Meluhha: the Indus Civilization and its Contacts with Mesopotamia

0:17 I wanted to welcome you all here this evening uh to uh our um our uh May members lecture and it's really a pleasure to uh to welcome uh uh tonight's speaker. One one of the things that I think is of greatest value about uh being at the University of Chicago and especially at the Oriental Institute is the fact that we have such a broad community of scholars and such a broad community of interests. And it's it's really interesting to try and look for linkages between areas where we might not normally seek connections. And tonight's lecture, I think, is a perfect exemplar of the

1:05 tremendous value of making these kinds of connections, of looking beyond uh the areas with which we uh spend most of our time. Uh, of course, the Oriental Institute focuses on the the ancient uh, Middle East, but it's the connections outward that uh, add a tremendous dimension of richness to our understanding of these ancient civilizations. And the connections between uh the Indis Valley and Mesopotamia, I think, are one of the most uh striking examples of connections and relationships that can really enrich our understanding of both of those civilizations in a way that we wouldn't

1:50 have if we just looked at them in isolation. And it's to my mind impossible to find a better person to explore those interconnections than uh uh Mark Kenoyer. Um Mark is uh a professor of uh anthropology and uh currently the uh the chair of the anthropology department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He's uh has a very very deep involvement with the culture and archaeology of the uh South Asian subcontinent both India and Pakistan. He grew up in India and he speaks um uh Hindi and Bangla fluently.

2:36 He knows Sanskrit. Uh in fact uh he went to school with what was it? Mave's um mom. Uh so there's that's yet another connection. Not that there was any kind of inside fix in inviting him here, but uh Mark is a a remarkable uh scholar. He's been excavating at Harapa, the the type site from which the entire Harapen civilization is named. He's been working there since 1986. And the the uh main focus of his research has been on the Harapenor Indis Valley civilization. And his interests are uh we we each have different sort of ways into understanding ancient civilizations

3:21 and and the pathway that Mark has really um distinguished himself in is using ancient technology as a window into the Indis culture. And he's been able to do this both as an archaeologist and as an anthropologist and also drawing on his very deep knowledge of of Indian culture uh from having grown up there and he carries this uh focus on technology in very interesting directions. It's a mark of I think a really great uh scholar that you can focus on very very tiny details and draw from them deep fundamental synthetic understandings of a culture and that's something uh in which uh Mark uh really excels and has for a long

4:07 time. uh he he received his uh bachelor's degree uh master's and PhD all from the University of California Berkeley where he worked with George Dales who is one of the leading figures in the study of the um the Indis Valley um Harapen civilization. He's written numerous books and articles um on both his work at Harappa and on the technologies of third millennium um and second millennium uh India and I I can attest to the the uh the interest of this kind of technological approach. I I I remember visiting um market in Madison once and seeing the uh the class projects from a course he taught on ancient technology. And I I think the

4:54 the best item you had there was uh I think you uh one of the students had taken a baseball bat and had stuck into it all these razor sharp obsidian blades and had recreated an Aztec fighting sword, I believe. And I thought this is finally useful knowledge in a college education. So, uh this is clearly a man of formidable intellect and um formidable abilities and um he's exactly the person to talk to us on tonight's topic, Malua, the Indivilization and its connections with Mesopotamia. So, please join me in welcoming Jonathan Mark Canoyer.

5:42 Thank you, Gil. It's really great to be here. Um, I I kind of got into archaeology from coming to this institute as a kid. My father was from Gary. We had come up here and see things and I started in biblical archaeology. I actually did two years in Wheaten College before I realized that it wasn't quite for me and I moved to Berkeley. Um they prayed they told me they would pray for me in Berkeley and I I think their prayers worked because I've had a very successful career in South Asian archaeology. Um I'd like to thank Gil for inviting me and the Oriental Institute for having me down here again. Some of you may remember I gave a talk in 1999 on the end of civilization in 2000 BC. Well, I'm going to give you a span today that goes from about 3,500 BC to about 1900 BC. So I'm going to cram a

6:29 bit more in the same time period. I also want to thank the department of archaeology and museums uh government of Pakistan and the archaeological survey of of India. A second I forgot to turn my mic on here. uh the archaeological survey of India uh for allowing me to work in both countries uh to do research on the ancient uh civilization that is in those regions and also all my colleagues who have shared their data and knowledge with me as I've worked in these regions. I had lots of funding uh I want to acknowledge that especially uh harapa.com which is a colleague of mine has set up a site called wwwharapa.com. If you ever need any images you're welcome to go there and download them. uh the more images we see on the indis

7:14 valley the more people understand about this region and also global heritage fund which is trying to help now to build a museums on the indis in India and I'm working with the Pakistan government for similar museums in Pakistan the um region that we know of as the Indis Valley is one of the largest areas covered by any early civilization and it's not trying to make it bigger and better than anything else it just is different because to cover and encompass a large area requires different technologies, different ways of integration and we can use that to understand that what's happening in Indis Valley may be different from what was going on in other regions. Uh earlier scholars used to think of these areas as being isolated. I think we know now very clearly that these regions have

8:00 been connected through trade networks and movement of goods and I'll talk about that a bit today. Um but the even though people do interact and we know that there's a lot of genes flowing across these regions as well as knowledge, people make decisions about their culture based on their needs. So they're not going to adopt anything. They're not going to change anything unless they really need it and it works for them. So each of these civilizations evolved on their own trajectory using what worked best for them even though there may have been some knowledge flowing in between. The um chronology that I put up here gives you a a general idea of the the framework which we can use to compare them. And we see that people were developing early food producing commodities and domestication of plants

