Page 311 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
out the plains of the Indus Valley. Their territory rapidly grew to
stretch a thousand miles from north to south along the river, and
twice that distance along the ocean coast, from somewhere in the
cliffs of Makran to the jungles of southern India. Perhaps all this
land was Meluhha to the Sumerians. To us it has become known as
the Indus or Harappan civilisation, since the first and so far most
significant sites revealing its former existence were found in areas so
named today. Excavations have shown a remarkably uniform and
i unchanging culture in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, from the time
these simultaneous cities were founded until they died out a millen­
nium later. Indeed, instead of progress there was a clear deteriora­
tion in construction details which some scholars have suspected as
due to rapid reconstruction following devastating floods.
5 The mystery of the Indus Valley civilisation is not so much why
it disappeared as how it began. As in Egypt and Sumer, this, the
? third of the large and contemporary early civilisations, lacks clear
[ local roots even at Amri and Kot Diji, and simply seems to have
chosen the fertile banks of a major navigable river as new home for a
branch of an old powerful dynasty. Civilisation in Mesopotamia,
too, began with settlers who knew how to cast bronze from
imported copper and tin, and who buried four-wheeled carts with a
troika of harnessed bullocks in royal tombs full of other evidence of
a level of civilisation which neither Babylonians nor Assyrians later
surpassed.
In searching for the home of the inventors who first gave us a
script and the wheel, we find that the Indus civilisation was not only
strikingly similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also
suspiciously contemporary. The difference of a century or so in
such important human mile-posts is negligible when today we have
' ^ to revise former thinking and measure human accomplishments on
I a scale of over two million years. With the total collapse of accepted
1
dogmas concerning man’s antiquity as a species, we have to move
on tiptoe and not be blindly wedded to existing assumptions on the
age and spread of civilisation. We know too little. And new dis­
coveries are constantly changing a still unclear picture. What we
know for sure is that the founders of the Egyptian and Sumerian
dynasties began to leave their traces on their river banks - and to
illustrate the large reed-ships of their ancestors - just when the
Indus Valley was settled by a third civilisation. All three established
themselves in the three major river valleys centring upon the
Arabian peninsula.
The Indus Valley excavations, like those of Mesopotamia and
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