December 7th, 2024
"Mehrgarh World's Oldest City" claims the banner in the Lahore Museum gallery, where the wooden display cases seem not to have changed since John Lockwood Kipling was in charge more than a century ago. There are few other places to glimpse some of the finer treasures from this 7000 BCE site in western Balochistan, the oldest larger settlement found in the subcontinent. Gregory Possehl preferred to call Mehrgarh more accurately as the "An Early Farming Community," (Indus Age: The Beginnings, p. 450). "What we see at Mehrgarh," he writes, "is a sequence of events that seems to document the local domestication of animals," (p. 460). As these objects suggest, they have so much in common with the ancient Indus civilization to the east and north that flourished four or five thousand years later (more time than between it and us). There is the terracotta bracelet, the red-slipped ware, the bird-whistle and humped zebu, the classic globular pot, sophisticated bead-making. Its hard to tell the difference. The stamps seals are larger and cruder. The women with their headdresses and chokers probably might have passed for locals in Harappa or Mohenjo-daro, while the angular face of the man suggests something distinctive about Mehrgarh. He too has stylish headgear, a choker and, with empty eye-slots, a haunting bird-like face that remains with you.
These figurines are dated to Period VII at Mehrgarh, around 2800-2600 BCE, just before the height of the ancient Indus civilization. They are most similar perhaps to the figurines in the famous, exceptional and controversial The Lady of the Spiked Throne find. Mehrgarh as a site developed through a number of periods as the site expanded from the Neolithic to Chalcolithic periods (see the map in Image 6, from Mehergarh The Oldest Civilization in South Asia (1992) by Brig. (Retd.) Mohammad Usman Hassan). As the Indus civilization reached its peak, the site was abandoned and that of Nausharo 6 km away was developed. Mehrgarh itself was discovered and excavated between 1974 and 1986, and again between 1997 and 2000, by a French-Pakistani team under the leadership of Jean-Francois Jarrige (that team was at Nausharo inbetween too).
It is remarkable how much can be traced back to Mehrgarh, whether it is the earliest cotton known in the subcontinent (5500-5000 BCE), the first evidence of agriculture, the earliest ivory and wheel-thrown pottery, steatite seals and pipal tree motifs that are also found at Mundigak towards the north in Afghanistan and Shahr-e Sukhteh to the west in Iran. In Period VII there is even a giant mud brick platform later to be found in Indus cities, as well as possibly the earliest swastika seal. Cemetery burials often with pottery or beads are later found at Harappa too, as are pot burials and animals as grave offerings; there are also compartmented structures with no doors that may have been used to store foodstuffs given the grain remnants discovered inside them (5500-4800 BCE). Mehrgarh is on the Bolan river, in what today is largely an arid region but many thousands of years ago was apparently much more fertile with rhinoceros and elephant bones at the site. There is also the amazing Mehrgarh amulet, the first example of the lost wax method to cast copper, of a wheel with six spokes that is a precursor of an Indus sign.
The full archaeological story of ancient Balochistan remains to be fully written, but there is no shortage of sophisticated, early cultures that must have deeply influenced the Indus towns and cities that emerged to the east thousands of years later. There is so much work to be done at Mehrgarh by future archaeologists. Village, settlement or greater, its inhabitants seem to have achieved an exceptional sophistication in so many fields. How might have the development of farming and animal husbandry have led its people to literally leapfrog manufacturing, communication and cultural developments? This is what we need to find out some day.