8:45 and animals about the same time. The blue area uh shows you the period of regional cultural development. And regional culture refers to different styles of pottery, different ways of living, different ways of organizing your society so that you can interact and also trade. And then the red shows the beginnings of urbanism and city states and the establishment of hierarchical social organization that evolves in some areas. Um each of these regions has it evolving at different times and depending on who you who you listen to. Uh developing cities was not always the best thing that people did. It would have been much more fun to be hunter gatherers living out there spending most of your time you know hunting, gathering and making love and relaxing rather than trying to make a living. uh which is what you do when

9:32 you're in a city. So, Mesopotamia was the first region that had to break down and figure out how to integrate people in urbanism. Then we see Egypt, then the Indis Valley, and eventually China. The Indis Valley itself is not in isolation even within South Asia. It didn't just emerge in a in a hinterland of a bunch of hunter gatherers, but there were many other complex cultures evolving in the subcontinent. We see them in Buchasan to the west of the Indis Valley. We see that in the Malva Rajasthan region to the east and then other areas back which is now northern Afghanistan uh Turkmanistan and the Helmand region which if you read your papers you know the Taliban are still very strongly in control in the Kandahar area and the area of the Helmund the Ganga of India

10:18 which is the major aluvial plane to the east and then the Dean which is the core area of the subcontinent all of these surrounding regions had a role to play in the emergence of Indis civilization and the cultures that we see in the technologies. Eventually, these regions become incorporated into a new form of urbanism which we can uh we refer to as the Indogangetic tradition which is when we see the first empires emerging in South Asia. That doesn't happen until about 300 to 400 BC during the Morian Empire. Um I won't be talking about the entire tra trajectory today but I would like to give the big picture so you understand the indis is part of a long-term trajectory of tradition that that eventually connects to later historical south Asia. I'm going to

11:05 start with the first phase of urban of development in the aluvial plane where we eventually see the urban center of Harapa emerging. And I've been working at Harapa since 1986 and we have a very good collection of data that helps us understand the emergence of cities and their linkages to surrounding areas. The first people who lived at Harapa settling down there uh were already connected to all areas of the Indis Valley. They were getting shell from the sea. They were getting minerals from the west and the east and the north and bringing these to this uh aluvial plane and using them to make different types of objects. So they had vast networks that were connecting them to a whole region around them. Um the mound that you see at Harapa uh

11:52 today is about 17 m above the surrounding plane. And when the first settlers came, this plane was flat as you would see in the base. And all of that mound is the result of human cultural development over the generations. In the very earliest levels of this mound is where we see the first village. And in this village we see evidence for uh different types of handbuilt pottery. Um pottery made only not with not with a wheel but by turning it on a piece of potshirt and building it by hand, painting it with various decorative designs. And on some of this pottery we start seeing two different types of inscriptions. One is what we could call a potter's mark inscribed on the pottery prior to its being fired. And this is a kind of mark that you see in many parts of the world used for identification. If your

12:39 sister-in-law and you are making pottery and she's not very good and her pots always break, you at least know that your pots are the ones that survive the kiln. So the the uh potter's marks are probably used for identification and don't necessarily connect with writing. They continue on through history and they even are found today. But along with this we see potters markings on pottery that happened after the potters had made the pottery. And this is what I think is the beginnings of the writing tradition of the indis valley. You see example on the left um which shows three signs that connect together to create a more complex motif which I'll show you later might be an ancestral sign to some of the later writing system itself. So this dates to around 3,300 BC which is about the same time that we see writing

13:24 developing in Mesopotamia in Egypt and also in China. U not all people argue that the Chinese potter's marks and painting on pottery is writing. I think it is. Um we also see at Harapa during this early phase the development of ideologies and those ideologies reflect a cosmology a way to see the universe that helps to establish their social organization. One of these signs is the swastika and all we have in Harapa is this tiny little fragment of what is the edge of a swastika and most people normally associate swastika with Nazis and later time period in history but swastika has there's swastikas dating from the you know very early periods Samara period in Mesopotamia there are swastikas from

14:10 cave paintings in India 10,000 BC and this swastika in India we think represents order out of chaos if you have chaos You divide it into four quarters. You turn it in the right direction. It brings profit and benefit to society. Harapen houses during this time period were oriented north, south and east, west there. Whether they were made of mudbrick or whether they were made with reeds and waddle and dab. We also see ornament styles developing which indicate hierarchy uh among the social communities at Harapa. shell bangles which have to come from the coast 800 kilometers away and they were being made at Harappa and you can make them thin or thick. Women who do heavy labor have to wear thick bangles because if you are chopping wood and you're wearing thin bangles they will break. So where women wearing thin

14:57 bangles we can assume are doing less manual labor and less heavy duty labor than women who are wearing thick bangles. People who wear clay bangles they're cheaper to make. Anybody and their mother can go down to the river, get clay, fire them, make bangles. So here you start seeing the the hierarchy of technologies that are used to reinforce social order. Um the during the Ravi phase we see um trade networks emerging that link all over. The first map I showed you was one that I did based on my uh limited knowledge of source areas. And Randall Law who is happening to is happens to be here. Raise your hand Randy. Um he has just finished his PhD in Madison. He did his dissertation looking at every piece of rock we excavated from Harapa and finding where the sources were. So this is his map showing the precise locations

