UNIT I

ANCIENT INDIA

INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION: CULTURE AND PATTERN OF

SETTLEMENT.
ARYAN CIVILIZATION THEORIES AND DEBATES OF ORIGIN
ORIGINS OF EARLY HINDUISM
VEDIC CULTURE - VEDIC VILLAGE AND RUDIMENTARY FORMS
OF BAMBOO AND WOODEN CONSTRUCTION
ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM AND JAINISM.

Early civilization of
Ancient India

B.Arch I Second
Semester

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilization (33001300 BCE; mature period 2600-1900 BCE) extending from what today
is northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and northwest India.
At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a population of over
five million. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed
new techniques in handicraft (carnelian products, seal carving) and
metallurgy (copper, bronze, lead, and tin).
The Indus cities are noted for their urban planning, baked brick
houses, elaborate drainage systems, water supply systems, and
clusters of large non-residential buildings
The Indus Valley Civilization is also known as the Harappan
Civilization, after Harappa, the first of its sites to be excavated in the
1920s, in what was then the Punjab province of British India, and now
is Pakistan.
The discovery of Harappa, and soon afterwards, Mohenjo-Daro, was
the culmination of work beginning in 1861 with the founding of the

Civilization defined
DEFINITIO
N

OR
SIMPLY

The stage of human social

development and organization
which is considered most
advanced.

The society, culture and

lifestyle of people in a
particular area.

REGIONAL SPREAD
Sites cover most of the modern
Pakistan and northwestern India
Area covered is about 1.3 million
square miles
The largest among the old world
civilizations
Over 1050 sites; scattered across the
area

This earliest known civilisation in India, the starting point

in its history, dates back to about 3000 BC.
Discovered in the 1920s, it was thought to have been confined
to the valley of the river Indus, hence the name given to it
was Indus Valley civilisation.

Features:
Mohenjodaro and Harappa, represent the high watermark
of the settlements.
Spread to a wide area in northwestern and western India.
Thus this civilisation is now better known as the Harappan
civilisation.
Mohenjodaro and Harappa are now in Pakistan and the
principal sites in India include Ropar in Punjab, Lothal in
Gujarat and Kalibangan in Rajasthan.

Planned Cities on the

Indus
Flat plain formed by two rivers the
Indus and the Ganges
Natural barriers of the Himalayas and
the Hindu Kush mountains offered
protection (Except Khyber and Bolan
Pass)
Seasonal winds called monsoons
Unpredictable floods, Wet and Dry
Seasons
India is a sub-continent, jutting into

MOHENJODARO -

Place /Mound of the Dead

Mohenjo Daro, or "Mound of

the Dead"
2600 and 1900 BCE.
Probably abandoned around
1700 BC
The site close to 4 Sq. Kms. was
discovered in the 1920s and lies in
Pakistan's Sindh province.
Urban Planning
Mohenjo-daro was successively
destroyed and rebuilt at least
seven times. Each time, the new
cities were built directly on top of
the old ones.
The city was divided into two
parts,

Citadel- public bath,residential

The city had planned cities

and buildings and roughly
housed 5ooo

Citadel:
the most important administrative
components of the City
Granary
Great Bath
Stupa
Assembly hall
Fortifications

The Citadel is the smaller component of the City

The Streets are not aligned to the cardinal points as in the

lower town

Consists of ramparts and fortified structures

The stupa was a later addition in 500 AD

The city was divided into two parts,

the Citadel included an elaborate tank or bath created with
fine quality brickwork and drains; this was surrounded by a
verandah. Also located here was a giant granary, a large
residential structure, and at least two aisled assembly
halls.

Mohenjo-Daro was carefully planned, laid out in an

irregular grid of streets oriented north/south and
east/west.
Massive perimeter walls of mud brick, sometimes
faced with fired brick or stone, surrounded the city.
Gateways provided controlled access into the
settlements.
Major streets in Mohenjo-Daro varied between 4.5 and 9
meters (15-30 feet) in width providing two-way ox cart
traffic
Smaller streets were for one-way traffic, only 2-3 m
(6.5-10 ft) wide.
The gateways into the city were only 2.5 m (8 ft) wide,
to control traffic in and out.

