lost civilization

The Lost Civilization of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa

Sometime around 6000 BCE a nomadic herding people settled into villages in the Mountainous region just west of the Indus River . There they grew barley and wheat using sickles with flint blades, and they lived in small houses built with adobe bricks. After 5000 BCE the climate in their region changed, bringing more rainfall, and apparently they were able to grow more food, for they grew in population. They began domesticating sheep, goats and cows and then water buffalo. Then after 4000 BCE they began to trade beads and shells with distant areas in central Asia and areas west of the Khyber Pass. And they began using bronze and working metals.
The climate changed again, bringing still more rainfall, and on the nearby plains, through which ran the Indus River, grew jungles inhabited by crocodiles, rhinoceros, tigers, buffalo and elephants. By around 2600, a civilization as grand as that in Mesopotamia and Egypt had begun on the Indus Plain and surrounding areas. By 2300 BCE this civilization reached had reached maturity and was trading with Mesopotamia. Seventy or more cities had been built, some of them upon buried old towns. There were cities from the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains to Malwan in the south. There was the city of Alamgirpur in the east and Sutkagen Dor by the Arabian Sea in the west.
One of these cities was Mohenjo-daro (Mohenjodaro), on the Indus river some 250 miles north of the Arabian Sea, and another city was Harappa, 350 miles to the north on a tributary river, the Ravi. Each of these two cities had populations as high as around 40,000. Each was constructed with manufactured, standardized, baked bricks. Shops lined the main streets of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and each city had a grand marketplace. Some houses were spacious and with a large enclosed yard. Each house was connected to a covered drainage system that was more sanitary than what had been created in West Asia. And Mohenjo-daro had a building with an underground furnace (a hypocaust) and dressing rooms, suggesting bathing was done in heated pools, as in modern day Hindu temples.
The people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa shared a sophisticated system of weights and measures, using an arithmetic with decimals, and they had a written language that was partly phonetic and partly ideographic. They spun cotton and wove it into cloth. They mass-produced pottery with fine geometric designs as decoration, and they made figurines sensitively depicting their attitudes. They grew wheat, rice, mustard and sesame seeds, dates and cotton. And they had dogs, cats, camels, sheep, pigs, goats, water buffaloes, elephants and chickens.
Being agricultural, the people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had religions that focused on fertility, on the earth as a giver of life. They had a fertility goddess, whose naked image as a figurine sat in a niche in the wall of their homes. Like the Egyptians they also had a bull god. They worshiped tree gods, and they had a god with three heads and an erect phallus, which they associated with fertility. Like some others, including the Egyptians, they buried objects with their dead. And they had taboos, especially about cleanliness.
The Disappearance of the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa Civilization
Between the years 1800 and 1700 BCE, civilization on the Indus Plain all but vanished. What befell these people is unknown. One suspected cause is a shift in the Indus River. Another is that people dammed the water along the lower portion of the Indus River without realizing the consequences: temporary but ruinous flooding up river, flooding that would explain the thick layers of silt thirty feet above the level of the river at the site of Mohenjo-daro. Another suspected cause is a decline in rainfall.
Agriculture declined and people abandoned the cities in search of food. Later, a few people of a different culture settled in some of the abandoned cities, in what archaeologists call a "squatter period." Then the squatters disappeared. Knowledge of the Mohenjo-daro civilization died - until archaeologists discovered the civilization in the twentieth century.
Aryans and the Origins of Hinduism
If rainfall declined in the Indus region between 1800 and 1700 BCE, around 1500 BCE it increased again, making the Indus Plain better able to support life. It has been estimated by various scholars that between 1500 and 1200 an illiterate, pastoral people migrated from the northwest, perhaps the steppe lands of central Russia through what is now Afghanistan, onto the Indus Plain. These migrants were to be called Aryans and to be classified as Indo-Europeans, their speech related to modern European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian.
The word "Hindu" was created by the British while they held India as a colony. Among those people called Hindus are believers in a divine origins of their religion - not unlike other religions across the world. They take pride in Hindu scripture being the oldest scripture among the great religions of today, claiming that Hindu scripture was composed sometime around 3000 BCE by several sages in direct contact with their god, Krishna. They object to the theory of outsiders, the Aryans, having invaded India and bringing with them that scripture. They claim that there is no evidence of any such Indo-European invasion and blame the theory on Christian scholars from the nineteenth century and endeavor to made the theory of an Aryan invasion politically incorrect.