15:44 or as close as we can get to where those pieces of stone may have come. And it tells us that the Ravi phase people primarily got their stuff from the north, but they also got things like carnelon from way in the south in Gujarat and Kutch. And they me developed very specialized types of drills for making beads and they made carnelon and lapis and jasper and all kinds of hard stone beads that require special drilling technologies. They also still continued to make clay beads. So people could have different styles of ornaments of different qualities. And so this is the time period. So the ravi phase goes from about 3,300 BC or maybe 3,500 BC to about 2,800 BC. And this is a time period when we see development of villages and throughout Mesopotamia and

16:29 networks of trade linking different cities in Mesopot or towns in Mesopotamia. Um and it's the question is whether or not Harapens would have had any contact with this region at this early time frame. Um recently uh not recently but um several years ago there was an exhibit in the Met called uh early cities. Um and in that exhibit I was able to see that middle cylinder seal which I've seen in publications for years and everyone is called a limestone seal. But I did my doctoral dissertation on shells, shell industries of the Indis Valley. And there's one species of shell found only in the coast of Karach that has a thick central column that can get up to 3 cm in diameter. It's the only species in the world that has that thick

17:15 of a column. And that shell is made that seal is made from that shell. And this is a late Uruk gem or gemdnaser period seal that dates between 3,300 and 2900 BC. So this indicates that sometime even before the Harapen cities and the Mesopotamian cities had emerged there were trade connections linking Mesopotamia and the Indis Valley and they were bringing shell a valuable material to make cylinder seals to Mesopotamia. What were the Indis people getting in return? I'll talk about that in a minute because they had to get something back for trading across such a large distance. By about 2,800 at Harappa, we start seeing the settlement itself grow from a small village to a large town. And this town was divided into two sectors that

18:02 were um adjacent to each other. Both of them had massive walls built around them. And these walls were clearly not for defense because you don't build two walled settlements right next to each other. Uh but they had the walls were primarily for control of access into and out of the settlement. So controlling trade and controlling materials and controlling the politics of a part of your settlement. They may have protected from bandits or something outside but the main focus would have been control. And this dates from about 2,800 to 2600 BC and we refer to this as the Kian period settlement. uh to build huge city walls requires new transportation technologies and we know that by the by 2800 ox carts and bullet carts used and we have models of these

18:50 were being used extensively roadways were being developed moving timbers moving bricks mud brick and other commodities and rocks to the city there's a possible early cart fragment at about 3,700 from the ravi phase uh but I only have one fragment and I can't write a dissertation on one fragment but I still think there's evidence of that and we have evidence from other sites in India uh a site called Gueraw which has wheels that date to about the same time period. So wheeled carts were being developed in the Indis Valley at the same time that they were being developed somewhere in the steps of Central Asia or Europe and I think we have evidence of multiple locations for the invention of wheeled vehicles. Um these walls that were first developing the ones in blue were made

19:35 primarily of mud brick. They didn't fire and use fired brick at this time, but they spent a lot of time building these walls. And I've calculated how much time it would take, and it would take about 450 men or men, women, children, uh, about 3 months to build the first city wall around, uh, the settlement of Harapa. Um, with, you know, concerted effort. The walls that they built were used to enclose a settlement that was laid out in a grid pattern with north, south, and east, west streets. We can see the cart tracks on these streets that start at 2,800 and those same streets were used throughout the Harapen history until 2600 and 1900. And we can see and the ones that you see there are at 2200 BC directly above the earlier ones that I've been able to map in this street. So

20:21 these early roads once they were established m were maintained for throughout the history of the settlements. Um in some areas of the site we see the development during the code DG phase of complex craft technologies that were used to create items of high value using artificial technologies meaning firing something to make something that was artificial. So fance is a is a frit. It's a ground rock that you fire and heat and you glaze and it has a glazed surface. The one you see in the bottom right is kind of bleached out, but it originally would have been blue. And that blue color was probably rep imitating turquoise. Turquoise is very hard to get in the Indis Valley. It would have had to come from Iran across all of

21:06 Afghanistan into that region. But they liked it enough that they invented a fake turquoise which you can see in fance and they use that extensively. They also built uh furnaces and kils in certain houses and in other houses there is no evidence of crafts. So clearly some people were doing crafts, some people were controlling them. At this time we also see the beginnings of the appearance of of a lot of silver and gold ornaments. And some of these are found in hordes. Some of them are found lost on a street. And another study that Randall Law is doing is to trace out where the silver comes from in the Indis Valley. And silver can be traced by looking at lead isotopes. Silver is associated with lead ores. and he's been able to find that a lot of the silver of the Indis Valley comes

21:52 from Baluchistan but then there's some silver we don't know where it comes from and we know that Mesopotamia was famous for its silver and the Anatolian plateau was famous for its silver so possibly some of that material is coming from those regions and I'm hoping that uh we can develop a project with the Oriental Institute to test the silver here which we know is from Mesopotamia and see if we can't match up some of the stuff from the Indis Valley. So when you have silver and gold, it means that some people are getting pretty wealthy. And when you lose silver buttons or gold buttons on the street and don't bother to pick them up, clearly you have enough that it's not going to matter. So some people were getting wealthy enough to be able to control and dominate these cities. Um we Randall has also done a map of the raw materials from the Kot Diji phase and we see a lot of different

