Crossing Continents

Between India and the Aegean from Prehistory to Alexander the Great

Robert Arnott

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781789255553
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

The first contacts between Greece, the Aegean and India are generally thought to have occurred at the beginning of the sixth century BC. There is now, however, growing evidence of much earlier but indirect connections, reaching back into prehistory. These were initially between India and its Indus Civilisation (Melu??a) and the Near East and then finally with the societies of the Early and Middle Bronze Age Aegean, with their slowly emerging palace-based economies and complex social structures. Starting in the middle of the third millennium BC but diminishing after approximately 1800 BC, these connections point to a form of indirect or what might be called 'trickle-down' contact between the Aegean and India. From the start, until 2500 BC, the objects and commodities that formed this contact were transported overland, through Northern Iran, but after that time, the Harappans took control and we see a structured trade using the sea out through the Persian Gulf. These contacts can also be placed into three categories: (a) the importation of objects manufactured in India or made from Indian commodities imported into the Near East, which eventually found their way to the Aegean and have parallels at Indian sites; (b) the importation of inorganic commodities such as tin, possibly some gold and lapis lazuli, exported from India or Central Asia under Harappan control; and (c) the importation of non-perishable organic commodities. This study views the Aegean as part of a greater trade network and here the author has attempted to both evaluate and re-evaluate what evidence and speculation there are for such contacts, particularly for the commodities such as tin and lapis lazuli as well as more recently discovered objects. It is emphasised that this does not testify to direct cultural and trade links and geographical knowledge between the Harappans and the prehistoric Aegean in the third and second millennia BC; it was just the natural extension of trade between the Near East and India. No goods or commodities arrived directly from India; they accumulated added value as they first built up a distinguished pedigree of ownership in the Near East and Syro-Palestine. In the Early to Late BronzeAges, India was an important resource for valuable and indispensable commodities destined for the elites and developing technologies of much of the Old World. Finally, the author has examined the period after the end of the Bronze Age to the time of Alexander the Great and particularly the period after the sixth century, when Greeks were now beginning to know a little about India. Within 200 years India was known to scholar and non-scholar alike, such as those who witnessed the Persian invasions of Greece or who later became Macedonian and Greek foot soldiers.

Chapter 1

Prehistory: The Background

The Harappan Civilisation

The Harappan or Indus Civilisation in its Mature Harappan Phase (2600–1900 BC) was the most extensive and sophisticated urban Bronze Age civilisation of its time and is characterised particularly by its great cities.¹ It is contemporary with the later phases of the Early Bronze Age and the earlier part of the Middle Bronze Age in the Aegean.

It covered approximately a million and a half square kilometres, stretching from Kashmir in the north to Gujarat in the south, but with its influence also extending beyond its northern border, into what is now Afghanistan and Central Asia and as far west as the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia (Fig. 1). The Harappan Civilisation was also the product of two great river systems, the Indus and the Ghaggar-Hakra (or Sarasvatī), the latter now dried up. In prehistory, they ran virtually parallel to each other, creating a vast alluvial plain, the basis for the region’s agricultural prosperity.

Its chronology (Table 1) has been largely based on the stratigraphy of Harappa and earlier sites of major importance in our understanding of the cultural development of the civilisation, particularly Mehrgarh.

The Mature Harappan Phase has also been distinguished by the emergence of distinct and large-scale complex features. The civilisation supported nearly 3,000 sites, ranging from village farming communities and small towns, to several fully developed and wealthy major urban centres or cites, such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwala and Dholavira, with populations of tens of thousands or possibly even more. These cities featured houses and other structures built from fired bricks, as well as warehouses, massive walls and gateways, public health infrastructures, sophisticated water management for the supply of fresh water and the disposal of sewage and extensive areas for craft and industrial production. This was supported by a rural subsistence economy consisting mainly of large-scale food production and pastoral farming.² Additionally, we now see the development of literacy, with the Indus script, finely carved stamp seals and the extensive use of lapidary art, standardised measures, the large-scale use of fired brick, standardised in size, with the ratio of 1:2:4, the most effective for bonding.

The Mature Harappan Phase witnessed a period of rapid urbanisation, which featured the creation of dense and heterogeneous populated cities, which become political, economic and ceremonial centres that could offer opportunities unavailable in the rural hinterlands. Technology, production and consumption now had transformed society, where population growth and immigration disrupted the structured settlement pattern. Houses in the core areas of Harappa, for example, often spilled over onto the streets and suburban areas sprang up on low mounds to the west and north-west of its centre.³

Figure 1. Map of Principal Harappan Sites (After Dr Akinon Uesugi)

Table 1. Chronology of the Harappan Civilisation and Minoan Crete to 1700 BC. The Aegean chronology has been added to as a comparison, not to indicate conscious contact. The Harappan chronology is based on M. Kenoyer, ‘Changing perspectives of the Indus Civilization: new discoveries and challenges’ Puratattva, 41: 1–18 (2011)

Supplying the demand for raw materials, food and finished products also required a highly sophisticated infrastructure that integrated the widely dispersed settlements. Many of the specialist products now became standardised through advanced craft specialisation and widely distributed throughout the region. Close similarities in pottery, brick sizes, weights and measures and seals show strong evidence for a shared ideology and the Indus Script, albeit still undeciphered, offers proof of a level of the economy, food production and public health. Some, such as Possehl, believe that the Harappan is also very different from other contemporary societies, as it is a rare example of an early heterarchical prehistoric state, which seemingly developed without any strong and centralised social control or evidence of structural violence.⁴