Separate walled mounds with suburbs suggest that the

city had competing political and socio-economic classes;
no single building or groups of buildings dominants the
site.
There doesn't appear to have been a single hereditary
ruler,
but rather severalelite groups created separate clusters of
large buildings and public spaces throughout the town.
One example of this is House VIII in Lower Town.
Stone carvings of seated male figures may represent
ancestral leaders of the community, and may not in fact
representpriestsor kings despite such names as "priest
king".
Many other figurines, in the form of human and animal

INFERENCE :
The sheer size of the city, and its provision of public buildings
and facilities, suggests a high level of social organization.
The city is divided into two parts, the so-called Citadel and
the Lower City. The Citadel a mud-brick mound around 12
metres (39ft) high is known to have supported public
baths, a large residential structure designed to house about
5,000 citizens, and two large assembly halls.
The city had a central marketplace, with a large central well.
Individual households or groups of households obtained their
water from smaller wells.
Waste water was channelled to covered drains that lined the
major streets. Some houses, presumably those of more
prestigious inhabitants, include rooms that appear to have
been set aside for bathing, and one building had an
underground furnace (known as a hypocaust), possibly for
heated bathing.

CITADEL

Great Bath:
The bath measures 12m x
7m x 2.4m
2 wide staircases lead down
from the N and S and there
are 2 small sockets at the
edge of the stairs which might
have held wooden treads or
planks
A small brick edging extends
for the entire width of the
bath
The floor is made water
tight by the use of bricks on
edge with gypsum plaster
Water proofing-thick layer of
bitumen or tar along the edges
and the floor too
A series of rooms are located
on the eastern edge of the

GREAT BATH

BATH AREA

WELL

INTERNAL
STREETS

DRAINS

PUBLIC WELLS

Lower Town:
grid system with 4 avenues running from north to south and
four running from east to west.
The avenues are several metres wide and have drains running
down the middle or side of the road.
The avenues divide the Lower Town into many blocks. Alleyways
and lanes further divided these blocks.
it was probably where most of the people in the city lived and
worked

Homes:
Most of the homes are made of baked bricks in a standard size
of 5.5x5.5x11.
The houses generally have several rooms built around a
courtyard.
The doorways to the outside usually open onto side alleys rather
than onto the avenues. Archaeological evidence, such as the
remains of stairways, seems
suggest
thatspecific
many ofrooms
the buildings
Manytohomes
had
for
had 2 storey.
bathing.
Roofs were probably made
wooden
beams
covered
with
These of
rooms
had floors
made
from baked
reeds and packed clay.
bricks or tiles and drains which emptied into the
drains in the street outside.
People had access to clean water either from
wells within their homes or from public
wells in the streets. Over 700 public and
private wells have been found at Mohenjodaro.

Materials used:
Structures constructed of
bricks of baked mud 5.5x5.5x11
sun dried bricks and
burned wood.

Standard Brick

At its height the city probably had around 35,000-40,000 residents.

It had an advanced drainage system, a variety of buildings up to two
stories high, and an elaborate bath area.
The bath area was very well built and had a layer of natural tar,
to keep it from leaking.
Being an agricultural city, it also featured a large well, granary, and
central marketplace.
Perhaps most unexpected, it even had a building with an underground
furnace (hypocaust) possibly for heated bathing.

LIVELIHOOD
Most of the people must have been TRADERS or
ARTISANS
Different types of seals and
standardized weights suggest
a system of trade
The advanced detailing in the
astonishing artefacts show that
there were great artisans
among them
Materials brought in from distant
regions were found

POTTERY CLAY AND TERRACOTTA

SEALS REFLECTING THE NATURE OF

USAGE

RELIGION
Seals bearing depiction of gods, goddesses and
animals point towards Buddhism and
Hinduism
The seated human like figure shown is the so
called

proto-shiva (Hindu god)

The religion to which the evidences point

emerged in the late 1000 BC
No evident religious buildings but some
structures do serve to the ambiguity being
what looks as remains of temples
Buried human bodies: evidence of a cemetery
Burial urns with ashes: evidences of cremation

The popular God Pashupathi/Shiva

The dancing god
The goddess of Fertility
Goddess of Mothers
The ritual for Gods and Goddesses

 Necklace from MohenjoDaro made from gold,

agate, jasper, steatite and
green stone.

The gold beads are hollow

and the pendant agate and
jasper beads are attached
with thick gold wire.

Steatite beads with gold

caps serve to separate
each of the pendant beads.

GAMES PLAYED BY EARLY INDUS PEOPLE

Burial of woman and infant, Harappa.

This burial was disturbed in antiquity, possibly by ancient Harappan
grave robbers.
Besides the fact that the body is flipped and the pottery disturbed,
the left arm of the woman is broken and shell bangles that would
normally be found on the left arm are missing.
The infant was buried in a small pit beneath the legs of the mother.