22:40 new types of raw materials being used. This indicates that people are out there prospecting and trying to find new competitive resources using to break into a market. You can imagine old families that have control of the church or the steotite and now somebody finds a new source and comes into the market and sells it cheaper. So this type of competition results in growth and expansion and the harapans began expanding and getting many new sources for raw materials during this time period. Predominantly, they're still to the north, but some extending now to the south. The people who control these resources began to demonstrate their power through an a continued use of writing and seals and weights and ceilings to control

23:25 goods being stored in store rooms. And I don't have time to go into all of this tonight, but I just wanted to give examples of some of the the button seals that we have. A ceiling that was clearly used to close the store room, a broken seal that they were making with an elephant motif. And elephants are an indigenous South Asian motif. So clearly these are local elites using their local animals. and then a a weight which was standardized probably for weighing gold or silver dust very high value but small volume material. The pottery itself shows beginnings of a lot more signage than had been found in the Ravi phase. I also have a bigger sample, but uh on the top line you see some of the Ravi symbols that are postfiring graffiti and directly beneath

24:11 them you'll see the signs that I think connect to the Ravi phase uh graffiti that show the development of a Harapen style of writing or early haren quote DG phase writing and eventually on the seal you'll see harapen writing which is during the formal phase which is using those same signs. So we can trace now the beginnings of writing symbols, their evol evolution and then eventual cotification and use in formal seals from around 3,300 BC to 2600 BC. This 2600 BC is when we see the beginnings of what is called the Harapa phase and some people refer to this as mature harapen but technically that word is not accurate. the um period of time the the Indis civilization or Indis tradition Harapa

24:58 phase refers to a time frame between 2600 and 1900 BC 700 years of integration using various mechanisms and it's during this time period that we see many cities emerging and they were all probably getting emerging in the same trajectory as Harapa so Muhenjadaro co uh Harapa Rakari Ganala Dol vera these are big cities located along two major rivers and the Indis river is the one that's flowing today but in antiquity there is also another river called the Saratisi in the north it also has the name Gagar or Hakra and N has four different names as you go down its length today and it's now dry but it had many cities of the ancient civilization along its banks.

25:44 So this is the the regions that are integrated by these cities. Who were the rulers? Uh these rulers had names. They used a writing system that wrote down their names and their genealogies and their linkages, but we can't read it. The main reason we cannot read it is because there is no bilingual text that has allowed us to break this writing system. We would not be able to read kuneaoiform if we did not ha if we hadn't had found the basoon inscription. We would not be able to read hieroglyphics if we didn't have the Rosetta Stone. So we can we can't read the indis until we have the similar bilingual text and it hasn't been found yet. Um, and we've been looking for over 150 years orund and some years. Um, but it's it is a writing system and it

26:29 probably codifies names or uh um positions. One of the most common symbols on these seals is not an animal that we have living today. It's a mythological animal, an animal that was created by the Indis people as a symbol of one of their communities. And this is the unicorn. And this unicorn is shown in the three-dimensional figurines. It's shown in pro on a seal in a two-dimensional way and but it's clearly not a bull seen from the side with only one horn showing and um I don't have time to go into all of the data for this but we have many figurines from many sites that show an idea of a unicorn but we have no animal bones for it. We've looked in every site but there is no unicorn animal bones. So clearly it's a myth and we just have to accept it as

27:14 that. um in this writing uh the question of writing is how what language was it codifying and I don't think it was probably codifying any single language I think it had it probably was codifying multiple languages if uh scholars had been a little more open to understanding ancient cultures they would not have tried to figure out ancient Mesopotamian languages Mesopotamian but they would have realized that many linguistic groups live in this area kuneaoiform is used to write many languages and they didn't figure this out until much later but now we know that it is in fact used for many different languages. So the languages that would have been present are protoravidian which is a language mainly spoke in parts of southern p or in southern Pakistan and buchchasan southern India mundari which is a tribal language

28:01 spoken in a belt all the way across central India to southeast Asia Indo-Aran languages which are in the north syotibetan languages which are in the very far north um probably in the areas where Afghanistan and the lapis sources are and then language X which is a language system that was the first language that people used to name animals and trees and plants and plows and sickles that is still embedded in Hindi and Udu today. So 60% of the names for those types of materials found in modern South Asian Hindi and Uru cannot be traced to any modern language family. So they are the Neolithic language that was there at the very beginning. It was written from right to left and we can tell that by pottery uh writing on pottery and it's found on a wide variety

28:48 of materials. So people who used indis writing had a versatile use for it. They used it in many different ways. Stamping materials, writing on cones, using tokens that may have been used for credit or exchange or ritual. Uh and it was used on pottery and we see it also being produced in workshops that were highly regulated. You couldn't just go and set up a workshop to make seals anytime you wanted to or writing. This was controlled by the state or by some elites and very prescribed and only a few parts of the sites were where we find evidence for producing writing. Uh when they did use it, they used it in various mechanisms and this top left hand slide shows ceilings on a lump of clay with four different seals. So four

29:35 people with different seals stamped a piece of clay. That's corporate ownership or bureaucracy. So four people have inspected the goods. They know it's been passed. You can send it out of the city or all four of us own it equally. And this is attesting to our ownership. We also have large seals that may never have been stamped into anything because they're very big and awkward. They may have been symbols. And then we have circular seals which were used by traders in the Gulf and they used the Indis writing system. But statistical analysis of this writing system on the Indis seals from the Indis Valley and the circular Gulf seals shows that the sequence of signs is not the same. Now English can be wred to write Mong, Vietnamese,