The rival theory among scholars is that the so-called Aryans came to the Indus Plain on horseback and oxcart, in waves separated perhaps by decades or longer. Like other pastoral people, they were warriors. They had two-wheeled chariots like the Hyksos, and coming through the mountains and the Khyber Pass they had the precious wheels of their chariots packed away on their carts.
The Aryans were familiar with prowling and hunting with bow and arrow. They enjoyed chariot racing, gambling and fighting. Like other pastoral peoples, men dominated the women. Like the pastoral Hebrews each family was ruled by an authoritarian male. And each Aryan tribe was ruled by a king who felt obliged to consult with tribal councils.
Gods, Creation and Human Mortality
Like other pastoral people, the Aryans were storytellers. They had centuries old sacred hymns, myths and oral history - stories that expressed their desire to please the gods. Like the Hebrews, the Aryans had a father god of the heaven, sky and atmosphere: Dyaus Pitar (sky father). They had a male god of thunder and rain called Indra, who was a god also of that other awesome disturbance - war. Indra was also called the "breaker of forts." And he was what the Aryan men thought a man should be: a warrior with courage, strength and energy who enjoyed drinking and making war.
The Aryans had a god called Agni who was fire. They believed that Agni hungrily devoured the animals that they sacrificed in their rituals of burning. These sacrifices were performed by priests to obtain from their gods the gifts of children, success in war, wealth, health, longevity, food, drink or anything else that contributed to their happiness.
The Aryans enjoyed singing around their campfires, and they had a hymn about creation. Like many other creation myths, theirs described the world as beginning with the kind of creation they understood: birth. They believed that their father god, Dyaus Pitar, the embodiment of sky, had mated with his own daughter, the goddess that was earth.
A later Aryan version of The Creation reads as follows:
In the beginning was nothing, neither heaven nor earth nor space in between. Then Non-being became spirit and said: "Let me be!" He warmed himself, and from this was born fire. He warmed himself further, and from this was born light.
The Aryans had a story that described humanity as having been created with virtue and everlasting life. According to this story, the gods were concerned that humanity would become gods like themselves, and to guard against this the gods plotted humanity's downfall. The gods talked Dyaus Pitar into creating a woman who lusted after sensual pleasures and who aroused sexual desires in men. According to this story, the world had become overcrowded because humankind lived forever like the gods. So Dyaus Pitar decided to make humankind mortal, and he created the goddess Death - not a goddess who ruled over death, but death itself. This creation of mortality for humankind pleased the gods, for it left them separate and of a higher rank than humans.
According to this story, Dyaus Pitar proclaimed that he did not create the goddess Death from anger. And the goddess Death was at first reluctant to carry out the task assigned her, but she finally did so, while weeping. Her tears were diseases that brought death at an appropriate time. To create more death, the goddess Death created desire and anger in people - emotions that led to their killing each other.
Settlement, Conquest and Autocracy
With the passing of generations, the waves of Aryan tribes that had come to the Indus Plain spread out across the region. They warred against local, non-Aryan people, and they settled in areas that provided them with pasture for their animals. They grouped in villages and built homes of bamboo or light wood - homes without statues or art. They began growing crops. Their environment supplied them with all they needed, but, responding to their traditions, and perhaps impulses, the different Aryan tribes warred against each other - wars that might begin with the stealing of cattle. The word for obtaining cattle, gosati, became synonymous with making war. And their warring grew in scale, including a war between what was said to be ten kings.
Gradually, Aryan tribal kings were changing from tribal leaders to autocratic rulers. Aryan kings had begun associating their power with the powers of their gods rather than the approval of their fellow tribesmen. They had begun allying themselves with priests. And, as in West Asia, kings were acquiring divinity. By taxing their subjects, these kings could create an army that was theirs rather than an instrument of the tribe. And these kings allied themselves with the horse-owning warrior aristocracy to which they often belonged.
Caste and Religious Blending
In the decades around 1000 BCE came a shortage of rainfall, and, running from drought, Aryan tribes trekked eastward along the foot of the Himalayan mountains, where jungles were less dense and rivers easier to cross. They entered the plains of the Ganges Valley . And some Aryan priests wandered ahead of their tribe and tried to evangelize among the tribes they came upon. They found these societies with a more egalitarian organization than they had, and they despised them for not having kings as autocratic as theirs.
