Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and might have come down into the plains of northern India after
the great flood all ancient mythologies record. This would suggest,
he speculates, that the cradle of civilisation might have been India
rather than Sumer.
The Aryan-invasion theory, then - of blond, blue-eyed folk
bringing great wisdom to dark-skinned people - looks suspiciously
like a modern, Progress-based myth. It may have more to do with
racial theories popular around the turn of the century. These
culminated in the Nazi Holocaust.
Certainly, the Aryans discovered no savage wasteland when they
entered northern India. They emerged from the savanna of Central
Asia with their religion, and little else - if we accept conventional
theory. As sophisticated as their philosophy indicates they were, the
Aryans were nomadic and left very little evidence about their day-
to-day existence. A little pottery, the odd burial mound: that's about
it. They built from mud brick, wood, animal hides, and bamboo.
What they found, though, was the Indus Valley civilisation, a culture
that had been thriving for some two thousand years when they
'discovered' it, trading with the ancient Mesopotamian centres, and
building some one hundred cities along the river Indus, the major
ones models of urban sophistication that rivalled those of Sumer or
Middle Kingdom Egypt. Surrounded by high walls, laid out in
grids, with advanced systems of water supply and drainage, centres
like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were built to last. And, whatever
the nomadic Aryans thought when they encountered this vast and
sophisticated civilisation, they could not have seen it as a primitive
and ignorant land eagerly awaiting their culture. The Aryans were
the ones who would benefit from the organised society they invaded.
In any case, they seem to have absorbed what they found, and
blended into it, quickly enough.
If the script found on thousands of terracotta seals in the
excavations of the two major Indus-basin cities could be translated
properly, we would know a little more about this civilisation. The
sites being worked are the largest archaeological excavations ever
attempted, and progress is painfully slow, expensive, and plagued by
bureaucratic and political problems. Yet, among the items already
unearthed is a carved relief from the third millennium
BC
that