30:21 English, French. So the same alphabet can be used to write many different languages. And the sequence of those signs is not going to be the same in those different languages. So here we have an example of indescript being used to write gulf language whatever it is. Um the indiscals in the last phase around 1900 BC also show a very subtle change in this sequence of writing. And I'm working with two scientists in India today may via and nisha yadav at the Tata Institute for fundamental research. One's an astronomer, the other one's a statistician. And we're trying to analyze the sequence of signs on different types of seals. And preliminary results suggest that there are new signs coming in in the later

31:07 time period when we can date certain seals to being late. And other signs appear early and disappear. So this suggests that the writing system was changing over time and possibly new languages came in. When Egyptian hieroglyphs um started, there was no word for horse. But when horse was introduced into Egypt, there's all of a sudden a new hieroglyph for horse and that came from somewhere else. So that word for horse clearly wasn't Egyptian. And we can see that. And so I think we're going to see that kind of thing happening in in this writing system. Indis writing was also used for ideology and its linked ideology was key to understanding its eventual disappearance. So we see it associated with rituals and um events that are happening. And here you see a a deity in

31:54 a tree with worshippers and a procession uh and writing in the top frame there. Uh the presence of trees as a motif also suggests that this may explain why we don't have any large physical temples in the Indis Valley. There's no big structure that we can call a temple and no area that we can call a ritual space. So they may have been doing it outside under trees which is still a common place for rituals in South Asia today. We know they did have rituals and these are depicted on images and narratives that are found on seals. But these seals occur during the last phase of the in this period which is between 2200 and 1900 BC. Um the kinds of narratives that we see a deity grabbing two tigers by the throat standing on an elephant and a wheel

32:40 above the head. Now, those of you with Mesopotamian background would say, "Well, that's the Gilgamesh epic translated into India." Um, I would argue no. Um, Gilgamesh is an epic of the ancient times. It's not something that we can identify with a specific time period when heroes could grab two lions by the throat. That was probably in the Paleolithic. It was a very, very deep tradition that goes very very it's very old in in history. In South Asia, the same kinds of paleithic myths were probably present. And I think that they're translating this into their own regional ideas and that it has doesn't have to spread from one area to the other, but they're emerging at the same time. A guy talking to a tiger um from a tree. It's a safe place to be when you talk to tigers. Um and the sacrifice of

33:26 a water buffalo using a trident like uh spear, a deity sitting in yogic position in front of it. These are narratives which we will never be able to to explain fully until we know the writing system. But we can see how those narratives are copied and followed in later iconography in South Asia. The killing of the water buffalo represents a deity conquering a power that is disturbing the balance of the universe and is a sacrificial form that is seen today in some of the tantric iconography. So this is a goddess killing the uh evil water buffalo demon. Um the water buffalo was a a motif that was spread to Mesopotamia from the Indis Valley. Um some scholars are wondering whether water buffaloos might also have been domesticated in the lower uh

34:12 Euphrates uh basin in Bastra area, but so far there's no concrete evidence for that. The iconography of the seals and the iconography of this Aadian uh cylinder seal suggests that the motif and the animals probably came from the indis and the way it was incorporated into indis into Mesopotamian iconography. So water buffaloos are great to have. They have good good milk and we know from Mesopotamian texts that they were kept in the temples and used as special offering animals uh and watered for the deities. Um we also have some new seals that have just come out. Uh this is from the site of Dol Vera um which is uh been excavated by Dr. Bisht from the archaeological survey of India. This one has a very complex motif showing a giant

34:57 holding two people by the waist and does it's not clear if the giant is going to bite their heads off or what. Um and on the other side is a deity a horned deity with possibly um upraised arm. We don't know what's in it. And then another deity or horned figure bowing down. So when we do see evidence of conflict on seals, it's usually between supernatural beings or between humans and animals, but never between people at the same level. Yoga is another important uh technology that was being developed in Indis and yoga is used today in South Asia for developing power, internal power, meditation and uh it seems to have been something that was being developed in

35:43 Indis cities as a part of their religious ideology and probably also a mechanism linked with writing which we see on this top seal. In later periods, yoga can be used and it was used in Buddhism and giism and Hinduism in various ways. And we're not saying that the Indis people invented all the ways that we see today, but that there's clearly a link between this development in the Indis and later times. So I mentioned before that there's no indication that the walled cities were used for warfare. And we also have no evidence of of people fighting people or killing people or enslaving people. um in India any of the indis iconography. Uh one example that might be um uh an

36:28 exception to this shows two men with spears pointed each at each other and a woman standing between them. Uh this is a a viable reason to fight. Okay. Uh and it's not like warfare against cities, but it's possibly conflict between two communities over a bride. Uh and there's a deity standing beside behind her ready to protect her. Uh, Indis people had spears, they had daggers, but they had no swords. Spears and daggers can be used for lots of things, hunting, and they hunted a water buffalo and elephant and rhinoceros, but we don't have any evidence for war weapons, which would be swords and battle axes of the type that we see in Mesopotamia. Um, none of the cities of the Indis