The body was placed inside a wooden coffin (which later decayed)
and entombed in a rectangular pit surrounded with burial offerings in
pottery vessels.
The man was buried wearing a necklace of 340 graduated steatite
beads and three separate pendant beads made of natural stone and
three gold beads. A single copper bead was found at his waist.

4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered,

some as far afield as Mesopotamia.

LIVING STANDARD

Some houses larger than others BUT most of

them similar in size and build
The society is an example of egalitarianism
Low wealth concentration though clear social
levelling
Access to water supplies and drainage facilities
Granaries
Ornaments made out of gold and ivory
No large monument except THE GREAT BATH
- a public bath probably for religious rituals
Hygiene and cleanliness were among the high
priorities of the society
Evidence of quality municipal planning and
efficient municipal government

TECHNOLOGY

Measurements
Great accuracy in measurement in measuring mass length and
time
MASS:
standard weights hexahedron in shape were found
weights in the ratio 5:2:1 (0.1,0.2,0.5 ; 1,2,5 ; 10 20 50
units)
Each unit measuring about 28 grams
Same as present day English imperial ounce system
LENGTH:
a scale with a precision of 1.704 mm was found
near lothal
The smallest in the bronze age

TECHNOLOGY
Metallurgy
The people knew unconventional techniques of
metallurgy
and produced
Brass
Copper
Bronze
Ivory
These materials were used in the making of
ornaments utensils seals and artefacts etc

TECHNOLOGY
Knowledge of dentistry
In 2006 it was announced that
the oldest evidence of drilling
teeth in a living human was
found in Mehrgarh (IVC)
This claim was made on the
basis of finding eleven
drilled teeth in nine men
excavated from what
supposed to be a graveyard.

HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION - LOTHAL

Harappa grew on the floodplains of a rich and life-giving river,

HARAPPA
2600 1500 BCE
the Indus. The original cities and many of the towns seemed to
have been built right upon the shores of the river.

The Harappans were an agricultural people whose economy

was almost entirely dominated by horticulture.Had around
40,000 people
Massive granaries were built at each city, and there most
certainly was an elaborate bureaucracy to distribute this wealth
of food.
Bricks that they built their cities with were fired bricks
In addition, many of the Harappan seals have pictures of animals
that imply a wet and marshy environment, such as rhinoceroses,
elephants, and tigers.
The Harappans also had a wide variety of domesticated
animals: camels, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, and buffalo.

Gateway At Harappa: Indus Valley Civilization

INFERENCE : Mohenjo-daro had no series of city walls,

but was fortified with guard towers to the west of the
main settlement, and defensive fortifications to the
south.Considering these fortifications and the structure of
other majorIndus valleycities likeHarappa, it is
postulated that Mohenjo-daro was an administrative
center.
Both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro share relatively the same
architectural layout, and were generally not heavily
fortified like other Indus Valley sites.
It is obvious from the identical city layouts of all Indus
sites that there was some kind of political or
administrative centrality, but the extent and functioning
of an administrative center remains unclear.
Mohenjo-daro was successively destroyed and rebuilt at

DECLINE
It was proposed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1953 that the
reason for the decline of the IVC was the invasion by an IndoEuropean tribe ARYANS
Rejected because no evidence of war or fights were found
Actually, people abandoned the region because of:
IMIGRATION of new people (Aryans) in the area
Decline in trade
Climatic changes- Indus valley got cooler and drier
with the course of time
Decrease in rainfall and thus inadequate supply of
water for irrigation
Changes in the course of the river
many elements of its culture were found in the later cultures

Four Theories of Collapse

Archaeologists have offered four explanations for the
collapse of the Harappan Civilization.
Three are based on ecological factors: intense flooding,
decrease in precipitation, and the desiccations of the
Sarasvati River.
The fourth hypothesis is that of the Aryan Invasion, proposed
by Sir R. E. Mortimer Wheeler and Stuart Piggott.

