Page 309 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
fisherman’s beautiful bronze fish-hooks; the merchant’s elegant
bronze scales, with precise flint weights, and his variety of dainty
! seals; the potter’s masterpieces in ceramic, ranging from vases
ornamented with coloured motifs to effigy jars shaped like birds,
beasts and men; the painter’s mortars; the carpenter’s cutting tools;
the jeweller’s necklaces, arm-rings and other ornaments wrought in
gold or made from precious stones; and not least the metal­
- worker’s astonishing products in bronze, from statuettes to hand-
i cire-perdne. Even the gambler is represented with dice indistinguish­
mirrors, created with expertise by the advanced process of

able from our own and game-boards with proper pieces to be
moved on the squares. In marked contrast, the soldier has left little
evidence of his former presence within the city boundaries, indicat­
!
ing an un-warlike, mercantile and agricultural society, counting on
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the strength of its outer defence positions with forts at strategic
places along the coast.
Skeletal remains from the Harappan cemetery have given no
answer to the obscure origin of the Indus civilisation. F. A. Khan1
claims that four different physical types were buried together. The
majority of the Harappan population, he says, consisted of a
‘Mediterranean’ type of moderate height, with long head, narrow
and prominent nose and long face. But there was also a second type,
long-headed, too, but more powerfully built and of tall stature.
The third type was short-headed and the fourth was typically
Mongolian.
No matter how many ethnic groups had joined hands to form the
Indus civilisation, how could the citizens of Mohenjo-Daro and
Harappa manage to out-distance all other peoples of their time so
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abruptly and so completely? Perhaps this question will never be
answered by local excavations in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.
Perhaps these cities were founded by already civilised settlers who
came from Amri or Kot Diji, two other mounds packed with
antique debris towering above the plains nearer the coast in the
j same Indus Valley. We visited both, but little was left except a
compact mass of broken adobe, potsherds, chips, bones and bits of
datable charcoal. From the meagre information to be gained from
these sparse fragments science begins to hope that these mounds
may provide important clues to the real origin of the Indus civilisa­
tion. Extensive digging has brought to light shattered remains of an
older culture of equally remarkable character, roughly datable
i from 3000 bc, or slightly before, to about 2500 bc, when
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa were founded. If this is a mere coinci-
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