Welcome to our next digital lecture, a basic introduction to the people of ancient India. Here I will tell you about the development of Harappan civilization, as well as about its demise after the arrival of the Aryans. I will also discuss the development and nature of the caste system, the innovative social structure of ancient India. This lecture is meant to work together with our lecture on Hinduism, ancient Indian's earliest original religion, upon which India's caste system was based. Together, these two lectures will help you make sense of the assigned excerpts from The Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's core texts. In The Bhagavad Gita, as you will see, the conquering Aryans created and justified a social structure based on the duty that each member of society owed to the gods.
The history of Ancient India began roughly 6,000 years ago, that is, close to 4,000 B.C.E. Around this time, agricultural people settled the lower region of the Indus River Valley. Closely dependent on the river, Ancient India is the third river valley civilization we discuss in this class. Similarly to other river valley civilizations, the original creation of civilization in India, which from now on we will call Harappan Civilization, was built around the creation of the efficient government and social order necessary for formalized agriculture. As we have seen previously, in a cycle of ever-growing complexity, once the population became sedentary and continued to grow, ever larger supplies of food become necessary, requiring the creation of a bureaucracy to organize the production of food, and a defense system to protect the land upon such surplus is produced. Roughly a thousand years after the initial settlement of this area, the existing communities became increasingly sophisticated, as the peoples of Harappan civilization developed advanced technologies, not only in agriculture but in architecture and politics as well. A recent excavation of the area shows that there were two major cities around which Harappan civilization grew. One is called Harappa, for which the whole civilization was named; the other is Mohenjo-Daro. These excavations have allowed scholars a pretty comprehensive picture of how early Indians lived, as you'll see in the slides that follow. From material remains found at these sites, among other things, we have learned that the people of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro spoke the language and had the physical characteristics of the people who live in the Deccan Plateau, that is, on the Northern part of the Indian sub-continent, today. What this means is that the original creators of civilization in India are the direct ancestors of modern people's in the area, making ancient Indian history part of the living culture of India today, something that cannot be said to the same degree of the peoples of Mesopotamia or Egypt whom we have already studied.
To make certain that you can situate Harappan civilization in relation to other river valley civilizations, here is a map of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the eastern Asian continent. Right smack in the middle of it, within the box, is the area in which Harappan civilization developed. As you can tell, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were both built along the edges of the river, in the Northern part of India, not quite yet in the sub-continent itself. In the far left of the map are the Nile River and the outline of the territory of the Egyptian civilization. To Egypt's right, highlighted in purple, are the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers and the surrounding territory in which Mesopotamian civilization developed. Notice that, although we don't have specific dates for when these civilizations rose, the three developed more or less at the same time. Equally important, all three had contact with each other, particularly through trade. Commerce between Egypt, Mesopotamia and India basically depended on either an overland route or a water route. I want you to pay close attention to the over land route, because this overland route remained the same for centuries, later becoming the Silk Road, about which you will learn in greater detail in future interactions.
To describe Harappan Civilization, I would like to list and explain the attributes it shared with other river valley civilizations. The most basic commonality is the fact that Harappan civilization was urban (that is, centered in cities). Nevertheless, it depended on agricultural production for its survival. Most of what we know about the urban nature of ancient India comes from the two major excavations I mentioned before, that of Harappa itself and that of Mohenjo-Daro. In several slides to come, you will see the complex urban environment which these excavations have unearthed. For now, you should note that the cities were fortified, that is, protected by peripheral walls. Also, the cities were built around a citadel, a fortified building which served three purposes: 1) it was the royal residence, 2) it housed the major temple, and 3) served as the physical center of the bureaucracy. The second common trait of river valley civilizations shared by the Harappans is the fact that it developed from very early on a highly organized and structured government. In its earliest history, the Dravidians were pastoral peoples organized at the local level into villages. However, as early as 3000 B.C.E. Harappans developed a centralized monarchy, in which the King was ultimate ruler, but counted on the help of a ruling elite. Most importantly, the monarchy had a theocratic base. That is, the king was believed to have been chosen by the gods and to be a direct intermediary between man and the gods. The highly structured nature of Harappan government is seen in the centralization of power upon the king and in the sophisticated standardization of the tools of government; this is, in fact, the third similarity among river valley civilizations. To explain this let me go a bit more into detail. Harappan kings made standard sized streets, which facilitated transportation and therefore trade, and they created a standard system of weights and measures to assure ease of trade and less cheating along the whole kingdom. More importantly, Harappan kings created a standard written language about which, sadly, we know little. In following slides you will see samples of the Harappan written language. In terms of its economy, like Egypt and Mesopotamia, Harappa depended on agriculture. Their main staples were wheat, barley and peas. Harappans are particularly important as an early civilization because they were the first ones to grow cotton. Like both Egypt and Mesopotamia, as I mentioned in the map slide, Harappa also had an extensive trading network. Their most important exports were textiles and foodstuffs.
Although Harappan civilization had much in common with other river valley civilizations, it nevertheless differed from them in two crucial ways. To begin, in its earliest development, Harappan religion was monotheistic. Although, as we will see, this changed dramatically over time, the earliest Dravidians believed in a single goddess, a goddess of fertility most easily understood along the lines of "Mother Earth". Although we do not know much about this goddess, her worship involved rituals of purification that required both bathing pools and people to lead the rituals. These people were court priests who lived in the citadels I mentioned previously. A second important difference between Harappa and other river valley civilizations is the role of their cultural production. Harappa was as sophisticated as Sumer or Egypt, if not more so, but their cultural emphasis lay in other areas. For example, their architecture was quite advanced, based on the making and usage of standard, durable bricks. However, their architecture was purely functional, technologically cutting-edge but without any decorative, extra elements. Thus, while architecture was the highpoint of Mesopotamian and Egyptian art, for Harappans it was not architecture but pottery and sculpture that were their most important artforms, in both of which they seem to have excelled. In cultural terms, we should also note that no Harappan literature survives, and that the only proof we have of their advanced linguistic system are a series of engraved seals. There seem to have been over 400 characters in their written language, which seems to have been mostly used by bureaucrats and merchants.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this lecture, almost everything we know about Harappan civilization comes from the archeological excavations done at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. The next nine slides take you through a brief tour of the excavation and its findings. This slide pictures one of the central areas excavated at the Harappa site. From it and others like it archeologists have concluded many of the facts I presented in previous slides. In this particular picture you can see the complexity of the city plan and of the architecture itself. Also visible is the advanced engineering of the city's drainage. The city in fact had running water, and each house had its own bathing area which, in a feat of advanced technology, drained directly into the city's sewer system. Finally, and perhaps most obvious, are the foundations of the city's defensive walls, silent witnesses that this period must have seen its share of war.
This picture is a modern artist's rendition of how Harappa looked like during its zenith, or high point. The drawing is based on the findings at the excavation sites, particularly the layout visible in the picture in the previous slide. This rendition shows the rectilinear plan of the city, its multiple high walls and narrow streets, and gives an overall sense of the level of activity likely to have taken place in Harappa on a daily basis.