September 20, 2024 marks the centenary of the announcement of the discovery of the Indus Valley civilisation.
Key points
- On September 20, 1924, The Illustrated London News published an article headlined, First Light on a Long-forgotten Civilisation: New Discoveries of an Unknown Prehistoric Past” authored by John Marshall, then-Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The article announced the discovery of the “civilisation of the Indus Valley”.
- Now, this Bronze Age civilisation is called the Harappan civilisation, named after Harappa, now in Pakistan, which was the first site to be discovered in the area.
- Two ASI archaeologists were instrumental in the discovery, and were credited by Marshall in his article.
- Daya Ram Sahni first excavated Harappa in 1921-22, finding seals, painted pottery, and beads. Known as an “industrious, accurate and modest” man, Sahni later became the ASI’s first Indian Director-General.
- In 1922, Rakhal Das Banerji started excavating Mohenjo-daro, also located in modern-day Pakistan, and found seals, pottery, copper products, and crucibles at that site.
- The Harappan civilisation can be divided into an early phase (3200 BCE to 2600 BCE), the mature period (2600 BCE to 1900 BCE), and the late phase (1900 BCE to 1500 BCE).
- Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Ganweriwala (all now in Pakistan), Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira (both in India) are the five biggest Harappan sites out of about 2,000 sites in the civilisational area, which is spread over 1.5 million sq.km. in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
- The village of Daimabad on the banks of the Godavari river in Maharashtra is the southernmost outpost of the Harappan civilisation.
- There are about 500 sites in Pakistan, and a few in Afghanistan.
- The civilisation burgeoned on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati rivers.
- The most characteristic features of the Harappan civilisation are; the fully developed Indus script; finely carved stamp seals with writing and/or an animal or some other iconographic motif; standardised measures, including cubic weights made of chert carefully cut and polished, employing a combination of binary and decimal systems; the large-scale use of burnt brick, standardised in size, with the ratio 1:2:4, the most effective for bonding; exquisite lapidary art, featuring highly developed micro-drilling of very long beads made of hard carnelian, decorated with chemically stained motifs.