37:13 Valley have ever been burned and destroyed by warfare. And though many of them on the border areas are have strong walls and defensive gateways, none of them have been attacked. So I think that during the development of Indies, warfare was not one of the mechanisms for integration. The threat of warfare may have been, but not actual warfare. Here's an example of Harapa based on our excavations and a drawing that I've done to try to picture what the city might have looked like. Multiple walled areas right next to each other. Each of them have their own gateways. Outside of some of the walls, you have a settlement which is a caravan sry. So if you come to the city late at night and the gates are closed, you can stay overnight. It's like a motel. Uh the the cemetery was always to the south and west of the

37:59 settlement. And you can see that on the left part of the slide. Um and these city these the craft workshops that we see at Harappa are replicated within each of the walled areas. So we've been able to find shell workshops in each one of the areas. fance workshops, but only one or two seal workshops. So, the one seal workshop I showed you is um in the left part of that central MW area, and that seal workshop produced seals for all of the city. So, clearly some control of production of writing material. But who were the rulers? And we can get some idea of this from some of their their sculpture. And um this figure of a priest king or large image of a of a male with a beard has been thought to

38:46 have represented one of the elites and it probably is. He may not have been a priest or a king but he was clearly somebody with a lot of power. Originally it would have been painted with red and blue or green and that same type of textile made with matter and indigo is is produced today in South Asia. the the gold bead on his forehead. We found an exact identical one in our excavations at Harappa. Um these elites would have been distinguished by their textiles and we have evidence for textiles made of cotton and wool. And most recently we have threads of silk that were used to thread ornaments of uh copper ornaments and beads, micro beads. Uh they didn't weave silk yet, but they use silk for for ornaments. These types of of robed male figures are

39:33 found at other sites do vera and several of them are found at Mohenjidaro. So they may have represented clan leaders or individuals from certain communities who were powerful but they weren't monarchs. They weren't rulers that lasted for the whole or had hierarchical rule over these cities. We also have very elaborately decorated women. And this figure on your left is a Harapen figurine showing a woman with elaborately ornamented necklaces and belts. And we have hordes of this type of jewelry that are buried under floors or behind a wall and hidden away. Uh and that gives us an idea of what they might have been wearing. So silver necklaces, tow rings and finger rings, headbands, carnelon, jasper, agot beads, and this

40:20 beautiful carnelian and bronze belt. In looking through the Mesopotamian figurines, I've come across one figurine from the site of Mari, which has a very distinctive headdress, which is identical to Harapen figurine headdresses. And when I showed this to some of my Mesopotamian colleagues, they just laughed. They said, "No, there's no way. This can't be Harapen." But no other figurines in all of Mesopotamia have this type of headdress. It's only from one site. And Mari happens to have a lot of indis beads and Indis type material in it. So I'm wondering if some of the merchants that were connected between Indis and Mesopotamia might have sealed relationships through marriage. And we know that this happens in later times that you marry your daughter into some family in another city that makes sure that when your goods get there,

41:05 they get the proper credit and you get the things sent back home that you need to have. So anyway, it's something that we can address and I'll talk about how we can do that. We have also evidence for indis materials, beads and lapis lazuli coming from Afghanistan either through Iran or through the indis by by sea ceilings of uh seals from the Gulf and Indis seals as well. So this indicates that we have trade beginning around 2600 BC possibly or maybe even earlier. Um and around 2450 is when I would date most of the materials found in the royal burials at Ore. And we're going to be working on the kish material at the at the Museum of Natural History. And I think that that material probably dates to about the same time.

41:51 Um, figurines that are found at Harapa have very distinctive headdresses which are with flower ornaments and the only figure figures in Mesopotamia with that type of flower ornament are found in the royal burials of Ur. And this is a photo of one of the um serving girls from uh that one of those royal burials. uh during Casper's a uh Dutch archaeologist argued that these were the royal court courters from Mesopotamia coming to the Indis Valley. Well, if they did, they only they they flew because they landed at Harapa and they're not at any other city. Um the question is some ladies from Harapa could have gone the other direction and ended up in Mesopotamia. How do we test this? One way of testing it is through strontium isotope analysis. So strontium

42:38 is a mineral that accumulates in your enamel when you're a child or in your womb and if you can whatever you were you were your mother was eating and what you were eating up to the age of eight becomes a signature. So if Indis people went to Mesopotamia we can find them. If Mesopotamian people came to the Indis we can find them. Just keep that in mind. The other thing about the royal burial is that it's filled with has lots of warriors and serving girls and many of them have cylinder seals uh harp players etc. Some of them have lapis cylinder seals. Lapis comes from Afghanistan and some of them have shell cylinder seals and I was just talking with Gail Stein about the seals that are in this museum collection. Some of them are clearly shell from the Indis Valley. And

43:25 most of the warriors in the royal tomb with Puabi had shell cylinder seals that were from the Indis Valley. So the question is, were they Indis men that were carrying with them a cylinder seal from that region? Um the Indis didn't make cylinder seals. So they sold them the shell and then they carved it in Mesopotamia. um in a later tomb. Um but in the cemetery, you also have this cylinder, this stamp from a pre uh a Persian Gulf ceiling. So there's lots of connections between Indis and the Gulf and Indis and and Mesopotamia at this time period. Even in the later Aadian period when Sargon claims to have ships from Maluca in his court in his port uh we have continued evidence of not only carnelian

44:11 but a dark green stone which is called blood stone and this is being made at a site called Dole Vera on the on in the island of Kutch at this time period in the Acadian period. We also have cylinder seals one of which says this is the seal of a Maluan interpreter. So we know that people were there interpreting for Maluhan traders. We have texts that say that Maluhan villages were there and there's statements by Mesopotamian rulers that they conquered Maluans. Now we have no evidence of Mesopotamians going to the Indis Valley and having warfare but there may have been Maluan villages that had to be put on order and conquered by these rulers. So the Maluans had a presence in Mesopotamia both through trade and actually living there.

