A mysterious realm

"A Peaceful Realm" by Jane McIntosh is an excellent introduction to the Indus Valley Civilization, a mysterious high culture that florished 4000 years ago in the northwestern part of the Indian sub-continent. The author summarizes what I take to be the current scholarly thinking about the Indus culture.

The book is intended for the general reader, but since it's written from an archeological perspective, some people may found it boring. Brace yourself for an over-view of excavations, excavations and even more excavations! Jane McIntosh is obviously not a journalist... Still, I give the book four stars, because it's very informative and fascinating, and the archeological perspective is inevitable anyway. Since most written records of the Indus Valley Civilization have been lost, and those that remain are undeciphered, most of what we can know about this ancient culture is due to...well, archeological excavations.

There are at least three things that make the Indus culture mysterious. First, it was a highly developed civilization with large cities (the largest had perhaps 100,000 inhabitants), a uniform culture, and a well-developed division of labor, including vast trade networks. This suggests some kind of empire with a large and efficient state administration. Yet, nobody has been able to find the rulers of the Indus people! There are no royal palaces, no cult statues of kings, and all burials were relatively simple. Also, all people seem to have been well-nourished, suggesting the non-existence of an underclass. This has led some daring people to suggest that the Indus civilization was relatively egalitarian, making it a curious anomaly among high cultures. McIntosh doesn't go that far. She believes that a ruling class did exist, and suggests other reasons for why it remains invisible in the archeological record. Perhaps the rulers were a caste of ascetic priests, whose ruling function was marked precisely by the absence of any worldy goods? The Indus peoples may also have showed their rank in ways we don't comprehend today. Studies of burials and sculptures suggest that jewelry or bracelets may have been used to denote rank, and seals with different animal motifs may have been caste symbols. Curiously for a culture ruled by priests, there are no temples either! At Mohenjo-Daro, a large structure known as the Great Bath have been uncovered, which may have been a kind of sanctuary for ritual purification, but this remains an educated guess.

Second, the Indus Valley culture was completely peaceful, and this peace seems to have lasted for at least 700 years, maybe more! This too is almost unique among high cultures, and indeed among "primitive" cultures as well. The towns of the Indus peoples did have large walls, but they were not defensive, but built mostly to impress, and perhaps to make sure that merchants moving in and out of the towns paid the proper dues. There is no evidence that the walls were ever attacked or destroyed by foreign armies. Nor are there any remains of a developed military technology, no siege engines for instance, and the weapons found were probably used for hunting. That a hierarchical, priest-ridden empire could be peaceful is counter-intuitive, and sounds almost to good to be true, but this is what the archeological record suggests. Nor was the Indus Valley Civilization brutally destroyed by invading Indo-Aryans, as once assumed. It seems that the civilization broke down for other reasons, including ecological disasters and a shift in agriculture, which eventually turned the once prosperous cities into backwater slums, eventually forcing the inhabitants to abandon them.

The third mystery of this culture is the Indus script, which nobody has been able to decipher (yet). McIntosh is confident that the script records an agglutinative language, which in an Indian context would mean a Dravidian language. Other linguistic evidence also suggests that the Dravidians settled in India before the Indo-Aryans, making the Indus culture the obvious candidate for a Dravidian culture. One fact not mentioned by the author is that genetic evidence confirms that Dravidians came to India earlier than the Indo-Europeans. The claim that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidian is controversial, especially in modern India, where various nationalist groups among both Dravidians and Indo-Aryans try to claim the Indus peoples for themselves. In America, there are Black groups which claim that the Indus peoples were Africans. (The aboriginal peoples of India may have been related to Negritos, Papuans and Australian Aborigines). Still, the case for the Indus-Saraswati cultures being Dravidian seems rock-solid. It also seems as if later Indian religion ("Hinduism") is a mixture of Indus and Aryan elements. While the religion of the Indus culture is difficult to interpret in the absence of written records, it seemed to include worship of cows or buffalo, mother godesses, the cult of Shiva or Durga, yoga, ritual purification through water, stellar worship based on astronomical observations (the author mentions this piece of information only in passing!), and perhaps even fire altars. When the Aryans entered the Indian sub-continent, they took with them their own gods, such as Indra or Vishnu, other kinds of rituals, and eventually wrote the Vedic scriptures. Together, these strands united to form Hinduism as practiced today.

Of course, the Indus Valley Civilization raises a lot of philosophical questions. How can a hierarchical society be benign and peaceful? How can a ruling class refrain from show off its wealth or power? Was there even a ruling class? And if not, how did these peoples get along so well together? (Perhaps precisely because of that?) McIntosh doesn't answer these questions.

They are left for the reader to ponder...