Some believe that Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and other major Indus urban centres such as Ganweriwala, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi, were multicultural and likely occupied by peoples of different ethnicities and social groupings. Although these centres lacked the temples, palaces and burials that are usually indicative of status, there is evidence that a high degree of social stratification and differentiation did exist and is found in many forms, including possession of, for example, personal adornment, inaccessible to all members of society. Power and social standing could have been created and maintained through control critical resources that included land, livestock and commodities, assisted by ties with kin or clan relations or through interaction with nomadic communities and other migrating ethnic groups.⁵

The rapid appearance of the Harappan Civilisation was originally thought to be the result of cultural diffusion from the Near East. This notion has now been completely discredited by the discovery of a structured subsistence economy and proto urbanisation in the Early Harappan Phase (3300–2600 BC). We now know that it developed directly from the Aceramic Neolithic, which began in the seventh millennium BC in such centres as Mehrgarh and shows a slow and indigenous development of their society and culture.⁶ In this Early Harappan Phase, there is also evidence of overland trade contacts with Southern Turkmenistan and with the Iranian plateau, where the Proto-Elamite culture (3200–2600 BC) had spread. This contact may have given the Harappans the impetus to create their own system of writing and literacy.

Discovery

The very existence of this complex urban society that was the Harappan Civilisation, remained largely unknown until the 20 September 1924. It was then that Sir John Marshall, Director-General of Archaeology in India, announced its discovery in the Illustrated London News.⁷ He named it the Indus Civilisation, because the finds came from two sites in the Upper and Lower Indus Valley, Harappa, near Lahore in The Punjab and Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, 600 km to the south. The discovery struck at the very root of the then prevalent view that the Aryans arrived in India in around 1500 BC and brought with them civilisation.

We are reminded of Marshall’s background. Following studying classics at King’s College, Cambridge and before his appointment in India, his archaeological career was with the British School at Athens in the early years of the discovery of Minoan Crete, including excavating with David Hogarth at Kato Zakro in the east of the island. He was also strongly influenced by Sir Arthur Evans and his discoveries at Knossos, where he had also worked and the unearthing of the Minoan civilisation. He probably wanted to find his own.⁸

This announcement followed the pioneering excavation campaigns led by the Indian archaeologists R. B. Daya Ram Sahni at Harappa in 1921 (and from 1923 until 1925) and Rakhal Das Banerjee and Madhu Sarup Vats at Mohenjo-daro in 1922–1924 (and to 1925). Since that time, archaeological research both in modern India and Pakistan and even further afield in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf has been constantly enlarging our knowledge.⁹

The news of the discovery of the Harappan Civilisation quickly came to the attention of scholars working in the Near East. The Assyriologists, the Reverend A. H. Sayce, C. J. Gadd and Sidney Smith were some of the first to point out the similarities as they saw them between the objects described by Marshall and those recently excavated in Mesopotamia, particularly at Susa in Elam.¹⁰ Ernest Mackay, soon to be drawn to India as the excavator of Chanhu-daro, also saw similarities with the Near East and Mohenjo-daro through the pottery and with a seal depicting a unicorn and Indus Script and especially cylindrical and etched carnelian beads he found beneath an early second millennium BC religious centre at the site of Kish.¹¹ A tentative chronological framework for dating the Harappan Civilisation was now possible.

The Decline of the Harappans

In approximately 2000–1900 BC, during the Late Harappan Phase, the very first signs of a gradual decline began to emerge and by 1800 BC, many of the major urban centres had been abandoned. Dismissing the notion of Indo-European invaders that destroyed them by force, for which there is no evidence, what we do see is clear evidence of the limited continuity of an identifiable Harappan cultural tradition. While it is accepted that this decline will have led to a major interruption in the overall urban life of the region, elements of the Harappan Civilisation can still be found in later regional cultures that emerged.¹²

More recent archaeological excavations seem to suggest that the decline of the Harappan Civilisation was marked by the final decades of the Late Harappan Phase, with the emergence of the Gandhara Grave (or Swāt) Culture¹³ and the final stages of Cemetery H Culture,¹⁴ which some believe may have continued until at least 1200 BC.¹⁵ The period of 1900–1800 BC, also witnessed the eventual withdrawal from its overseas relations, depopulation of urban centres, when settlement was now focused largely in the core areas of the city and was very random. This combined with an indication that the breakdown in authority was likely to be systemic. Eventually there was a new emphasis on agrarian village life and this large-scale depopulation of Indus cities in the Late Harappan Phase seriously weakened Indus society.¹⁶

Later, we see several Iron Age cultures emerging, such as the Painted Grey Ware Culture (1200–800 BC) followed by the Northern Black Polished Ware Culture (700–300 BC). To what extent they were different from the Late Harappan Phase is not clear. Both are, however, associated with the first use of iron, but the former is also associated with copper hoards, a second millennium BC Bronze Age phenomenon of the Indus-Ganges (or Ganges-Yamuna) Plain with its Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP).¹⁷

Whether these later populations can be found to also have been associated with proto-Hindu Indo-European population movements into Northern India, is pure conjecture,¹⁸ although it is accepted that some Vedic texts (possibly excepting the earliest phase of the core of the Ṛgveda) are thoug...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Prehistory: The Background
• 2. Prehistory: The Evidence of Objects
• 3. Prehistory: The Evidence of Commodities
• 4. Prehistory: A Conclusion
• 5. From the Iron Age to Alexander the Great
• Appendix: Indica by Ctesias of Cnidus
• Bibliography