentalists see the cities of the Indus River as being part of an ancient Hindu culture. They explain cultural and linguistic similarities between their culture and Iran by saying that the culture spread from India to Iran rather than vice versa. There is a much stronger version of the theory that states that all civilisation and the Indo-European language family originally came from the Indus Valley. This is known as the Out of India theory and there is almost no evidence to support the strong version of it.

Bullock Cart Statue from the Indus Valley

To compound the religious and cultural issues involved in "claiming" the Indus Valley, some people from the south of India believe (following elements of the Aryan Invasion Theory) that the language (and by extension the people and culture) of the Indus was Dravidian rather than Indo-European. Due to the unfortunate tension that exists between India and Pakistan and the fact that some Indian political parties claim the Indus Valley as the birthplace of distinctively Hindu civilisation, there have been issues in conducting large scale excavations.

So, do check out the Indus Valley Civilisation online but be aware that we know very little about it. Also be aware that, sadly, there are people who have very definite agendas, or political and religious points to make so be wary in your research.This is one area where political interest in history has unfortunately obscured the search for truth.

Related Blog Posts:
India from 1800-500BC: Part One
India from 1800-500BC: Part Two