By now, the Aryans had iron tools and weapons, iron having spread eastward through Persia . And with their superior weaponry and self-confidence, the Aryans fought those who resisted their advance, the Aryans believing that their gods were on their side and that resistance from local peoples was inspired by demons. Gradually the Aryans spread over much of the Ganges Valley, clearing land for themselves by calling on their god of fire, Agni.
Some Aryans migrated south along the western coast of the Indian continent, and some Aryans went down the eastern coast, to an area called Kalinga . A few Aryans went as far south as the island that in Hindu literature was called Lanka . And some Aryan priests went as missionaries to southern India, where they found a dark-skinned people called Dravidians. Occasionally the missionaries felt mistreated. They sought the aide of their king, and their king's warrior nobles came south to their rescue. But southern India remained independent of Aryan rule.
The Beginnings of Caste
With the Aryans settling alongside local peoples, a complex hierarchy of classes developed that would be called caste. At the top of this class ranking were the priests and their entire families: the Brahmins. Also at the top were the warrior-aristocrats, the Kshatriyas, whose job it was to practice constantly for combat. Neither the Brahmins nor the Kshatriyas conceded superiority to the other, but they agreed that the other classes were lower than they. The first of these lower classes were the Vaishas and their families: Aryans who tended cattle and served the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in others ways. The lowest class were the conquered, darker, non-Aryans who were servants for the Aryans: the Shudras. The Aryans made these four classifications a part of their mythology. The four groups, it was claimed, came from the body of the god Prajapati, the Brahmins from the god's mouth, the warriors from the god's arms, the tenders of cattle from his legs, and the Shudras from his feet.
This class system was less rigid than it would be centuries later. People from different classes could dine together. A man from a non-Brahmin family could still become a priest and therefore a Brahmin. And although marriage within one's own class was preferred, there was no absolute restriction against marrying people from a different class. Brahmins married women from a lower caste whom they found attractive, but this was a male prerogative. A girl from a Brahmin family was allowed to marry only someone also from a Brahmin family.
A Blending of Pastoral and Agricultural Religion
The Common Era (CE) is equivalent to Christianity's Anno Domini (AD) - in the year of the Lord.
Like the mix between the agricultural religion of the Canaanites and the pastoral religion of the Hebrews, in India a mix developed between the pastoral religion of the Aryans and the local religions of the conquered. This mix came with Aryan males marrying non-Aryan females, and it came with some among the conquered accepting the religion of their conquerors - much as those in the Americas the 1500s CE NOTE would accept the religion of their Christian conquerors. In India this blend of Aryan and local religions became known as Hinduism, a word derived from the Aryan word Sindu, the name the Aryans gave to the Indus River. The Hindu religion ranged from veneration of traditional Aryan gods by urban intellectuals to the worship of a diversity of local, rural, agricultural deities.
Hindu Scripture and Sin
Maybe before and maybe around the same time that writing spread to the Hebrews, it appeared among the Aryans in India. Some Brahmins considered it a sacrilege to change from communicating their religion orally. But a sufficient number of Brahmins supported the innovation, and they put traditional Aryan stories into writing, in what became known as the Vedas - Veda meaning wisdom. The Vedas became wisdom literature, a literature that would be considered an infallible source of timeless, revealed truth.
The most important of the Vedas was the Rig Veda, which consisted of hymns or devotional incantations of 10,562 written lines in ten books. Another Veda, the Yajur Veda, focused less on devotional incantations and more on sacrificial procedures as a means of pleasing the gods. A third Veda, the Sama Veda, was mainly concerned with the god Indra. Indra was now seen as the god that had created the cosmos, the ruler of the atmosphere, and the god of thunderbolts and rain - Dyaus Pitar having diminished in importance. Also mentioned in the Sama Veda were other gods of the sky and atmosphere: Varuna, guardian of the cosmic order; Agni, the god of fire; and Surya, the sun. A fourth Veda, the Atharya Veda, was a collection of 730 hymns, totaling six thousand stanzas, containing prescriptions for prayer, rituals for curing diseases, expiations against evils, protection against enemies and sorcerers, and prescriptions for creating charms for love, health, prosperity, influence, and a long life.
Among the Vedas were descriptions of funeral rites that included cremation, and there were descriptions of lengthy and solemn rituals for marriage. The Vedas implied that humanity is basically good, and, in contrast to the view of sin in West Asia, sin among the Hindus was viewed as a force from outside oneself - an invader. Hinduisms's Vedas saw evil as the work of demons that might take the form of a human or some other creature, which could be removed by the prayers and rituals of priests.

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