Ancient Indus Civilization Blog

Iravatham Mahadevan, India's leading expert on the Indus script, and Padmashri award winner (2009), sadly passed away on Monday in Chennai. He was 89. His contributions towards the understanding of early Indian and Tamil scripts were unparalleled; he was also an extremely generous contributor to Harappa.com, one whose scholarship was widely recognized internationally. >

Happy New Year from all of us working Harappa.com: Ilona Aronovsky, Nadine Zubair (Editors), Vasant Dave (Community), Jeff Turner (Programming). With a lot to come in 2018 . . .. >

One of the nice thing about archaeology is the surprises. Surprises like finding the Ghaggar-Hakra aka Sarasvati River according to some was not flowing in any big way during the Indus period (3500 BCE-1800 BCE). >

Photographs of the new Indus section and an exclusive interview with Curator Daniela de Simone on how it all came together. >

It may be hard to imagine that the best places to see artefacts of the ancient town of Chanhiyun Jo Daro [Chanhu Daro] are along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have a number of pieces from a US-funded team the worked at the site in 1935-36, led by Mohenjo daro excavator E.J.H. Mackay [see Dorothy Mackay, Finds at Chanhu-daro]. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston lent some items to the Metropolitan which I was fortunate enough to see in the fall of 2016 [A Visit to the Met I]. It is over 7,000 miles… >

This is pure speculation, but in looking at this long seal from Mohenjo-daro [M-1271], and seal signs from Mesopotamia which we know the meaning of, it could just be that some of the Indus signs are also names of places or of particular cities. >

Bridget Allchin, a pioneering woman archaeologist of South Asia, recently passed away. The Guardian has a fine summary of her remarkable career. >

"The weights are precisely made, well polished and systematic (though unfortunately not inscribed with any Indus characters, which would have helped scholars to decipher the script's numerical system)." >

A really nice and well-written blog entry about the analysis of bones and other material from ancient Dilmun [Bahrain], before we even knew where the civilization lay. >

"The most important crafts were in the fields of textiles, ceramic manufacturing, stone carving, household artefacts such as razors, bowls, cups, vases and spindles, and the production of jewelry, statuettes, figurines and children's toys, some of which were mechanical in function." >

An excellent article in Frontline just out on Rajasthan excavations 2017, lots of exciting stuff, 27 images, 6 pages, including a copper tablet with a long inscription. >

The image is published in a blog entry by Alessandro Ceccarelli of the Two Rains Project at the University of Cambridge, source of some of the most interesting recent research on the agriculture and demise of the ancient Indus civilization. >

Just as we turn to more of the publications about discoveries about ancient Dilmun, another find on an island near Bahrain, with Indus pottery fragments, and a Gulf-type seal that reiterates how important trade relationships by sea were with this area. >

The drainage system was one of the most remarkable features of the Mature Harappan city. All the streets and lanes across neighbourhoods in Mohenjo-daro had drains. In addition there was also provision for managing wastewater inside the houses with vertical pipes in the walls that led to chutes opening on to the street. >

A very interesting paper by Steffen Terp Laursen, an expert on Dilmun, or the civilization in Bahrain contemporaneous with the ancient Indus civilization, suggests that the round, so-called [Arabian] "Gulf seal", often found with Indus signs and creatures like the short-horned bull and standard, developed from ancient Indus seals and representatives moving westward. Later these types of seals followed their own development trajectory and their Indus iconography. The westward transmission of Indus Valley sealing technology: origin and development of the ‘Gulf Type’ seal and other administrati… >