POINT TO WONDER
Sir John Marshall is known to have reacted with
surprise when he saw the famous statuette known
as the dancing girl
He said:
when I first saw them I found it difficult to believe
that they were prehistoric. Modeling such as this
was unknown in the ancient worlds up to the age
of Greece,
I thought that these figures had found
their way into levels some 3000 years
older to which they properly belonged

The Vedic Period

was
a direct
result
ofBCEthe Aryan
VEDIC
AGE
1500

800
Movement
The main feature in this period is the total absence of the
highly skilled construction and planning of the previous
civilisation the Indus Valley Civilisation
It was like a return to the aboriginal roots
No architectural examples of this period are surviving. The
Aryans built no colossal monuments. So what is the
importance of this period?
It was early Aryan architectural forms that were
translated into the architecture of India for thousands of years.
The Main Contribution of the Vedic Period is the
influence it had on all the subsequent periods in Indian
Architecture
The caves of Ajanta and Ellora, much of Buddhist
architecture, were directly influenced by the simple village

After the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization, another

glorious civilization flourished in India.
The people who were responsible for the evolution of this
civilization called themselves Aryas or Aryarns.
Arya literally means the man of noble character, and the
free-born. They belonged to the group of people known as IndoEuropeans. They entered into India from the north-west.
European Origin
Migration from Southern Russia:
Indian Origin

Society and economy

Vedic society was characterized by a nomadic lifestyle, with
cattle rearing being the chief occupation.
Agriculture grew more prominent with time as the community
settled down. Money was unknown, and bartering with cattle
and other valuables replaced financial commerce.
Families were patriarchal, and people prayed for abundance of
sons.
Society was strictly organized in a system of caste.
The four major Varnas were Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya
and Shudra. Those who are outside these caste structure are
known as Adivasis

Political organization
The grama (village), vis and jana were political units of
the early Vedic Aryans.
A vish was probably a subdivision of a jana, and a grama was
probably a smaller unit than the other two.
The leader of a grama was called gramani and that of a vish
was called vishpati. Another unit was the jana whose head was
a jyeshta (elder).
The rashtra (state) was governed by a rajan (king). The
king is often referred to as gopa (protector) and samrat (supreme
ruler). He governed the people with their consent and approval. It

The main duty of the king was to protect the tribe. He was aided by
two functionaries, the purohita (chaplain) and the senani (army
chief; sena: army). The former not only gave advice to the ruler
but also practiced spells and charms for success in war.
Soldiers on foot (patti) and on chariots(rathins), armed with
bow and arrow were common.
The king employed spasa (spies) and dutas (messengers). He
often got a ceremonial gift, bali, from the people.
The Aryans did not settle into the well-planned cities of the
Harappan culture, and instead preferred to clear forests around the
riverbanks of the Gangetic plain and settle in small villages

The Vedic grama could have a pur, or a fort-like structure

within it.
The Vedic hymns speak of "purs" made of stone and metal. The
Vedas have many words for houses.
It appears that the main distinction was between chhardis
( house with a thatched roof), harmyam (a house of brick
and stone that had a courtyard in the middle), and gotra
(a multi-dwelling complex with sheds for animals).

THE 3 STAGES OF THE VEDIC HOUSE

VEDIC AGE 1500 800 BCE-

The basic unit was the hut. For building material, the abundant
forest provided ample raw stock.
The Aryan hut, in its most basic shape, was
Circular in plan,
Thatched roof over a bamboo network of ribs.
This was later elongated to become rectangular in plan, with
roofing of bamboo as well,
curved in the shape of a barrel.
Clusters of these huts formed a courtyard, much like huts in
Indian villages even today.
The better-off citizens roofed them with planks of wood or tiles, and
used unbaked bricks for the walls.
To maintain the barrel shape of the roof, a thong or string,
perhaps of animal hide, was stretched across the end of the
bamboo.

For protection against wild animals, a palisade fence of wood and

bamboo surrounded the whole settlement.
This fence was made of upright posts of bamboo with horizontal
members threaded into holes in posts.
At one point, the fence was extended forward to form a sort of gate.
These forms - the barrel vaulted roof, the tie-cord, and the
palisade fence and railing, formed important motifs for future
Indian Architecture.
In fact, huts in modern Orissa, one of the poorest Indian states,
are still carrying traces of this influence, with symbolism dating
back to Vedic times.

VEDIC AGE 1500 800 BCE-

Groups of small villages banded together, and small 'cities'

began to take shape.

A palisade wall inevitably protected these and the

buildings within were also made almost entirely of
wood.
Upright posts - Thaba and 3 horizontal barssuchi or needles threaded through holes
The Vedic carpenters developed skill in timber
construction of a very high standard. It is not surprising,
therefore, that in later ages timber construction techniques
were employed even though the material of construction was

Vedic Cities:
In general, the cities of the Vedic period were rectangular in plan
and divided into four quarters by two main thoroughfares
intersecting at right angles, each leading to a city gate.
One of these quarters contained the citadel and another housed
the residential area.
A third quarter was reserved for the merchants, and the last for
tradesmen who could display their wares.