Marriage in Harappan Times

At Harappa, there is evidence for matrilocality - where husbands go to live with their wives' community. 

Nearly all cemetery inhumations conform to a similar layout that is not readily differentiated into distinct social classes.

Joe Ravi, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia

The skeletons found are generally healthy people which indicates an improved access to resources. A study found that the few burials that have been found (only 600 so far across hundreds of years of urbanized living across hundreds of settlements) may have related to first generation immigrants. These burials show they were respected and that mobility between villages and cities existed as also trade. 

A study from Farmana, in present day Haryana, showed trade links with present day Punjab in Pakistan, and Gujarat as well. There were signs of matrimonial linkages as well. 

More burials found at Rakhigarhi at Haryana have unearthed a man and a woman together, possibly in a matrimonial relationship. This may point to the earliest marriage (4700 years ago) for which evidence has been found. 

Uptill now historians believed the earliest marriage had taken place about 4400 years ago, in Mesopotamia. 

Historians believe that some of the beautiful painted jars found at various sites may have been used as marriage gifts. 

A bangle found at Susa in ancient Mesopotamia was made from materials found only along the Indus coast. Historians have speculated that 'it is possible that the woman wearing this bangle was part of a marriage alliance with a distant trading family in Susa. Such long distance marriage contracts can be documented historically and ethnographically. In the absence of strong state control, long distance kin relationships would have been a form of insurance in trade relations.'

A high degree of planning is evident in Indus Valley Cities' Infrastructure

Please note : the text following is from a variety of internet sources that i did not at the time bookmark. Nothing original below - just mix and match from various creditable historians. 

Terracotta pipes used for washing basins and manholes constructed by the Indus Valley people are still in good condition after nearly five thousand years.

Almost all houses in Mohen Jodaro had a bathroom, always constructed at the side of the building adjacent to the street for the convenient disposal of wastewater into the street drains. Latrines found in the houses were placed close to the street wall for the same reason. 

Ablution places were placed adjacent to the latrines, thus conforming to one of the most modern of sanitary maxims. Bathrooms and latrines situated on the second floor were drained using terracotta pipes with a fitting valve placed in the boundary wall of the building.

The street lights system, watch and ward arrangement at night to outwit the law breakers, specific places to throw rubbish and waste materials, public wells in every street, well in every house etc. revealed the high sense of engineering and town planning of the people.

The corners of the street rounded off perhaps to enable the heavy carts to take turn easily. The streets intersected in right angles and so arranged that the prevailing winds could work as a sort of suction pump and thereby clean the atmosphere automatically. 

No building was allowed to be constructed arbitrarily and encroaching upon a public highway. The owners of the pottery kilns were not allowed to build the furnaces within the town obviously to save the town from air pollution.

Devices known from Persia as “wind catchers” were attached to the roofs of some buildings which provided air conditioning for the home or administrative office.

All of thes Indus civilization cities had been pre-planned. Unlike those of other cultures which usually developed from smaller, rural communities, the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization had been thought out, a site chosen, and purposefully constructed prior to full habitation.  

Scholar John Keay comments: “Our overwhelming impression is of cultural uniformity, both throughout the several centuries during which the Harappan civilization flourished, and over the vast area it occupied.” 

The ubiquitous bricks, for instance, are all of standardized dimensions, just as the stone cubes used by the Harappans to measure weights are also standard and based on the modular system. Road widths conform to a similar module; thus, streets are typically twice the width of side lanes, while the main arteries are twice or one and a half times the width of streets. Most of the streets so far excavated are straight and run either north-south or east-west.

Villages in the Indus Valley

I have been reading on the Indus Valley Civilization for the last few years. I share highlights with friends and relatives on whatsapp. 

But perhaps they are not all interested in so much detail. So I decided to record some of my readings here. 

Read a study of four village sites of the Indus Valley (there are nearly 1100 of them spread over 1.5 million sq kms !). These village sites are in Haryana and Rajasthan. 

