Dear Editor,
New evidence now suggests that the Indus Valley Civilisation, famous for its meticulously planned cities and impressive crafts, predates Egypt and Mesopotamia, with some signs of settlements dating back to over 9,200 years BP (before present). This means that the Indus Valley Civilisation is at least 2,500 years older than previously believed.
In sheer size, stretching from Afghanistan and Balochistan (now in Pakistan) to the Gangetic heartland, covering an area of nearly 2 million square kilometres, the Harappan civilisation is easily the largest of all ancient civilisations. At its peak it had a population of more than 5 million, making up 10 per cent of the world’s population.
It has been reported in the prestigious Nature (25 May, 2016), that a team of researchers from the Archaeological Survey of India, Institute of Archaeology, Deccan College and the renowned Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur, headed by Anindya Sarkar, have analysed pottery fragments and animal bones excavated from the Bhirrana site in Haryana, using carbon dating methods.
Based on radiocarbon ages from different trenches and levels, the settlement at Bhirrana has been dated to 9,000 years (BP), making it the oldest on the Indian sub-continent. The researchers also used ‘optically stimulated luminescence’ (OSL) to check dating and investigate whether the climate changed when the civilization was thriving. According to geology and geophysics professor, Anindya Sarkar, the study will have major implications for the evolution of human settlements in ancient India.
As to what brought the world’s most extensive and ancient civilization to an end, speculations and theories abound. One of the earlier explorers, Mortimer Wheeler, based solely on the discovery of five skeletons believed to bear the marks of violence, announced that the Indus Civilisation was destroyed by invading hordes of Aryan nomads originating somewhere in Central Asia. Long believed to be a political tool, this theory is almost universally abandoned and no serious scholar gives it any credence. Earlier protagonists on the invasion theory have now shifted to a migration theory.
According to a study co-authored by Dorian Fuller, University College, London, decline in monsoon rains led to weakened river dynamics, and played a critical role in both the development and collapse of the Indus culture. However, Professor Sarkar and his team, based on evidence that Bhirrana continued to thrive despite changing weather patterns after 7,000 BP, are suggesting that climate change was probably not the cause of Harappan decline.
They suggest that inhabitants shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species of small millets and rice in the later part of declining monsoon and thereby changed their subsistence strategy.
Because rice and millet generally had a much lower yield, the organized large storage system of the mature Harappan period was abandoned, giving rise to a smaller more individual household-based crop processing and storage system which probably acted as a catalyst for the de-urbanisation of the Harappan civilization rather than an abrupt collapse.
One of the most important implications of this new discovery is that it poses a challenge to the official version of chronology in ancient India. It will be remembered that western scholars, and now their Indian counterparts, established arbitrary dates for Indian civilization to ensure that Biblical dates retained their assumed earlier antiquity.
This finding has another important implication. It is now known that the mighty Saraswati river, elaborately and extensively described in the Vedas, started drying up some time around 4,000 years ago which means the Vedas themselves have to be much older than the 1,500 BCE date arbitrarily attributed by Max Mueller and since upheld as the “official date.” Based on the Saraswati evidence, scholars are now contending that the date of the Vedas should go back to at least 8,000 years ago which brings it more in line with the findings of Sarkar and others.
It may still be a huge leap to say definitively at this point that the Vedic culture and civilization and the Indus Valley Civilisation now known at the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation are one and the same. This will eliminate the famous Frawley paradox of a Vedic civlisation with its world class literature without a writing system and the Harappan civilization with its writing system without a literatrure. Time will tell.
Yours faithfully,
Swami Aksharananda
