Robinson - The Indus: lost civilizations

THE INDUS

LOST CIVILIZATIONS

The books in this series explore the rise and fall of the great civilizations and peoples of the ancient world. Each book considers not only their history but their art, culture and lasting legacy and asks why they remain important and relevant in our world today.

ANDREW ROBINSON

REAKTION BOOKS

For Asko Parpola
Scholar, decipherer and friend

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2015
Copyright Andrew Robinson 2015

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780235417

CONTENTS

Bust of the priest-king, from Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley.

I n Civilisation, Kenneth Clarks study of Western civilization based on his pioneering 1960s television series, the eminent art historian pondered the non-Western origins of civilization two-and-a-half millennia before the classical Greeks. He observed:

three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but also in the Indus valley; another was in the sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasnt reached again for two thousand years but also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled.

Ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia are familiar to the world, because of their art, architecture and royal burials; their extensive texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform; and numerous references to the Egyptian pharaohs and Babylonian and Persian rulers in the Hebrew Bible and Greek and Roman literature. So, too, are the glories of classical Greece and, maybe less so, the spirituality of Buddhist India (roughly contemporary with Greek philosophy) and early Hindu India as expressed in the Vedic literature (probably composed between 1500 and 500 BC). Not so familiar, however, is the civilization that appeared in the Indus valley in what is now Pakistan and India during the first half of the third millennium BC.

The Indus civilization was, in its own way, as extraordinary as the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. But it declined around the nineteenth century BC and left no direct legacy in the Indian subcontinent. Neither Alexander the Great, who invaded India from the northwest in the fourth century BC, nor Asoka Maurya, the great Buddhist-oriented emperor who ruled most of the subcontinent in the third century BC, was even dimly aware of the Indus civilization; nor were the Arab, Mughal and European colonial rulers of India during the next two millennia. Indeed, amazing as it may seem, the Indus civilization remained altogether invisible until the 1920s, when it was almost accidentally discovered at Harappa in the Punjab by British and Indian archaeologists (during Clarks youth). Ever since then, scholars have been trying to elucidate its mysteries, including the meanings encoded in the characters of its aesthetically exquisite but stubbornly undeciphered writing system, and thereby to elevate this most significant of lost civilizations to the position it deserves both in the history of South Asia and in world history.