44:58 Um, we know also that the craftsmen were there because this is a belt from Harapa or from Mohenadaro made with carnelon. And on the on the right hand side are a bunch of cylinders of of similar beads from the royal burials at Ur. The top four are probably from the Indis Valley and definitely made in the Indis Valley. And I've examined these using various techniques. The bottom one is a stone that we don't have in the Indis Valley, but it's made with the technology of the Indis craftsman. So, I think that the Indis craftsmen were living in Mesopotamia and making things catering to the elites of the Mesopotamian courts. And this is what we're hoping to be able to identify through the study of the Kish beads at the museum. Another example is this top bead on the left

45:43 here, which is a faceted carnelian bead. Mesopotamians liked faceted beads. They made them in lapis. They made them in carnelon. Indis Valley people never faceted their beads and never in any workshop do we have a faceted bead. But clearly these beads were made by Indis technology and being ca catering to uh Indis uh Mesopotamian elites. I'm looking at trade from the Indis Valley to Mesopotamia and that's been my focus today. Uh we also have evidence of trade from the Indis Valley to Central Asia. we have trade uh and some of the beads from Central Asia may have eventually gotten to China. And in August, I'm going to China to study these beads that you see on the top right. They come from Western Joe period tombs that date to about 1500 BC, a

46:29 thousand years after the end of period uh when they were being made. But in China, things were curated and handed down often from generation to generation and then put in tombs. And eventually they probably started copying them. The lower ones are probably copies. And so I'm hoping to see if we can trace that that trade and technology to a further distant area. So I want to continue just a bit more about the technology of these um indis beads because you need to show I need to tell you how I can prove that they're indis technology. The indis people developed techniques for drilling that were unique. They found a specific type of stone that is very hard. We still have not been able to find the source of it. And that stone I've called Ernestite after Ernest McKay who's

47:15 actually first found drills in Kish who he claims were from the Indis Valley or he says that they may be and we're going to look for them in the collections now. Um but I've never seen a photograph of them. And these black stones here are nestite drills. They were used for drilling these long carnelian beads. The top drills over on the right, most of the brown ones are ch. They're not hard enough to drill carnelian and you can't drill through long beads with them. So, the indis developed a special drilling technique and we can study it by taking drill hole impressions. And I do this the same way your dentist makes your dentures or your um broken tooth replacement. You stick a gum in your teeth and you take an impression and you make a mold. So, I stick that inside the drills holes of the beads and I pull it out and I can see exactly the surface of

48:01 that drilling um drill hole. So the the bead on the right is an indis carnelian bead and Mesopotamian beads have that same striation and identical surface position and I won't go into the details of how the drilling process works but it's a very uh specialized technology that allows them to drill strong and long uh straight columns right through the center of the bead without making a big hole. Um that technology was used for grinding not drilling not only carnelon but vuvianite. Vuvianite is a dark green stone. It looks like jade and many of the earlier publications called it jade. And Randall Law has found out that this is found only in one part of northern Pakistan and mined in an area then

48:47 brought down into the Indis cities. There's possibly a Vuvianite cylinder seal. He he mentioned to me. So the suvianite clearly came from the indis valley to Mesopotamia. the only way you can carve it without diamonds is with an earnestite drill. And so they used earnestite to drill these very very very hard stones. Um so these cities were there to develop high quality technologies. They controlled it indirectly um through by putting a wall around the cities. Anybody coming in or out had to pay taxes and you don't have to have warfare to conquest conquer an entire region. Just put a wall around your settlement and have a couple guards there. And then then that way you can control. They used very complex weight systems that were

49:32 highly standardized and the same between all of the cities and they have a weights a very highly standardized calibration that is almost identical between every city and it's they're cubical weights. We also have some truncated spherical weights that for conform to the same industry of certain other commodities but overall it's the same weight system. Um there is a similarity to the Egyptian beas system but this is possibly coincidence. Um and there is no indication that Egyptian connect there was an Egyptian connection between the Indis Valley uh Mesopotamian weight systems were not highly standardized. We have many different weight systems for every different different cities and up to 15 different weight systems or count numbering

50:19 systems for counting different kinds of commodities. So a very different economy than we see in the indis uh indis number systems we can't translate the writing but we can figure out that one slash means one two slashes means two and if you look at this you'll see that four is a very important number. Now four you have four and eight and 12 and 16 and in South Asia even today you count with four fingers and then you count by one two three digits 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 count it and you'll get the number. It's exactly what you get 24 or 12. So you can get the same kind of four counting system that we see in the indis seals that you see in South Asia today. Indis merchants did trade with me with

