Page 306 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Indus Valley in Search of Meluhha

tamarisk-bushes. The broad Indus river, once flowing past the city
wharves, has since withdrawn. Even the climate has c Y
and less favourable. Like the deserted ruins of Ur and Babylon,
Mohenjo-Daro now lies far from any water. The rums ot tormer
homes and shops stretch for a mile in the direction of the calm
Indus, which was originally the life-preserving artery of the city
and an unpredictable threat at the same time. Excavations have
revealed that the city was rebuilt seven times following floods,
before it was eventually abandoned for some unknown reason, for
we do not know why the whole population suddenly disappeared
in about the fifteenth century bc. Many of the skeletons found
among the ruins show signs of a violent death in combat. Sir
Mortimer Wheeler and other authorities have suspected that
although climatic, economic and political deterioration might have
weakened this firmly established civilisation, its ultimate extinction
was more likely to have been completed by deliberate large-scale
destruction by the Aryan invasion from the north. The fertile plains
that supported the Indus Valley civilisation for a thousand years
were then conquered by Aryans who arrived, not by sea, but by the
high inland mountain passes. These invaders were the Sanskrit­
speaking people who subsequently used the non-Sanskrit loan­
word Mleccha to denote non-Aryans, a term which Bibby
tentatively identified with Meluhha and considered a possible name
for the original Indus civilisation.
Whether Mleccha to the Aryans or Meluhha to the Sumerians,
the founders of the metropolis known to us as the ‘Mound of the
Dead have left vestiges that make a profound impression on any
visitor. It is a monument of the age-old unity of mankind, a lesson
m not to underestimate the intellect and capacity of other people in
places or in epochs remote from our own. Take away our hundreds
of generations of accumulated inheritance, and then compare what
ls. °.^ our abilities with those of the founders of the Indus
civilisation. Counting the age of humanity in millions of years, we
begin to understand that the human brain was fully developed by
3000 bc. The citizens of Mohenjo-Daro and their uncivilised con­
temporaries would have learnt to drive a car, turn on a television set
and knot a neck-tie as easily as any African or European today. In
reasoning and inventiveness little has been gained or lost in the

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