The study concluded that the villagers had access to high quality luxury goods in small nos. - articles made from gold, lapus lazuli, etc. Such items have been found at other village sites too. So these articles were not limited to the cities. 

Agate, lapis lazuli, gold and carnelian beads
 from two of the villages. 

The study goes into details of the pottery that must have been produced in these villages. It found designs, materials and process different from that found in large cities, though related. This has been observed at other sites as well. So there was a trend for regional aesthetics and preferences. 

The study concluded that the villages were production centres for goods other than agriculture as well. They were not isolated from the cities but not totally dependent on them as well. 

Many such villages are also laid our in grid pattern with wide streets, public buildings and fortified walls. So size of the settlement did not limit the essential features of the indus valley civilization. 

Reading about Indus Valley Civilization again

 Am reading about Indus Valley Civilization again - a topic i go back to periodically. 

The Grid Pattern of Roads and Lanes

The Indus Valley civilization thrived with well-planned cities and elegant streets laid out in a grid pattern. At its height it had 1500 cities spread over a million kms - the largest civilization, by far, among its contemporaries. 

The longest street in Moen-Jo-Daro was 805 m long and about 10 m wide, which likely indicates that wheeled carts were in existence during this period and streets were used for trade.

The city center was connected by main streets from four directions to reduce congestion and allow free movement of people and goods to the central business district. One outstanding feature is a concentric shaped street in the form of a ring structure which was used to control expansion of the cities. The main streets of Moen-Jo-Daro and Harappa intersected one another at right angles with width varying from 3.50 to 10.00 m and up to 1.5 km long.

The lanes were joined with the streets. Each lane had a public use and was provided with street lamps. The life in the Indus cities implies a democratic urban economy.

The Modern Water Supply Systems in the Indus Valley

The people of Moen-Jo-Daro had expertise in digging water wells. The residents of the city had built about 700 wells, where a single well serviced three houses. The wells were assembled with tightening mud bricks to have a stronger life to last for centuries.

Terracotta pipes used for washing basins and manholes constructed by the Indus Valley people are still in good condition after nearly five thousand years.

Linked to larger mains, which eventually emptied outside the city walls, the sewers at Harappa would have removed wastewater from the habitation areas, depositing fertile sludge on the surrounding agricultural fields. 

Did the Minoan Civilization learn its water & sanitation techniques from the Indus Valley ?

The Minoan civilization in Crete, Greece was the earliest sophisticated society in Europe. About 1250 years after the Indus valley had begun to use modern sanitation and water supply systems, the Minoans developed ones very like them, although no other society around them had anything like it. 

It is even surmised that a wave of migration from the Indus Valley to Crete may have occurred for such developments to have taken place in Crete. 

The landmark technological achievements by both civilizations had no precedent in prior civilizations.

Save for the Indus cities, no other city in the ancient world featured such a sophisticated water and waste management system. Even during the Roman Empire, some 2,000 years later, these kinds of facilities were limited to upper-class neighborhoods.

A Sophisticated Governance System in the Indus Valley

During this period, Indus scribes developed a sophisticated writing system comprising more than 400 symbols.

Excavators have found distinctive pottery with widely used ritual motifs at all settlements throughout the greater Indus Valley.

Similar city organization and trade patterns existed throughout the Indus Valley, showing a sophisticated governance system without the use of warfare.

The Indus script

The Indus script became widespread in all the major urban centers of the Indus Valley. Its most prominent use was on seals that also bore animal motifs and ritual objects. The unicorn image is the most common (found on more than 65 percent of known seals), but other animals appear as well, including elephants, humped zebu bulls, water buffalo, bison, tigers and rhinoceroses.

We also see for the first time small tokens or tablets made of soapstone incised with script and symbols. Because many of these items feature the same set of signs and what appear to be numbers, researchers think that they served as tools for accounting. 

The writing may indicate the owners name, the commodity and its quantity, or the creditor to whom it is being presented. Some of these tablets have been intentionally snapped in two, possibly to indicate a contract between two parties, each of whom retained half until the transaction or work was completed.