51:06 central Asia and to do that they had passports. This is a terracotta ceiling with a mess a central Asian seal on one side and a harapen seal on the other and it's found in Muenjidaro. So it means that somebody from central Asia came to to Mujidaro in what's now Pakistan stamped this piece of clay they fired it and they said okay you come up to my little shop in Bactria and you can trade and you know you get credit for X Y and Z. So this indicates these interactions within central Asia. We don't have this. We have for from Mesopotamia to the Indis. We have no Mesopotamian ceiling in the Indis. We only have Harapen ceilings in Mesopotamia. So this suggests that there's a different trade relationship between the Indis and

51:52 Mesopotamia. And my feeling is that Mesopotamian trade was probably through Oman. And it's the Oman intermediaries that were doing this. This isn't my idea. George Dales and many other scholars have proposed it earlier, but we're finding more and more evidence to suggest that this was the main mechanism towards Mesopotamian trade. This is a wig, the fragment on the top right that we found at Harapa. So, some Central Asian merchant with their little idol or home household god came down, but the wig fell off and we found it at Harapa. They took the rest of it home, but we haven't found the rest of the body. uh and in the in the cities we have very clear evidence for um elites and one of the pe one of the arguments that people have had about Indments is you don't have palaces you don't have temples so

52:38 it's not a state it's just a chieftdom but I argue that we do have elites and those elites are the people who are actually buried in Harapan cemeteries um they are healthy adults many of them living to be 35 to 40 years old uh and the males and females are about equal in terms of numbers in these cemeteries is they're not buried with wealth. They're buried only with a few personal ornaments and b shell bangles are usually worn on the left hand of women. What we found is that the women in the early part of the cemetery tend to have wider bangles and the later part of the cemetery have very very thin bangles. So if you remember back to that first thing from the ravi phase, ladies who have thin bangles don't do hard work. So in the last phase of Harapa, the women at Harapa were ordering servants around.

53:24 They were telling them what to make for dinner. They were not making their food because if you try to knead dough with those thin bangles, they would break. And this suggests that these women became more and more elite, more and more removed from physical labor over time at Harappa. Outside the cemetery, we still find these big wide o bangles, big old hunky things. So, they weren't buried in that cemetery, though. These women weren't buried here. They their bangles were taken off and given to somebody else. And these may be the nomadic women or the trader women. We have bangles like this at Souza. We have them in in Iran made from the Indis Valley and taken to Central Asia to Soua. So these were the women who were the traders and they may have been very powerful traders carrying their ornaments with them. We also have

54:10 some men in the cemetery about equal number of men and women and some of the men are buried with special ornaments but again not a lot of gold. Those three tiny gold beads are the maximum amount of gold found in any Harapen burial. Late Harapens did bury some more stuff, but in the Harppen period, that's it. But notice the top bead. The second one is turquoise that came from very far away as well. But the top bead is important because we found a blocklet of that unfinished stone in a workshop in Harapa and the bead around the neck of this guy in the cemetery. and Randy and I were working on material from Dol Vera which is down in the Kutch. We found the raw material. So clearly this material is coming from Kutch to Harapa worked at Harappa and

54:56 buried around some guy's neck. Now is this man who was buried in the cemetery a Harapen merchant who went to Dol Vera to collect the rocks or is he a Dover Vera merchant who came to Harapa to set up shop? How can we identify that strontium isotopes? So right now there's a big project going on with several different scholars trying to identify the strontium of teeth throughout the Indis Valley region. We're working on this in the Harapa Cemetery and this is just a view of the cemetery. I'm working with Dr. Doug Price and Jim Burton in Madison and we've done the preliminary analysis of some of these and basically we find a lot of local people and you can tell the local people by comparing the strontium of the teeth of animals especially pigs which don't wander a whole lot of long

55:41 distance they are locally they live locally they die locally uh cattle tend to be you can herd them over greater distances so the pig's teeth and a lot of the women and men in the central part of the cemetery have the same strontium they were born and raised at Harapa and died at Harapa. In other parts of the cemetery, we have people who were not born at Harapa but buried at Harapa. And the question is where are they from? So right now u several scholars are working on this to try to get the signatures from Dol Vera and other parts of Pakistan. And eventually we'll be able to map the the movement of what I call elites throughout the Indis Valley to see who was marrying who and how they were linked across this vast area. Uh this is a matrix chart showing some of the the the stars mean local and we have

56:28 local females and non-local males. And the physical anthropologists have argued that most of the women in the cemetery are more genetically related to each other than the men based on their skeletal form which would mean that the men are being buried next to their wives and the wives are being buried next to their mothers and grandmothers. Now you might immediately jump to mat matriarchal society but no matrolo burial does not mean matriarchal society. Um it means matrlocal burial. So people were being buried next to their mothers. Okay. Uh we don't know what the society was organized as but it's an interesting pattern and we are also going to be able to compare this with late harapen populations. And this is um um material from a burial in near

57:13 Delhi uh dug by the archaeological survey of India which has people wearing a variety of ornaments. Now we start seeing a lot of gold. It's in the late harapen period but we're also doing the strontium isotope analysis of these skeletons. Uh the Harapa cemetery summary and kind of conclusion suggests that cemeteries reflect social hierarchy. There's a strong indication that only certain communities were being buried and they were the ones the the one group of Haropen elites, land owners, traders and ritual specialists who were probably controlling the society. Uh some indication that they were hereditary communities based on skeletalbased genetic trade analysis and also the artifact based stylistic analysis. So I think that those cemeteries indicate the elite communities and that they were

58:00 linked over great distances through marriage alliances. Um and this is the trade networks that we see which reinforce the urban centers. So thank you very much. [Applause]